Does the profession involve espionage? Undercover work of any sort?
Are the people trying to fail the test in the same profession as the one that it was suggested you should go into?
Prosecutors?
Yes.
Yes.
I don’t believe so, no.
Is the profession international espionage? Domestic, like being an FBI informant or similar? Are people in this profession generally regarded as criminals?
Is the test specifically intended to ferret out spies / informants / other untrustworthy types?
Would it be useful to know more about why it is ordinarily hard to fail on purpose? Are involuntary responses involved, like a lie detector test?
Does this involve counterfeiting in anyway?
International espionage, which I guess tells you how they’re generally regarded, insofar as they’re presumably breaking the law where they’re at on instructions from officials back home.
It’s administered, in this context, to ferret out spies.
I think you’d have the whole thing if you had that.
I’d say that, yeah, involuntary response are involved.
I don’t believe so. (I mean, you guys now have the “international espionage” aspect, and I guess I’d figure that a spy would walk around with a fake ID in his pocket, and you could maybe argue that a test that catches spies would indirectly reveal the truth about said ID, but that’s presumably not what you have in mind.)
You are correct, that is not what I had in mind. I was thinking being able to tell fake currencies as part of the test, and the colors throwing some people off.
Is it an “implicit association” type of test? Specifically, are people presented with a variety of words in different colors and told to click on (say) all the green ones, but some of those green-colored words actually mean things like “blue” and “yellow” in Language X? So a spy who is actually a native speaker of Language X, but is pretending not to be, is more likely to get their wires crossed?
I figure that’s close enough!
The professor was telling the class about the Stroop Effect, explaining that it got used to catch Russian spies who of course claimed to not even speak Russian, and who got shown a bunch of words in various colors: if you don’t speak the language, you can rattle off the colors of those letter groupings — you say “red, blue, orange, brown, yellow, green” with no hesitation, and you don’t even know if you’ve been looking at the Russian words for “elephant” and “death” and “firewood” or whatever — but if you’re looking at red letters that spell out “green” and blue letters that spell out “brown”, you slow down and effectively pass the Do You Understand Russian test.
I of course suggested that they claim to be colorblind, the professor of course replied that it wouldn’t work because there are ways to check if someone is faking colorblindness, I of course replied that I really am colorblind, and he of course brought the house down by waving a hand in my direction and saying “then you go play secret agent.”
Ah, as I was reading through to catch up, I thought of the Stroop effect. Using it to catch spies would never even have occurred to me.
I wonder if that’s more reliable than testing for knowing the second and third verse of the “Star-Spangled Banner”?