Federal Courts and private sectors exclude evidence collected by polygraphs already, and government organizations are employing polygraphs because it seems to provide the best technological support available in detecting deception. As noted in this document, polygraphs perform significantly better than human beings in classifying untruthful statements, and any support that could be utilized to protect the national security should be utilized to reduce the risks of potential important negative consequences.
However, examinees could successfully employ countermeasures to increase their likelihood of passing a polygraph test, independently from the truthfulness of their answers NRC, ; Synnott et al.
Professional spies, for example, could be arguably aware of these techniques, making it very difficult for a polygraph examiner to identify very few untruthful individuals within a large truthful population, leading to an increased risk of false positives results Rutbeck-Goldman, The three general options described above highlight the factors that should be taken into account to define a policy that utilizes effectively the currently available polygraph technologies. However, it is also evident that most of the studies reported concurred in considering current polygraph testing procedures not scientifically reliable.
The widespread utilization of prescreening polygraph testing, in particular through CQT, is therefore not justifiable. Accordingly, it is advisable to expand the application of the Federal Employee Polygraph Protection Act to include current and potential employees of government organizations and their contractors, and exclude polygraph testing from the prescreening and investigating procedures.
Furthermore, it is suggested to divert part of the resources currently dedicated to polygraph programs to study the reliability of CIT in criminal investigations and define standard methods that could improve the consistency of polygraph tests and their evaluation.
Currently, it seems that pre-employment background checks and traditional investigations could provide more reliable information than polygraph testing, by limiting some of the possible shortcomings involved in utilizing polygraphs, such as the difficulties in estimating the accuracy rate, a measureable amount of false positives, and issues in the area of human rights. It is worth noting that the present recommendations are based on the technology and the information currently available and do not exclude that further developments in this area could make polygraphs more reliable and applicable in both employment and criminal investigations settings.
Alder, K. A social history of untruth: Lie detection and trust in twentieth-century America. Representations , 80 1 , Alder provides an historical review of the polygraph technique in the United States, by trying to explain the cultural and economic motivations behind the proliferation of lie-detection tests.
Ben-Shakhar, G. The validity of psychophysiological detection of information with the Guilty Knowledge Test: A meta-analytic review. Journal of Applied Psychology , 88 1 , The authors found that the accuracies indicated were generally high but significantly different, with the most accurate results reported by mock-crime studies. Bond Jr, C. Accuracy of deception judgments. Personality and social psychology Review , 10 3 , This literature review considered more than relevant studies on people attempts to identify truths and lies, and concluded by indicating an average accuracy slightly above chance in correctly judging lies and truths.
Bradley, M. Natural selective attention: Orienting and emotion. Psychophysiology , 46 1 , Bradley reviews is this article the empirical research on the connection between attention and emotions and concludes by stating how stimuli that individuals recognize and perceive as significant could elicit an emotional response associated with cardiac deceleration and increase in skin conductance, defining the theoretical framework to support the effectiveness of the Concealed Information Test.
Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, Inc. The case sets a new standard after the Frye to define the admissibility of scientific testimony in federal court. According to Daubert, judges should evaluate the scientific validity of the proposed evidence and the applicability of the scientific reasoning to the specific case.
Department of Justice, U. Use of Polygraph Examinations in the Department of Justice. The document includes a summary of the tests conducted by each department and the relative economic investments between and Ekman, P. Telling lies: Clues to deceit in the marketplace, politics, and marriage revised edition.
In this book, Ekman explains how to interpret nonverbal communications to reveal lies and anticipate potentially violent behavior.
The case defines the Frye standard, for which scientific evidence must be generally accepted by the scientific community to be admissible in court. The discussion focused on the admissibility to court of the systolic blood pressure deception test. Grubin, D. Lie detection and the polygraph: A historical review. The article reviews the history of the polygraphs in the United States and their applications in sex-offenders supervision. Harris M. The article investigates the economic costs and the reliability of EyeDetect, a polygraph machine developed by Converus Inc.
