posted 02-01-2011 11:45 AM            

In a recently published article {Polygraph, 39 (4)}, titled “Testing the Truth-Teller Who Was There”, Avital Ginton provides a definition for "Psychological Set" and offers five references for that definition. He writes;

"Psychological Set" with different qualifiers for prefixes, is a concept widely used in psychology between the 1950s and the 1980s, describing a psychological state of mind of having predisposition to perceive, interpret, and/or to react to stimuli in a particular way, while relatively ignoring other stimuli, interpretations, or various possible reactions. This tendency or readiness, which might be situational or context bounded, is caused by specific prior experiences, instructions or .biases towards a particular interpretation of the target stimuli. (McKeachie & Doyle,1966; Hilgard & Atkinson, 1967; Marx, 1976; Myers, 1986; Reber, 1995).

I have the Reber 1995 reference here and checked an on-line electronic copy of a later edition of the Myers reference on Amazon and cannot find any reference for the term “psychological set”. I have emailed Dr. Ginton and asked him to provide me with copies from his cited references in order to help learn the origin of this term and it's definition.

If any of you happen to have any of these references and can find the term “psychological set” and a definition would you share that with me.

Here are the complete references he provides as the source of his definition.

Hilgard, E. R., & Atkinson, R. C., (1967). Introduction to Psychology. 4th edition, Harcourt, Brace
& World, Inc. (Hebrew edition, (1975) Tel-Aviv, Israel)

McKeachie, W. J. & Doyle, C. L. (1966). Psychology. Reading, MA : Addison-Wesley Publishing
Company Inc.

Marx, M. H., (1976). Introduction to Psychology. New-York, NY: Collier Macmillan, Inc ..

Myers, D. G., (1986). Psychology. New-York, NY: Worth Publishers, Inc.

Reber, A. S., (1995). The Penguin Dictionary of Psychology. London, England: Penguin Books Ltd.

Thank you in advance for helping me educate myself. Please email scanned copies to;
polygraphmark@gmail.com

posted 02-01-2011 12:31 PM            

Well, it looked right before I hit the submit button. It looses something with an explanation, but it said, in Hebrew, "I have the Hebrew edition of the Hilgard book." (I would have told you that later.) Well, at least that's what it was supposed to say. I don't speak Hebrew.

posted 02-02-2011 04:45 PM            

Those appear to be just intro to psychology textbooks.

First I doubt whether the term "psychological set" actually appears in them regarding an underlying hypothesis for polygraph responses.

Second, why would the term "psychological set" be present in 5 intro psych texts and be so conspicuously absent from the published scientific literature in psychology.

Third, an intro-to-psych textbook is not satisfactory to anchor the fundamental hypothesis (which is not yet a theory until it is proven repeatedly by scientific studies) for the entire profession to hang its future on.

And fourth the term "Gravity" is a metaphor. The term actually belongs to a field of science called "physics."

There is no actually gravity (in the sense of the science of physics) for a RQ or CQ. It is simply a metaphor for how-important-is-the-question-to-me-al-franken? We make inferences about the relative importance of the series of questions based on the strength of reactions in the different component sensors, after several presentations of the test stimuli and multiple observations/measurements of the response. Then we make statistical inferences about the meaning of them-there strong reactions, and the probability of truth or deception, by comparing the aggregated response data to statistical norms. (In the past we compared the aggregated score to an arbitrary cutscore with unknown statistical significance).

What Ginton seems to be create a new metaphor ro arguing that the old hypothesis of "psychological set" is correct

What he has not done is provide any parsimonious or plausible explanation to account for know polygraph phenomena such as has how the term "psychological set" accounts for the polygraph accuracy with psychopaths ( who have low levels of fear conditioning), and why DLCs work (which should not work based on the theory of fear/psych-set/gravity). Yet DLCs do work.

When your data and theory do not agree you need to modify one of them.

Changing the data is not nice, so we must upgrade the hyppothesis.

Ginton has offered a new metaphor but not a new hypothesis.

Also, there are a number of erroneous attributions about the salience hypothesis.

Keep in mind that psychologists in the US have strongly favored a scientific form of psychology that is not impressed by theorizing, expertizing, and psychologizing. We want evidence in the form of data from scientific research. Just making up new ideas is dangerous to the future of the profession if we endorse them without proof.

