Polygraph Madness

Unusually skeptical commentary about “lie detector” exams for a U.S. government publication can be found within an April 12 report from the Congressional Research Service.  The report finds (page 24):

. . . polygraph examinations are not necessary to the security clearance process. For example, no one in the legislative branch is subject to polygraph examinations. Concerns are repeatedly raised about alleged privacy violations, “out-of-scope” reporting of criminal activities, “false-positives” and other polygraph inaccuracies, examiner and agency inconsistencies, and over-zealous and inconsistent examiners.

The report does not break any new scientific ground, because there is none. The National Research Council’s 2003 study, The Polygraph and Lie Detection, expressed the definitive consensus and there is no reason for it to change.  “The polygraph machine, first constructed in the early 1900s, does not detect lies,” the CRS report states, which for idiosyncratic cultural reasons continues to be an unobvious fact in the United States. It mentions somewhat misleadingly that “the Supreme Court has determined that ‘There is simply no consensus that polygraph evidence is reliable . . . To this day, the scientific community remains extremely polarized about the reliability of polygraph techniques”–a quotation attributed in a footnote to Justice Clarence Thomas, who tends to be oblivious about what constitutes a consensus. There is a scientific consensus about polygraphs about which the scientific community is in no way polarized: they are junk.  Nonetheless, tens of thousands of federal government employees continue to be subject to the intimidation of mandatory tests, though they are mostly banned in the private sector.

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Discover Magazine, March 1986

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