pailryder wrote on Jun 15^th, 2015 at 12:30pm:



Maybe now is a good time for APA to fix this

I think you have confused a false negative and a false positive.  The test is positive for deception, negative for truth.

Thank you pailryder, I stand corrected.

pailryder, where is the research that shows polygraph screening exams to be around 80% accurate?

Dan Mangan wrote on Jun 15^th, 2015 at 11:27pm:



I have to believe that the APA will, in the end, do the right thing  I least I hope that people within the APA, important people will stand up and separate themselves from the behavior in TAPE by condemning the behavior.

I have privately taken a lot of crap of my accusations of Rios and the TAPE leadership condoning racism.  I'm thinking it is time to provide that evidence as TAPE has still failed to condemn the actions that was taken on their behalf by one of their Board Members and the covering up of that behavior by the Ethics Committee consisting of Andy Sheapard, Bridget Woodall, and Gary Hale Del ASantos; as well as the entires current Executive  Committee, from the Secretary to President.   

Thinking it is time to prove that up.  This is already information the APA has as well as other big polygraph associations.

I believe that the APA and other associations want to do the right thing, but it's hard to do the right thing when some of the people doing the wrong things are important within the industry; like Holden.

BTW, sorry it's been a few days, I've been busy putting other ducks in a row

Dan there are some things we disagree on, but it is amazing to me how much we DO agree about.

Ya know only in the polygraph industry (speaking of the industry in Texas) are lies and deceptions fertilized and nurtured and the truth is seen as a noxious weed to be poisoned and exterminated.   

TAPE's take on public integrity and transparency is to treat the public like mushrooms; feed them shit and keep them in the dark.   

pailryder, the polygraph is indeed an effective investigative tool. It functions superbly as a "psychological billy club," to quote Doug Williams.

But the industry, led by the APA, has been trying to affix an imprimatur of scientific legitimacy to the fatally flawed process of polygraph for decades.

In 1997, the APA promoted a report claiming polygraph was 98% accurate. They highlighted that claim on their official web site for about fifteen (15) years, including a full decade after the highly damning NAS report came out in 2002.

The polygraph industry took that 98% accuracy claim and ran with it. In fact, that very claim is still in wide use today, years after the APA's allegedly more rational meta-analysis claiming 89% average accuracy for incident-specific exams was published.

In both cases, the APA said, in effect, "Trust us, the data is cool."

It wasn't then (in 1997) and it isn't now, in my opinion.

Yet the polygraph-as-sound-science drumbeat goes on, with many examiners clinging to that belief with religious fervor.

Predictably, the polygraph industry geeks, technocrats and statistical alchemists who concocted the home-brew of spun-up synthetic test-tube tripe that's currently in vogue run like hell from any form of countermeasure challenge, not to mention a bill of rights for polygraph test subjects.

Such avoidance makes one wonder what the hell kind of scientists they are.

It's kind of funny...in 2004 I attended a presentation by Krapohl at which he described polygraph as being BS (belief system) driven.

That still applies today, even in light of the industry's allegedly scientific advances.

So, while some well-grounded polygraph utilitarians may continue to keep the limitations of their tool in perspective, more and more practitioners who buy into the polygraph science myth are creating problems of a different order.

Those problems need to be addressed.

Of course, all of this is merely the opinion of one lowly polygraph operator.