. . . and now one of his attorneys (was it F. Lee Bailey?), the one who made the core statement about the earlier flunked lie detector test, is backpedaling.
Who knows the scoop about lie detector tests? Are they proven accurate? The Ramseys claim they passed one and proved their innocence regarding Jon Benet. Maybe if you are a pathological liar and believe your own stories, you won’t register as lying on one of these tests. Who knows more?
IIRC, Carl Sagan wrote unfavorably about polygraphs in The Demon-Haunted World. There are several Internet sites skeptical of the idea that they are scientific. Among them:
http://www.salon.com/health/feature/2000/03/02/polygraph/print.html
The reason that they aren’t used as proof in court is because they have been proven to be inconsistant with reality, like hypnotic regression, and one can be trained to improve their score. Their main purpose is to be an interogation tool.
I’m not interested in hearing him answer any questions, but it sure would be nice to have O.J. all wired up…
As a kid,I remember building a “Lie Detector” from a kit from Radio Shack. It consisted of metallic velcro strips which were attached to the fingers of the person being interrogated, and a control box. Slight increases in the perspiration level caused the machine to change the frequency or pitch out of the speaker. (it hummed, basically)
As a matter of fact, the thing worked pretty well, after a fashion. My father would ask us questions about which girls we were interested in, or whether we had ever taken the car without his knowledge, however first asking us a series of benign questions in order to establish a “baseline.” It was a lot of fun. Of course, a good liar could “beat” this.
I’ve heard of a case where the police knew a guy was guilty and wanted a confession, so they put a metal collander on this guys head, with wires running to a copy machine. They’d ask a question, hit the print button, and out of the copier would come a piece of paper saying “He’s Lying;” He confessed, but of course that’s probably illegal. Lie detectors merely measure physiological response - heartbeat, breathing, insensible perspiration, etc. But they work, sometimes.
My uncle has a college degree in criminology and is a private investigator and polygrapher by trade. If there is one thing he has told me about polygraph testing, it’s that it’s all in the hands of the polygrapher. A polygraph test produces a graph, and just like a graph showing sales growth or stock prices, what a polygraph machine produces is open to interpretation. As Horselover mentioned, the primary use of a polygraph machine is for interrogation. A polygraph test is administered often by a civilian tester, not a police officer, and the questions are often worded carefully, re-worded, and asked several times. The polygraph machine does not simply tell if a person is lying or telling the truth, it measures the person’s reactions in many ways when asked specific questions . The polygrapher can then use his or her expertise and what the machine has told them to make a judgement of whether or not a person is likely to confess, if they are a good liar, if they are too nervous to give a statement at all or, in the best cases, if they are lying or telling the truth. The reason polygraph tests are not admissable in court is because so much of a polygraph test relies on the element of human interpretation.
In other words, it boils down to the results of a polygraph examination being the examiner making his/her own best guess about the subject’s truthfullness.
Thre’s a thread on this already here: Stop the Lies!. The discussion degenerated for a while, but it’s back on course now.
Plenty of links ad data in that thread. The polygraph can be proved to poiduce correct results more often than chance. That’s far from enough to satisfy me, and the numbers of false positives and false negatives are too much for me.
This is actually an urban legend. Jan Harold Brunvand addressed this one in The Baby Train and The Big Book of Urban Legends. www.snopes.com is a great tool for checking these things, too.
Also isn’t another issue it doesn’t tell you what is real but rather simply what the person believes. I mean I bet if you questioned people about if GOD is real a majority would say so and pass. And others would deny it and pass.
The Juice would make a lot of money! But then he has to give it to the family. Ironic, eh?
JonF,
I think The Ryan sufficiently hijacked the discourse and sent it plummeting nose first into the pavement. 