OK, Gino. Although this will probably just lead to both of us citing studies and articles that none of the worriers on this forum will actually read, I'll humor you . . . at least once. We'll look like two people arguing over the true meaning of an obscure Biblical passage.
In 1983, the Office of Technology Assessment of the United States Congress selected 10 field studies they believed had scientific merit. The overall accuracy of the polygraph decisions was 90% on criterion-guilty suspects and 80% on criterion-innocent suspects (Lykken, D.T. (1997) The detection of deception.
Psychological Bulletin , 86, 47-53).
Pretty darned good, huh, Gino? It gets better, so read on:
In 1997, the Committee of Concerned Social Scientists found four significant field studies that showed the average accuracy of field decisions for the CQT (comparison question test) was 90.5%. It is signficant, though, that nearly all of the errors made by the CQT were false positive errors. (Still, when you're dealing with accuracy over 90%, don't place too much emphasis on those FP's--besides, it just gets better after this, Gino.) In the four studies, the data was derived from independent evaluations of the physiological data (the raw charts). Because it is usually the original examiners who testify in court, and because they obviously make the decisions on how to proceed in their exams, the Committee went further in an effort to ascertain their accuracy compared to that of the independent examiners. The Committee also included an additional two studies in this evaluation. What they found was that the original examiners were even more accurate than the independent examiners. In fact, the mean acccuracy for the innocent was 98%, while the mean accuracy for the guilty was 97%. The studies used by the Committee are as follows:
Horvath, F.S. (1977) The effect of selected variables on interpretation of polygraph records. Journal
of Applied Psychology, 62, 127-136.
Honts, C.R. and Raskin, D.C. (1988) A field study of the validity of the directed lie control question.
Journal of Police Science and Administration, 16, 56-61.
Kleinmuntz, B. and Szucko, J. (1984) A field study of the fallibility of polygraphic lie detection.
Nature, 308, 449-450.
Raskin, D.C., Kircher, J.C., Honts, C.R. and Horowitz, S.W.(1988)
A Study of the Validity of Polygraph Examinations in Criminal Investigation, Grant No. 85-IJ-CX-0040. Salt Lake City: Department of Psychology, University of Utah.
Patrick, C.J. and Iacano, W.G. (1991) Validity of the control question polygraph test: The problem of sampling bias.
Journal of Applied Psychology, 76, 229-238.
Honts, C.R. (1996) Criterion development and validity of the control question test in field application.
The Journal of General Psychology, 123, 309-324.
So much for your crystal ball/tarot card/flip of the coin analogies, huh, Gino?
(By the way, those two sunglassed smilies in the dates of one Honts and one Raskin reference should be 1988--your forum has a problem with the number one thousand nine hundred and eighty-eight--it shows the last eight as a smiley--weird!)
Go ahead and come back with some more referenced studies that the worried boys and girls on this forum won't ever read. This is more for you and me, Gino, just so you and I both know that I know what I'm talking about. The difference between you and me, though, is that all you can do is counter with your own citations, while I have real-world experience and have rubbed elbows with the Top Guns of the polygraph world. Take your best shot, Gino. I probably won't waste so much time to counter your inane, memorized rhetoric again, so rest easy, baby!
Oh, where, oh where has my little George gone, oh where, oh where can he be? He'll be back, of course. This ridiculous forum is his whole life. He's not much good for anything but entertainment, though.
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