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Topic: Its official - Polygraph is 100 percent accurate and immune to countermeasures
rnelson Member
posted 05-01-2008 10:49 PM
PP's own elusive Dan Mangan et al (Mangan, Armitage, & Adams, 2008) have shown the polygraph technique to be 100 percent accurate.
Moreover, the polygraph is apparently immune to countermeasures and capable of distinguishing fear of a testing error from other types of fear.
But wait, don't call yet, because the polygraph also provides perfect interrater agreement (despite the need to memorize 23 rules), and nearly zero inconclusives.
Sounds almost TGTBT dunnit.
The authors assign a large part of their results to the "inside track," and refer to the NRC/NAS (2003) report as an authoritative reference to the "Fear of Error phenomena." Out of curiosity, I searched the NRC report for the words "fear of error" and got nothing. Same with "fear-of-error." Same with "hope of error," and "hope-of-error." NRC does refer to the truthful examinees fear of being judged deceptive, but those sections do not seem to endorse the idea of Matte's "fear of error/hope of error" phenomena as a construct or even as a theory. That would mean that this idea is correctly referred to as a "hypothesis." As you known, in science, the role of the researcher is to design an experiment in order to prove a hypothesis wrong.
This study is not really an experiment, but a survey of the confession-confirmed results of one experienced examiner (Armitage). Its interesting, but we should be very careful in attempting to generalize this.
Actually, there is very little real description of any statistical analysis outside of some very basic frequency statistics, and no attempt (i.e., zero, nada, zilch) to consider alternative explanations for the observed results.
It would be great to actually see a table of normative parameters describing the distributions of exams with
On the other hand, the convergence is interesting, when comparing the low INC rate of this study (based on a sample of confession and QC confirmed cases conducted by one of the authors), and the low INC rate of the screening validation samples (also confession and QC confirmed) which we used in our experiments with OSS-3. I am not convinced that those low numbers are not an artifact of the case selection process used to construct the samples.
Peer review or not, if the goal is to improve the scientific basis of the polygraph and improve on credible perceptions among scientists and academics, I fear we may need to be just a bit more realistic.
r
------------------ "Gentlemen, you can't fight in here. This is the war room." --(Stanley Kubrick/Peter Sellers - Dr. Strangelove, 1964)
A revisited analysis of the "Manganian Loaves." by: Eric Johnson, Forensic Hairstyle analyst
A. Side Loaf. This is a standard man's side loaf, however, with the presence of a secondary side loaf (see D), this shows the man to have a desire for symetry.
B. The Primary Loaf. This is the first loaf seen from 100 yards, and consequently, serves as the "flagship loaf." It is primarily used for light reflection and coufe stabilization. Also known as the "anchorman loaf."
C. Secondary Loaf. This serves as the levee for the primary loaf--also known as the "gusset loaf." This type of follick arrangement requires that the secondary loaf be able to withstand "Katrina strength" flooding of primary loaf "blow over"
D. Secondary Side Loaf. This loaf is pure showboating. It is an anchor of nothing, and serves only to impress mono-side-loafed men who have neither the time nor resources to maintain such a complex hair system.
[This message has been edited by stat (edited 05-02-2008).]
posted 05-03-2008 08:12 AM
If any of the authors of this paper would be kind enough to post a link, perhaps we could have them share and explain their findings.
As one can imagine, the results will probably be considered dubious by many as the test purports to achieve perfection in all areas of polygraph testing. If these fine men have in fact found the Holy Grail of polygraph, we should all aspire to learn the technique.
The first author should have access to all of the data and be willing to allow others to review it, as in any scientific experiment. While most experienced examiners could likely produce similar results with the confessed DI cases, the near perfection in the NDI cases is potentially troublesome. From a confirmation status, that many confirmed NDI tests from one agency is a phenomenal investigative feat.
posted 05-03-2008 08:52 AM
I haven't seen this yet, and yes it defies well-established scientific principles. Where was it published?
I have always had this question though: If the CQs are set up to be equally important to the examinee, and if lies to them would lead the examiner to conclude guilt on the RQs, then why would the fear of error not be as strong on those questions? The fear of error should contribute equally to both meaning the RQs would have to get their greater salience from some other variable.
