If I had a dime for every time I’ve heard some prosecutor or detective or lawyer tell us that someone
is a suspect for a particular crime because he failed a lie detector test, I’d be
rich.
But the
truth is, according to a panel appointed by National Research Council, a branch of the
National Academy of Sciences, lie detector tests are worthless.
Actually, it’s worse than that.
They are worse than worthless.
Just how
useless are they?
If you took a sample
company or organization of 10,000 employees, of which 10 were spies or
saboteurs, and you
required every one of the them to take a lie-detector test, you would have 1,606 suspects.
That narrows
it down considerably.
Two of the
10 spies will have escaped detection completely.
There
is no way to distinguish the 8 remaining genuine spies from the 1,598 innocent employees.
Among the 2 would be the infamous mole Aldrich
Ames who passed twice.
This study
did not take into account the fact that when evil corporations or governments realize that
all employees are being screened with a polygraph, they can actually do their own
screening and train their spies to pass the polygraph.
The
“lie detector”, of course, doesn’t actually detect lies. It records various bodily functions like
respiration, blood pressure, and sweating.
The
“expert” polygraph administrator (like an “expert” witch doctor)
calibrates the responses by comparing the results to those obtained from known factual
truths.
As any
amateur would guess, it is quite possible for a nervous, upset, or annoyed employee to
“fail” the test simply because he is nervous, upset, or annoyed, as I would be
if my employer demanded that I participate in this exercise of quackery.
There is no
such thing as a lie detector.
Polygraph
examinations don’t work.
Forget about
it.
In Fort
Jackson, N.C., your Department of Defense has a “Polygraph Institute”, where
expensive and useless research is conducted into this joke.
I’ll
bet you’d be really upset if those dollars ended up going to welfare mothers instead.
The army would probably argue that some day the lie detector might
work. As might the welfare mother, but I think her odds are better.
