On Thursday, 23 July, Showtime aired an episode of the Emmy Award-winning series Penn & Teller Bullshit! dedicated to the bullshit of lie detectors. As a long-time fan of the show, and I was delighted when I was contacted by the show's producers late last year to talk about polygraphs. A film crew came to my home for an interview. I'm very pleased with the way the episode turned out. While there is much more that could have been said about polygraphy, I think the show did a fine job of debunking polygraphy in an entertaining fashion. Here are some highlights from the episode:




No explanation was provided for why the woman strapped to the lie detector in this vignette is dressed in a Wonder Woman outfit with bondage fetish paraphernalia. It's an allusion to the fact that the creator of the lie detector, William Moulton Marston, also created the comic book charater Wonder Woman, whose magic lasso compels those encoiled by it to speak nothing but the truth. Marston, who lived in a ménage à trois with his wife and mistress, was fascinated by sado-masochistic sorority hazing rituals. It's worth noting that the FBI considered Marston to  be a phony and a crackpot.




The episode's central storyline follows the saga of Mike and Chrissy. Mike has proposed marriage to Chrissy, but she has doubts over his fidelity to her. She wants him to take a polygraph test before she'll agree to marry him.




The polygraph examination is conducted in the office of polygrapher Larry Dipaolo. Mike fails, and Dipaolo proceeds to spin minor admissions into a full-fledged confession to "inappropriate sexual conduct."




Former police polygrapher Doug Williams explains that the polygraph is not a lie detector, that it is based on a faulty premise, and talks at length about the ruses that polygraphers use to interrogate suspects.




I'm introduced as an example of a person who has suffered career harm as a result of governmental reliance on polygraphy.



I discuss my experience with the FBI polygraph. For more about that experience, see my statement, "Too Hot of a Potato: A Citizen-Soldier's Encounter With the Polygraph."




Dr. Alan Zelicoff, who headed a research review (125 kb PDF) by senior scientists at Sandia National Laboratories, spoke about the scientific shortcomings of polygraphy.



Dr. Zelicoff explains that the polygraph is not only a worthless tool, but that it might be worse than worthless, because it tends to misclassify truth-tellers as liars. Nonetheless, the U.S. government has ignored the science on lie detectors and continues to force employees to submit to polygraph screening.




Penn & Teller cite Soviet spy Aldrich Hazen Ames and serial killer Gary Leon Ridgway (A.K.A. "The Green River Killer") as prominent examples of liars who fooled the polygraph. But you don't have to be a sociopath to beat the lie detector.




Doug Williams explains how to artificially produce reactions by constricting one's anal sphincter muscle and trains a volunteer how to fool a peak of tension test. In what is for me the most memorable line of the show he quips: "A polygraph examiner is nothing but an asshole with a little training. In order to beat this asshole with a little training, your asshole's got to have a little training."

The show does not go into the intricacies of the polygraph "control question test" or CQT (the most commonly used polygraph procedure). An understanding of such procedure is critical for successful use of polygraph countermeasures, which may not only be used by liars trying to fool the polygraph, but also by truthful persons who want to protect themselves against the risk of a false positive outcome. For more on polygraph validity (or lack thereof), policy, procedure, and countermeasures (including a discussion of techniques that may be preferable to the anal sphincter contraction), see AntiPolygraph.org's free book, The Lie Behind the Lie Detector (1 mb PDF).

Teller tweets:

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Teller tweets:

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EosJupiter,

I'm glad you liked the show! I also found it entertaining. While there is more that I would have liked to have seen included, I think they did an excellent job of debunking polygraphy, and I hope this episode reaches a wide audience.

For those who may have missed it, it will be re-broadcast several times throughout the week.

The Penn & Teller: Bullshit! lie detector episode is currently available for viewing on YouTube. I'm not sure how long this will remain available, as it likely violates YouTube's terms of service, but for the moment, the episode may be watched here (in three parts):

That was quite the show.  Pretty much tells it like it is.

Penn Jillette may appear crude and profane but IMHO "Mystical Spirograph" elevates him to world class poet.