Cleve Backster and I had a conversation about this a few months back, and he suggested that introducing the "fear / hope of error" questions could introduce issues that otherwise might not be present. Was that addressed in the paper?
posted 05-03-2008 09:06 AM
I haven't read the "Grail" report yet, but the whole inside track concept sounds like more of the Princess Bride's Vizzini's "you think that I think that you KNOW what I want you to THINK."
"Have fun storming the Castle"---Billy Crystal/The Princess Bride
[This message has been edited by stat (edited 05-03-2008).]
posted 05-03-2008 01:04 PM
In case some of you cowboy types have never seen "The Princess Bride," the scene I referanced earlier which has a "battle of wits" is here. Someow I imagine Gordan Barland has never seen this film.
[This message has been edited by stat (edited 05-03-2008).]
I've been using the term "psychologizing" because its meaning is accessible to many.
In psychological assessment, we actually use the term "projection" to describe the mechanism of action in a "projective assessment."
Projection is, of course, a Fruedian defense mechanism. But in this useage it describes the mechanism of information access.
Projective assessments are wonderful and rich assessment techniques. They include the Rohrschach, Thematic Apperception Test, Walker Images, Rey Complex Figure, Sentence Completion Series (written), and Word Association Exercises (verbal). Even the good-'ole Bender Gestalt was originally a projective, though now includes error norms for children and adults. As you can imagine, these assessment's can provide a lot of information about a person's psychological makeup, which cannot often be accessed through other testing and evaluation strategies. The cost, however, is that they are known to be rather unreliable (interrater reliability). That is natural whenever we are testing for phenomena or accessing data that cannot be pointed-to (e.i., measured). These methods work because we use our own cognitive and emotional information and responses to formulate a conjecture about what is going on in the mind of the subject. Obviously we can't ever really know what is going on in the mind of anyone else. We can speculate, and the accuracy of our speculation hinges on our similarity to our subject, or our ability to understand the psychological paradigms of our subject (which depends on his experiences, world-view, values, traumas, etc.) Projective measures have largely fallen out of favor because the unfortunate fact is that most mental health professionals (people with advanced degrees and advanced training) still do not have sufficient training or expertise to use them well or reliably. Western psychology has emphasized a measured scientific approach, because it is more reliable.
In scientific psychology, we formulate hypothesis and disprove them with experiments, and slowly hone our theoretical premises to "validated constructs" that have no alternative explanations. Then we use those "validated constructs" to formulate reliable assumptions pertaining to questions about human behavior and classification models.
All competent and complete psychological evaluation will include at least one projective measure alongside a battery of more objective assessment procedures such as IQ tests, and paper-and-pencil personality tests like the MMPI-II. We use projective measures more extensively with younger children who are often inarticulate about the complexities surrounding their family structures and experiences (which sometimes include chaos, abandonment, neglect, and abuse). I have one example of a projective psych eval on a 9 year-old female victim of sexual abuse, which still describes her quite accurately 20 years later (age 29). When used competently, projectives are quite good.
Projective measures, however, are a form of psychological gymnastics, and don't often generalize well across cultural differences, which include values and attitudes about things like directness and subtlety, deference to authority, metaphor, and humor, as well as differences in linguistic idioms. As a result it is viewed by many professionals as irresponsible and unethical to use these measures, and things like statement analysis, with persons from differing cultures without first re-norming or re-validating their diagnostic indices.
More robust phychophysiological and learning constructs like conditioned-response, habituation and orienting will effectively generalize across different cultures and this has been demonstrated.
This bid'ness about fear-of-error and hope-of-error requires a lot of projective leaps of faith (unproven hypotheses) about our ability to use polygraph sensors to tell the difference between: 1) various types of emotion, and 2) the causes of those emotions. It is overreliant on linguistic logic, and seems to assume some unproven things about physiology, emotion, and language (e.g., that physiological reacitions such as EDA, BP, and respiration will be differentiated for various types and causes of fear, as prompted by a linguistic stimulus).
Considering that DLCs seem to work quite well in techniques like the TES and those from Utah, fear seems to be an inadequate explanation for why people react or don't react to polygraph questions. Same with “hope.” Lying too is an inadequate explanation – considering that reactions to CIT and SPOT exams can be produced with answer's other than “yes” or “no” lies, and that CQT exams can produce reactions with silent answer tests.
