QuoteInteresting story Longfellow. Please excuse the other redditor(s) who happen to stumble across this thread - some of us happen to be asshole idiots. Do not waste your time on them, just continue on your business and they will be gone soon.
Quote from: George_Maschke on Feb 16, 2013, 11:11 AMredditor,
Thank you for taking the time to explain control questions to me in Dutch. Forgive me for not replying in kind. I'm an American working in The Hague. Although I can more or less read Dutch, I'm not fluent in it. I do, however, understand what you've written above.
I'm afraid you have a misapprehension with regard to control questions in polygraphy. As I mentioned earlier, questions like one's full name, place of birth, parents' name, etc. are only used as unscored irrelevant questions in polygraphy.
"Control" questions, by contrast, are not those to which a known truthful answer is given, but rather those which are designed to produce an untruthful answer. For example, a commonly used "control" question is, "Did you ever lie to a person in a postion of authority?" The polygraph interrogator will try to get the subject to answer this question "no" by suggesting that the kind of person who would lie to an authority figure is the same kind of person who would commit the crime under investigation and then lie about it to the police. But secretly, it is assumed that everyone has lied to a person in a position of authority, be it a parent, a teacher, an employer, etc. at some point in their life.
In control question test (CQT) polygraphy, reactions to such control questions are compared to reactions to the relevant questions (questions directly about the incident under investigation, for example, "Did you take that money?"). If the subject reacts more strongly to the control questions than to the relevant questions, it is inferred that the answers to the relevant questions are truthful. If, by contrast, the subject exhibits stronger reactions to the relevant questions, then deception is inferred.
You'll find CQT polygraphy explained at length, with references to primary sources you can check for yourself, in The Lie Behind the Lie Detector (which I co-authored).
Quote from: George_Maschke on Feb 16, 2013, 02:53 AMredditor,
The questions about one's name, place of birth, and parents' names are not "control" questions but rather irrelevant questions. They're not scored, and they don't establish a "pattern for truth-telling."
Quote from: Longfellow on Feb 14, 2013, 11:30 AM
Me: "It's complete and total deception, you say. So I guess my name isn't B^^^ ^^^^^^^, and I wasn't born in ^^^^^^^ hospital in the city of ^^^^^^^, and my parents weren't ^^^^^^^ and ^^^^^^^^, eh?
It was as if I had punched him in the gut... he visibly winced... and did so badly.
He started to reply, but the words wouldn't come out. You could almost see the file cards shuffling in his head as he tried to come up with something to counter this sudden attack of common sense and logic that I had unleashed on him.
Quote from: George_Maschke on Feb 15, 2013, 02:18 PMIt looks like Paul Carey has had a long career as a polygraph operator. He's listed as a current member of the Michigan Association of Polygraph Examiners:
http://www.michiganpolygraph.org/members.asp
QuoteIt's on Reddit....