Odd then that the words “abolition, abolish, abolishing, or abolishment don’t appear in a word search of the NAS Study. Hmmm

Are you now agreeing that they in fact did not call for the abolition of polygraph screening, only that abolition is the inference you drew from your interpretation of their comments. One would think that such an august body as the National Academy of Sciences, would clearly state what they mean in such a manner as to leave as little as possible open to inference. In short if they wanted it abolished, why didn’t they say so?


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Regarding what you claim to be the AMA’s Position on polygraph, if you have a credible superseding citation to this one, JUST POST IT

Ask, and you shall receive:

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My link provides the abstract for the very article you are citing. Its odd that if the AMA is taking the position you described that something similar and unequivocal wasn’t mentioned in the abstract. Of course at this point JAMA articles from that time period are not currently available on line while the reconstruct their online archive. I am perfectly willing to accept the abstract which everyone can read as their position on the matter, which is closer to what I have said than your characterization of words we are not capable of reading ourselves.


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Do you have any information that Drew Richardson ever ran a field polygraph on a criminal case or competed a polygraph internship. A PHD does not automatically bestow polygraph knowledge or skill sets.
Likewise his comments that you provided are so broad and general that they show little specific knowledge of the practical application of polygraph. I will discuss them below.


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Actually I feel he is incorrect on at least all seven. The reason I say that is the he is talking in broad generalizations and while they may have occurred in isolated polygraph examinations are not necessarily applicable to all examiners or all examinations so using any of those statements as evidence that “Polygraph Examiners” are liars is intentionally misleading but more specifically?

1.      Polygraph examiners probably do not explain the autonomic nervous system in exactly the same way a doctor of physiology would explain it. How exactly would you explain the autonomic nervous system to say, a suspected rapist with a ninth grade education who doesn't know the difference between an axon hillock and Axel Rose or Dendrites from Dentyne? Most polygraph examiners that I've heard give a fairly good lay explanation of what happens during a sympatheic activation as it relates to the data collected by the components.  I haven't heard them all. Neither has he.
Even examinees with advanced degrees who aren't students of medicine are likely to have a great deal difficulty of following a text book explanation of the process.

2.       Neither you or Drew know how all examiners explain the stim test to examinees. Drew may recall how he was initially taught, but all examiners don’t use a stim test an all don’t explain it exactly the same way.

3.      How exactly do you believe that examiner’s represent the function of irrelevant questions in a control question test (CQT) polygraph exam

4.      Old news. Some recent studies show that the examinees knowledge of the function of comparison questions have little or no effect on the outcome of an examination. Since it doesn’t really matter why do you presume that “Examiners” lie about it.

5.      Drew has very little idea about what “examiners” as a group represent about the 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. At best he has limited knowledge from whatever examinations he has personally conducted, those he has personally observed and questionable anecdotal comments from people he may have talked to. At best that is probably going to account for a less than hundredth of a percent of the examinations conducted without him.

6.      Interrogational themes are a tool used my 99% of criminal investigators regardless of polygraph. If deception during interrogation has received broad acceptance by the courts. Even if it had not;  for him to conclude that all polygraph examiners lie during post test interrogations is an overgeneralization unsupportable by data. Which he then attempts to support with more opinion and supposition with his sub points 1 and 2.

7.      That’s an opinion and as such really doesn’t prove or establish anything



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We know that in the 7 years between 1994 and 2001 the FBI ran approximately 27,000 pre-employment polygraph tests. I think it is fair to presume that they have conducted close to that many in the last eight years. Considering that you probably haven’t talk to all of them, How many conversations are you relying upon in order to conclude that they have never run a breakdown test on pre-employment or that at some point in the last 8 years their policy has not changed?  Even if we presume, for the sake of argument that you are absolutely correct you are only  calling attention to an agency problem not a “Polygraph” problem

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My point exactly if you find a deception on the part of a single polygrapher you attempt to tar all with the same brush.

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I’m sorry, but you couldn’t be more wrong. A truthful person attempting countermeasures and passing their polygraph test DOES not prove that countermeasures work. It would be impossible to separate those who passed because they told the truth from those who passed because they attempted countermeasures. The only Identifiable subset would be those who attempted countermeasures and were caught. That also assumes that countermeasures even work research cited by NAS establishes that honest people who atempt countermeasures actually decrease their chances of passing a polygraph. If the study is correct, truthful people who attempt countermeasures fail and the NAS also said that it isn't very likely that someone could learn the effective application of countermeasures by reading your book.

The ONLY way to prove in a field situation that countermeasures are an effective way to pass a polygraph is for a liar or criminal to attempt countermeasures, lie on the relevant questions, pass the test, and then confirm that they were lying. So In order for you to prove that countermeasures work in the real world requires a level of cooperation you are unlikely to obtain from people you really shouldn’t believe. You will never be able to effectivly separate a successful countermeasure attempt from a false negative and yet you regularly criticize polygraph reserach. You can't even figure out how to research the stuff you teach in your book.

One of the long held criticisms of polygraph research is that laboratory studies are unable to approximate field conditions with any reliability. The challenge that has been proposed would have the same inherent faults that have been openly criticized on this site.

