I was talking to a friend the other day who knows a lot of polygraph casualties. One of his trusted friends (I'll call him "Bill") failed a polygraph and lost all his clearances. Bill believed he failed the question "Would you be able to keep our secrets even if it would mean the death of a loved one?" I told my friend this sounded like a control question, and if anything, Bill might not have shown enough of a reaction to this question. However, I've never heard of this question before as a control. Any thoughts?
As a side note, I also hear that one of our gov agency's pre-poly pep videos has an interesting error where the speaker is offering some consoling words and the captions in the video say the exact opposite.
Onesimus,
The question, "Would you be able to keep our secrets even if it would mean the death of a loved one?" is an example of a "hypothetical control" question (see p. 104 of The Lie Behind the Lie Detector (http://antipolygraph.org/pubs.shtml), 3rd ed.).