Part of that proof occurs in the formulation of a hypothesis that is consistent with knowledge from other related fields of science and actually accounts for the known phenomena.

more later...

peace,

r

RIG is not a new hypothesis, and they absence of data means it is far from being a theory. It appears to be

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"Gentlemen, you can't fight in here. This is the war room."
--(Stanley Kubrick/Peter Sellers - Dr. Strangelove, 1964)

posted 02-03-2011 08:07 PM            

He wrote the Israeli Police have been using a "lie" or false report approach for tests on “alleged victims” and speculates this has "not been applied to other allegations". This is not a new concept. In that approach the relevant issue actually is whether the complainant has falsely reported something to the police. That is the crime with which they would be charged if they had so done this. I know many law enforcement agencies that use that approach to complainant and informant testing. This is in lieu of attempting to test a subject with what is sometimes called “yes-answer test” which has limited ,if any ,empirical support. When testing in those cases the relevant issue should not be where the alleged suspect placed his junk, but whether the complainant falsely reported the incident. My pneumo tubes on HER can’t tell what HE did or did not do. This is without even beginning to get into the silly notion we have a “lie detector” that will be able to tell whether or not the complainant is lying because she answers “yes” when I ask her to relive one of the most horrible moments of her life. But I digress.

posted 02-04-2011 01:37 PM            

The whole concept, though, is a little troubling in terms of science.

Ginton's paper seems to be about two things: 1) testing victims and 2) the "gravity" hypothesis.

The RIG hypothesis seems to be a new metaphor for “psychological set” and Ginton seems to prefer to anchor the argument to emotion and fear as the basis of PDD response. As has been discussed in several recent papers in the Polygraph Journal, and by the NAS/NRC 2003 report, there are serious shortcomings to the “psychological set” emotion/fear explanation – including the fact that it cannot be found in any scientific studies that evaluate or demonstrate the construct and its application to PDD testing, and the fact that the emotion/fear explanation does not account for known PDD phenomena and data regarding psychopaths and DLCs.

There is an erroneous attribution about the salience hypothesis, in that while Ginton seems to assert that salience emphasizes cognition as the primary basis of response, the authors of discussions on the salience hypothesis have made no such assertion and have simply stated that reactions are most likely the result of a combination of emotion, cognition and behavioral conditioning – with no attempt to theorize/hypothesize/expertize which of these is primary. It is possible that emotion, cognition and behavioral conditioning play themselves out in different proportions with different persons. It does not matter. The mistake will be in making assumptions without data, and in neglecting the body of scientific literature that can help us understand and explain the polygraph. The salience hypothesis assumes only that stronger reactions are indicative of the more important stimulus, due to cognitive, emotional, or behaviorally conditioned causes – and depends on previous scientific studies that have already demonstrated the structural correlation of them-there reactions with deception and truthtelling in CQT PDD examination contexts.

It is unwise to allow our desire for an answer now to prompt us to take a position or assume knowledge that does not yet exist.

It will be a mistake for us to believe that we must have all the answers right now, and a bigger mistake to allow ourselves to feel insecure about the fact that we do not have all the answers right now.

Science – real science – does not pretend we know things when we do not. Real science understands that every one of our theories will eventually fall short as we continue to expand the boundaries of our knowledge and the range of phenomena that we encounter and attempt to account for. This is why the field of physics requires mathematical models and evidence to accept a hypothesis as a theory, and it is why the theories keep changing. All theories have some validity – in that they account for some known phenomena. All theories are also wrong – in that they cannot account for everything we observe (remember uncontrolled variance or $%^& happens). All theories therefore need to continue to evolve. A theory that is etched in stone as the final and only answer that can never evolve or change – even when faced with phenomena that it cannot account for – is an indicator of a pseudoscience. We will never know everything, unless you are omniscient already.

To paraphrase a wise man: yesterday's solutions will not solve today's and tomorrow's problems. So we must keep learning and not anchor our future to a 50 year old theory. We must allow the theory to evolve.

Another thing to keep in mind is that metaphors are great for teaching new an unfamiliar concepts. Over-reliance on metaphors will not work, because it will eventually limit our ability to grapple with the actual details (not the metaphorical details) of the construct in which we are interested. It will be important to actually describe the psychological and physiological mechanisms themselves. The salience hypothesis does this, using the language and concepts that exist in the published scientific literature in the related scientific disciplines of psychology, physiology, and neuroscience.

.02

more later

r

------------------
"Gentlemen, you can't fight in here. This is the war room."
--(Stanley Kubrick/Peter Sellers - Dr. Strangelove, 1964)