There are more robust and parsimonious explanations that involve better proven constructs - such as conditioned response theory, orienting theory, and neuropsychology of cognition and language. These constructs are fairly well established and can begin to account for the wide range of phenomena observed in polygraph testing (e.i., why the test works in so many different ways), and are also capable of advising us about the known limitations of the test and why errors sometimes occur.
An experiment, involving the "inside track" would involve a control sample of exams conducted with more common techniques such as the Utah or Army Zone. A properly constructed experiment would include random experimental and control samples that are selected without regard for the original examiner's opinion (which is impossible with a confession confirmed sample). Short of that, a stratified sample would also do well to provide results that could be more easily generalized. The investigators (authors) should be independent of of the examiners, and their should be more than one examiner (else no interrater variance with which to calculate the confidence intervals necessary to offer any generalizable conclusions). Stratification of samples might be along the usual demographic characteristics of age, gender, ethnicity, education or SES, prior ciminal history. Examiners for the stratified experimental and control samples would be stratified for training and/or experience.
The goal would be to evaluate the difference in outcomes in examinations with and without the inside track, with the null-hypothesis that there is no significant difference. Observation of a statistically significant difference would begin to provide some validation to the hypothesis. It does not however, fill the gap of an adequate theoretical explanation of all the psychological and physiological and linguistic problems associated with this kind of projective approach.
So, I'll return to the idea that the plain old-fashioned single-issue investigation polygraph (Zone) involving multiple versions of "did you do it" may provide the greatest opportunity to establish any real construct validity with the CQT. "Did you do it" is premised on simple language, that is descriptive of behavior. “Did you do it” rests on well established conditioned-response theory and orienting theory (which includes the idea of a defensive response), and on very simple cognitive requirements (recognition of the issue), without all the projective cognitive-emotional gymnastics of "fear-of-error" and "hope-of-error."
I've said this before, but we polygraph examiners sometimes do a more psychologizing than most of the psychologists whom I know.
The Quadri-Track ZCT described in this article is the same test that is referred to as the Matte Quadri-Track Zone Comparison Technique throughout Matte's book. Interestingly, the article itself seems to have a lot of Matte's written voice to it.
.02
------------------ "Gentlemen, you can't fight in here. This is the war room." --(Stanley Kubrick/Peter Sellers - Dr. Strangelove, 1964)
posted 05-03-2008 08:54 PM
Let's just cut to the chase here. This simply shows the same thing Matte's "study" shows: the inside / outside track adds nothing to the test. (Backster is probably correct in that it adds a variable that would otherwise not be present.)
What is says is that if scored as a You-Phase test the first two spots would produce adequate scores (on average) to make the same calls as the addition of the extra track. The extra track just increases scores, and they need that increase to justify their complicated rules and scoring system that allows them to set up their straw man and then knock it down.
So far two "studies" on the Matte test, and both show the same thing: it doesn't work like he claims.
posted 05-03-2008 09:19 PM
Despite the title, this one is not a validation study.
It's a survey.
It's a survey of the confession and QC confirmed results of one of the authors, who is probably not representative of the average field examiner (sorry people).
Another thing to think about is this:
What do you think we'd find if we picked any experienced examiner using their favorite technique, and surveyed the results of their confession and QC confirmed exams?
.02
r
------------------ "Gentlemen, you can't fight in here. This is the war room." --(Stanley Kubrick/Peter Sellers - Dr. Strangelove, 1964)
posted 05-04-2008 10:31 AM
Hello Ted, Hope all is well. I suggested one of the authors post the study/survey for us to all review. Maybe someone with contact to Greg Adams or Dan Mangan can alert them to this thread and they can respond. Like many, I am dubious but open-minded. This Inside Track hypothesis makes little sense, given what we know of polygraph testing. It makes blanket assumptions that seem overreaching and unjustifiable. The claim or suggestion that it is immune to countermeasures seems implausible. That said, if these men have developed, tested and proven there is a technique as wondrous as they purport, let's learn this and we could dispose of all other testing techniques. I have read no studies of any other technique that match this one, according to the authors.