Honts, C. American Polygraph Association. The authors review and corroborate the contemporary research reporting a high accuracy of polygraph testing, by analyzing and criticizing an article published by Iacono and Ben-Shakhar , focused on demonstrating that most of the experimental studies on polygraphs overestimate their reliability of these instruments. Iacono, W. Current status of forensic lie detection with the comparison question technique: An update of the National Academy of Sciences report on polygraph testing.
Law and human behavior , 43 1 , In this paper, the authors review the most recent scientific works on the polygraph comparison question technique CQT and confirmed the conclusions of the report published by the National Research Council , which indicated weak scientific support for the CQT.
The validity of the lie detector: Two surveys of scientific opinion. Journal of Applied Psychology , 82 3 , This work describes the results of two surveys conducted on members of the American Psychological Association to evaluate the opinion of the scientific community on polygraphs.
The main findings indicated that most of the respondents did not consider polygraph testing scientifically valid and claimed that polygraph test results should not be admitted in courts. Kozel, F. Detecting deception using functional magnetic resonance imaging.
Biological psychiatry , 58 8 , In this empirical study the authors utilized functional magnetic resonance imaging fMRI to detect deception in subjects participating to a mock crime, by reporting an accuracy rate higher than 90 percent. National Research Council. The Polygraph and Lie Detection. Committee to Review the Scientific Evidence on the polygraph. Division of Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education.
The National Academies Press. This study reviews the theory and applications of polygraphs, empirical evidence supporting this technology and the effectiveness of polygraphs in protecting the national security. The report describes the main issues concerning the accuracy of the polygraph tests and alternative methods to detect deception. Nelson, R. Scientific basis for polygraph testing. Polygraph , 44 1 , The paper explains the characteristics and the components of a polygraph test and proposes a framework to standardize, verify, and compare the reliability of polygraphs.
Raskin, D. Polygraph , 48 1. The report investigates the validity of the control question polygraph technique by analyzing polygraph charts from examinations provided by the U. Secret Service and concluded by indicating that human and computer algorithms are both very accurate in detecting deception and, furthermore, laboratory experiments significantly represent of the accuracy of polygraphs in real world scenarios.
Reid, J. A revised questioning technique in lie-detection tests. Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology , 37 6 , Reid explains in this article the importance of control and relevant questions in lie-detection tests and shares his experience as a member of the Chicago Police Scientific Crime Detection Laboratory to propose some examples of how formulate questions and structure an effective lie-detection test, by lying the foundation of the modern Comparison Question Technique.
Another example might be the screening of individuals who had access to anthrax in U. Again, even though the examiners do not know the specific target action, they can ask some focused relevant questions. The tradeoffs in focused screening are often very different from those in other screening situations because the base rate of the target activities may lie below the 10 percent or higher typical of criminal investigations.
Tradeoffs may also be different in terms of the relative costs of false positive and false negative test results and in terms of incentives to use countermeasures. A polygraph or other screening procedure that is inappropriate or inadvisable for employee security screening may be more attractive in some focused screening situations.
As with other applications, the tradeoffs should be assessed and the judgment made on how and whether to use polygraph screening on the basis of the specifics of the particular situation. We believe that it will be helpful in most situations to think about the tradeoffs in terms of which sensitivities might be used for the screening test, which false positive index values can be expected with those sensitivities, and whether these possibilities include acceptable outcomes for the purpose at hand.
One way to make the tradeoffs associated with polygraph screening more attractive would be to develop more accurate screening protocols for the use of the polygraph.
This section discusses the two basic strategies for doing this: improving polygraph scoring and interpretation and combining polygraph results with other information. The 11 federal agencies that use polygraph testing for employee screening purposes differ in the test formats they use, the transgressions they ask about in the polygraph examination, the ways they combine information from the polygraph examination with other security-relevant information on an examinee, and the decision rules they use to take personnel actions on the basis of the screening information available.
Despite these differences, many of the agencies have put in place quality control programs, following guidance from the U. Department of Defense Polygraph Institute DoDPI , that are designed to ensure that all polygraph exams given in a particular agency follow approved testing procedures and practices, as do the reading and interpretation of polygraph charts.
