SanchoPanza wrote on Sep 6
th, 2008 at 12:41am:
Notguilty1
Your question is actually a poorly disguised statement that presumes unsupportable generalizations' such as #1 polygraphers lie and #2 there are not any research studies that support a claim of 98% accuracy.
You cannot support either of those generalizations because, as generalizations, they fail if there is a single truthful polygrapher or a single study that supports 98% accuracy. Frankly, you lack the motivation to do the reading involved to support your claims. You don't seem to be very clever either.
Get real! Polygraph "testing" is
fundamentally dependent upon the examiner lying to and otherwise deceiving the person being "tested" (and the naivety and gullibility of the latter). It's no stretch to say that polygraphers lie. As Dr. Richardson pointed out
in an earlier thread:
Quote:...Deceptions for the average examiner would include (but not necessarily be limited to) intentional oversimplification, confuscation, misrepresentation, misstatement, exaggeration, and known false statement. Amongst the areas and activities that such deceptions will occur within a given polygraph exam and on a continual basis are the following:
(1) A discussion of the autonomic nervous system, its anatomy and physiology, its role in the conduct of a polygraph examination, and the examiner’s background as it supports his pontifications regarding said subjects. In general, an examiner has no or little educational background that would qualify him to lead such a discussion and his discussion contains the likely error that gross oversimplification often leads to.
(2) The discussion, conduct of, and post-test explanations of the “stim” test, more recently referred to as an “acquaintance” test.
(3) Examiner representations about the function of irrelevant questions in a control question test (CQT) polygraph exam.
(4) Examiner representations about the function of control questions and their relationship to relevant questions in a CQT exam.
(5) Examiner representations about any recognized validity of the CQT (or other exam formats) in a screening application and about what conclusions can reasonably be drawn from the exam at hand, i.e. the one principally of concern to the examinee.
(6) A host of misrepresentations that are made as “themes” and spun to examinees during a post-test interrogation.
(7) The notion that polygraphy merits consideration as a scientific discipline, forensic psychophysiology or other…
The deceptions involved in polygraph "testing" are also outlined, using primary source materials, in Chapter 3 of
The Lie Behind the Lie Detector. The polygraph community's claim that polygraphy has a 98% (or thereabouts) accuracy rate doesn't pass the giggle test. Polygraph "testing" has
no scientific basis to begin with. Not surprisingly, it hasn't been proven through peer-reviewed research to reliably operate at better-than-chance levels under field conditions. On the contrary as Dr. Alan Zelicoff
has shown, the polygraph community's best field studies suggest that under field conditions, a truthful person has roughly a 50-50 chance of failing a polygraph.