Instead of talking about polygraphers like they are all exactly the same and do their jobs exactly the same. You need to separate the actions of individuals from "polygraph" as a whole and you also need to separate policy decisions made by hiring authorities from "polygraph" as a whole. "Polygraph" cannot dictate policy or the behavior of individual examiners in a manner that would make "polygraph" responsible for the majority of the criticisms on this board any more than "Medicine" can be held responsible for he behavior of a doctor or the policies of a hospital.

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If you truly believe what you have written, then why are the statements of people who have told the truth and failed their polygraph dismissed as unimportant anectdotal evidence?

What is the difference in reliability between a person who says they lied but used countermeasures and passed, and a person who did nothing wrong, told the truth on their polygraph, and failed?  The liar admitted he was lying, so he is more trustworthy than the police applicant who has told the truth on his entire application? 

That doesn't seem to make a lot of sense.

Since you repeatedly refer to it, what is the known error rate of the polygraph during pre-employment testing?

You have obviously never read the definition of indicated.
Here's one http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/indicated?qsrc=2888

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Cullen you are AGAIN putting forward a fallacious argument by generalization in that you are attempting to draw a broad conclusion from a small number of perhaps unrepresentative cases. You are in no position to know what "examiners" routinely do which adds a second fallacious argument to your comment by your uninformed opinion. While the term Deception Indicated is used by polygraphers  to describe the results of an entire specific issue polygraph test it does not refer to any single reaction on a polygraph chart. The term Deception Indicated is not currently approved by APA as a finding for any screening protocol absent a specific issue breakdown test to clarify any reactions observed during screening. Your conclusions, like Drew Richardson’s statment that all polygraphers lie at least seven times in any polygraph is no more accurate or supportable than claiming Columbus discovered the world was round.


Sergeant the information for you to find that data is contained  in the NAS study and in the JAMA abstract that has been posted Ad Nauseum. Look it up if you need to. However, if a high error rate is established by legitimate research it just weakens your argument regarding the value and consequence of anecdotal claims, I see no need to "run the numbers for you in order to make my point, which was that unless the anecdotal claims establish a clear question of the existence hgher pecentages that known error rates established by research, then they are inconsequential.

I will acknowledge that depending on the protocols of the individual studies, error rates appear different. The NAS statistical example for security screening of 10,000 employees uses a 90% accuracy rate and reports potential false positives in the 15% range. The FBI reports unresolved failed pre-employment tests in the 7% range. Using their numbers, False positives will necessarily fall somewhere in the 1% to 7% range. Absent some method of verification, separating false positives from true positives isn't possible. This is why APA does not recomend that agencies base their hiring decisions solely on the results of a pre-employment polygraph test.

So Sergeant, have you ever engaged in any roadside psychological manuipulation in order to obtain a consent to search? Ever manipulated a drug trafficker into a lie by getting him to deny that he was carrying drugs or money and then once obtaining the denial asking him a double edged question to manipulate him in to consenting to a search. Does your agency condone that practice? Have you attended Reid or Walters' schools. What is the ratio of officers trained in kinesics interrogation techniques or drug interdiction to the number of polygraphers in your agency?  Just curious.

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Anonymous too/Ed Earl (sancho panza/phil queeg?),

And just what the hell is supposedly used to determine the "results of the entire specific polygraph test"?  Do polygraphers analyze the patterns on the chart, or the shape of the suspects toe nails?

You can't get around the fact that polygraphers claim the machine to be accurate in detecting deception.  Claims of 98% accuracy in determining deception abound.  

You can analyze chart patterns to your heart's content, submit it all to fancy computer algorithms, whatever, the underlying theory is that chart reactions indicate  "deception".   And, of course, that is a pseudo scientific falsehood!  GARBAGE IN, GARBAGE OUT!

TC

P.S.  What's with the cyber multi-personality disorder.  Are you trying to make it appear that you are "many in number"?   Is that really necessary to make your case?

Sergeant I didn't say I didn't know what they were, I told you where to find them. I simply declined to post them for you because it has been my experience that if I were to quote the numbers, instead of responding to the numbers the members of this board would simply attack my representation of the reasearch. So go read them yourself, they are not hard to find. Post them if you feel they support your position but I encourage you to ise the research and not someone elses characterization of the research.

I think that the real reason that you want to get into a numbers argument on error rate is that you have found yourself unable to refute my comments.  I can certainly see why you would want to change the subject.

You are at the very least unwilling to respond to my questions about the way some cops and troopers seem to use deceipt and psychological manipulation to con drivers into waiving their rights.

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Mr. Anonymous too, Ed, or whoever you are today,

You're argument that I am overgeneralizing, when I am actually just giving the general facts, is itself an overgeneralization. 

TC

P.S.  How can I be perpetrating "ad hominem" attacks when you use multiple anonymous, fictional or literary monikers?   We don't actually know who you are.  At any rate, even if you used your REAL name, I was just presenting you with the facts you eschew.  OTOH, you falsely accused me of posting excerpts from the NAS report that you claimed didn't exist, which they did.  IOW, you lied.  Shame on you for such hypocrisies!