Any one of the authors should have access to the data and should be willing to share and present this. mark
Apparently you and Ray have either heard or "read" something about this "study". What was the source?? This is starting to sound like another "George steals Garden Nome story".
posted 05-04-2008 02:05 PM
I think we'd all love to have one technique that solves all our polygraph problems.
I, for one, would also like a technique that will wash and wax my car, water the lawn, and drive my kids to school. That way I'll truly have nothing to worry about.
r
------------------ "Gentlemen, you can't fight in here. This is the war room." --(Stanley Kubrick/Peter Sellers - Dr. Strangelove, 1964)
Rebuttal to objections by Iacono and Verschuere et al.
Mangan DJ, Armitage TE, Adams GC.
New Hampshire Department of Corrections, Mental Health Unit, P.O. Box 14, 281 North State Street, Concord, NH 03302-0014, United States.
The arguments presented by Iacono and Verschuere et al. against the publication of the Mangan et al. field study of the Quadri-Track Zone Comparison Technique in Physiology & Behavior , are based largely on dated articles that examined control question polygraph techniques whose psychological test structures, physiological analyses, and scoring systems are significantly different than those of the Quadri-Track ZCT. Iacono and Verschuere et al. alleged that the Quadri-Track ZCT is biased against the innocent and can be defeated with the use of countermeasures without considering the technique's unique "remedial inside track" that quantifies the innocent examinee's fear of error-and the guilty examinee's hope of error-which are factored into the overall score, thus avoiding false positive and false negative errors. Their objection to the use of confessions as the criterion for ground truth presumes that the polygraph examinations conducted in this field study were conducted in a vacuum. They ignored the various methods of post-test confirmation and research studies that support the use of confessions as ground truth. Verschuere et al. cited the National Research Council's 2003 report to support their conviction that the accuracy of polygraph tests is well below perfection and errors often occur. However, they failed to mention that the accuracy range values of the seven field studies which met the National Research Council's scientific criteria were from 0.711 to 0.999 with a median value of 0.89, and that the field study with the highest accuracy (0.999) was from a published 1989 field study on the Quadri-Track Zone Comparison Technique.
PMID: 18601942 [PubMed - as supplied by publisher]
Review Accuracy of polygraph techniques: Problems using confessions to determine ground truth
William G. Iacono, a,
aDepartments of Psychology and Neuroscience, University of Minnesota, 75 East River Road, Minneapolis, MN 55455, USA
Received 5 May 2008; accepted 4 June 2008. Available online 10 June 2008.
References and further reading may be available for this article. To view references and further reading you must purchase this article.
Abstract Mangan et al. [D.J. Mangan, T.E., Armitage, G.C., Adams: A field study on the validity of the Quadri-Track Zone Comparison Technique. Physiol Behav 2008] have carried out a field study of polygraph test accuracy in which they relied on confessions to determine guilt as well as to clear co-suspects in the same case as innocent. Using this criterion for ground truth, they estimate polygraph accuracy by determining how often confessions are matched by failed polygraph tests and how often those cleared by confession have passed polygraph tests. They conclude that the polygraph was “100% accurate in the identification of the innocent and guilty.” However, their method contains a flaw, not discernible by reading their article, that invalidates this conclusion. The flaw arises because confessions were obtained by the polygraph examiner who interrogated the examinee after deciding the test was failed. Under these circumstances, the criterion (the confession) and the test outcome (deception indicated) are not independent. The method thus virtually guarantees that the two will match, ensuring 100% “accuracy.” Although largely ignored by the polygraph profession, this flaw inherent to confession-based field studies of polygraph validity has been known to confound these studies for over two decades. Hence, contrary to Mangan et al., their study design does not provide for an adequate estimate of polygraph test accuracy. Moreover, reviews of polygraph testing carried out by scientists at arms length to the polygraph profession have repeatedly failed to support the accuracy proponents claim for the polygraph.
[This message has been edited by Barry C (edited 07-10-2008).]
posted 07-10-2008 05:42 PM
Yeah, but he's as cheap as I am when it comes to this stuff. We've built our collections for almost nothing by begging and poor-mouthing like this.
Polygraph Place Bulletin Board
posted 05-01-2008 10:49 PM
posted 05-02-2008 11:36 AM
