[QUOTE=Guinastasia]
Oh shoot, you’re right. For some reason I read him as talking about people who honestly believed they’d been kidnapped.
Sorry!
-FrL-
Here’s a summary of the Federal Law in pdf. You’re basically right, but there are plenty of exceptions - Federal, State & Local governments are completely exempted from the law (hah), defense contractors, pharmaceutical companies, & security companies can polygraph employees as well.
Massachusetts has a polygraph law with none of the above exceptions. 10 years or so ago, if you worked for a defense contractor in MA and wanted to get a security clearance that required a polygraph test, they’d send you out of state to take the test. I notice in my link that that’s illegal as well - I don’t know if that’s a new addition to the law or if they’ve taken a “live & let live” attitude to security clearances, since MA has plenty of defense contractors.
I asked this exact question in the above-mentioned other thread on polygraphs, and Excalibre specifically denied that there is any such brain pattern associated with deception. Clearly, the two of you are going to have to battle it out for cite supremacy!
I’m responding to both Campion and Yabob here for brevity’s sake. I didn’t mean to imply that protection of the judicial system was the only reason polys aren’t used in court (I’ve been polygraphed for work, and was accused of lying about my drug history and handling of Classified materials - both of which were absolutely NOT legitimate). I fully recognize that the polygraph is a scripted interrogation. The poly is not a solid tool; it is, however, useful when they polygrapher already has facts that the subject doesn not think they possess.
Again, “scripted interrogation.” But useful. And yet, not concrete.
In that sense, the polygraph is merely an accessory in a good cop-bad cop routine. Imagine how much more devastating it would be if it were believed to be accurate.
[QUOTE=Frylock]
Both. What matters is that we KNOW they aren’t telling the truth. Right? If they are lying for the sake of getting cash or honsetly believe that they were kidnapped- the LD has said they aren’t lying and thus the LD is wrong. (Please tell me we are all 100% in line with no real alien abductions, right?)
When I was working at the County IT Dept., we had a District Court Judge who installed an obsolete, non-working mainframe terminal on the corner of his bench. Then he would ask defendants questions like ‘do you have any other charges pending?’ and say ‘I’m going to check this on the computer right here, you know.’ Sometimes he would tap a few keys on the dead terminal, and then ask ‘what about this one in that other county?’.
He ended up having a lot of them admit to past convictions or current pending charges in other counties; which entered into the sentences they received.
I was once abducted by a group of aliens who wanted my seed. I know they were aliens because they showed me their green cards.
Hmm, maybe the Resident Alien Work permit really is green in the case of an intergalactic alien. 
(“Green cards” haven’t been green in over a decade). 
Heh. I’ve argued with our current and previous community police officers about the polygraph, and what they describe, in terms of its effectiveness, matches pretty well what Aldrich Ames had to say about polygraphs:
They think the machine itself is effective because they’re confusing the source of the results they say they see. They describe a process of cold reading to get information, perhaps something akin to what John Edward perform, to get people to give up information. And just as some people believe John Edwards can talk to the dead, some people believe the polygraph is effective. One officer described how people can learn to detect lies, and then describes how one investigator uses his skills to get good deals on a car, but the process he describes is not one where the salesman makes a statement and the investigator detects truth or dishonesty; rather, he describes a process of cold reading.
Indeed, when it comes to criminal investigation, the method sounds more like hot reading, where other methods are used in conjunction with cold reading. One officer spoke of how he knew a woman was lying based on her statements & behavior; however, when I asked why he interviewed her in the first place, he said that he already knew she was guilty based on other evidence. With witness reports, evidence, and outright lies, he was very well prepared to read the subject person. He describes the process as being the same as what the polygraphers do, the difference being they’re using the machine in addition to all the other props available. At no point in the discussion with these officers does the polygraph machine’s operation actually come into play.
Another mistake they make has to do with conditional probabilities. They look at evidence to make guesses about who is guilty before applying techniques. They’ve already pared down the set of possible criminals based on evidence, and so it becomes much easier to use manipulation and cold (or hot) reading to guess where the person is lying and focus on those areas.
Regardless, that’s a small sample of advocates, so caveat lector.