Federal agencies have established procedures aimed at standardizing polygraph test administration and achieving a high level of reliability in the scoring of charts. The quality control procedures that we have ob-. We emphasize two things about reliable test administration and interpretation. First, reliable test administration and interpretation are both desirable in a testing program and essential if the program is to have scientific standing.
Second, however, it is critical to remember that reliability, no matter how well ensured, does not confer validity on a polygraph screening program. Attempts to increase reliability can in some cases reduce validity. For example, having N examiners judge a chart independently, and averaging their judgments, can produce a net validity that increases when N increases, because the idiosyncratic judgments of different examiners tend to disappear in the process of averaging.
Having independent judgments produces what appear to be unreliable results, i. If examiners see the results of previous examiners before rendering a judgment, apparent reliability would increase because the judgments would probably not differ much among examiners, but such a procedure would likely reduce the accuracy of the eventual decision. Even worse, suppose instructions given to the examiners regarding scoring are made increasingly precise, in an effort to increase reliability, but the best way to score is not known, so that these instructions cause a systematic mis-scoring.
The result would increase reliability, but would also produce a systematic error that would decrease accuracy. A group of examiners not so instructed might use a variety of idiosyncratic scoring methods: each would be in error, but the errors might be in random directions, so that averaging the results across the examiners would approach the true reading.
Here again there is a tradeoff between reliability and validity. These are just illustrations. We can envision examples in which increases in reliability would also increase accuracy. The important point is that one should not conclude that a test is more valid simply because it incorporates quality control procedures that increase reliability.
In addition to establishing examiner training and quality control practices at DoDPI and other agencies, the federal government has sponsored. This approach holds promise for making the most of the data collected by the polygraph. Human decision makers do not always focus on the most relevant evidence and do not always combine different sources of information in the most effective fashion.
In other domains, such as medical decision making Weinstein and Fineberg, computerized decision aids have been shown to produce considerable increases in accuracy. To the extent that polygraph charts contain information correlated with deception or truth-telling, computerized analysis has the potential for increasing accuracy beyond the level available with hand scoring. The investigators from JHU-APL, in their publications and in oral presentations to the committee, have made claims about their methodology and its successful testing on criminal case data through cross-validation.
We made extensive efforts to be briefed on the technical details of the JHU-APL methodology, but although we were supplied with the executable program for the algorithms, the documentation provided to us offered insufficient details to allow for replication and verification of the claims made about their construction and performance. JHU-APL was unresponsive to repeated requests for detail on these matters, as well as on its process for building and validating its models.
On multiple occasions we were told either that the material was proprietary or that reports and testing were not complete and thus could not be shared. From the information available, we find that efforts to use technological advances in computerized recording to develop computer-based algorithms that can improve the interpretations of trained numerical evaluators have failed to build a strong theoretical rationale for their choice of measures.
They have also failed to date to provide solid evidence of the performance of their algorithms on independent data with properly determined truth for a relevant population of interest. As a result, we believe that their claimed performance is highly likely to degrade markedly when applied to a new research population and is even vulnerable to the prospect of substantial disconfirmation.
In conclusion, computerized scor-. We end with a cautionary note. A polygraph examination is a process involving the examiner in a complex interaction with the instrument and the examinee. Computerized scoring algorithms to date have not addressed this aspect of polygraph testing.
For example, they have treated variations in comparison questions across tests as unimportant and have not coded for the content of these questions or analyzed their possible effect on the physiological responses being measured.
Also, examiners may well be picking up a variety of cues during the testing situation other than those contained in the tracings even without awareness and letting those cues affect the judgments about the tracings. Little evidence is available from the research literature on polygraph testing concerning this possibility, but until definitive evidence is available, it might be wise to include both computerized scoring and independent hand scoring as inputs to a decision process.
In most screening applications, information from polygraph examinations chart and interview information is not by itself determinative of personnel actions. Thus, polygraph information is often combined in some way with other information. We have been unable to determine whether DOE or any other federal agency has a standard protocol for combining such information or even any encoded standard practice, analogous to the ways the results of different diagnostic tests are combined in medicine to arrive at a diagnosis.
We made repeated requests for the DOE adjudication manual, which is supposed to encode the procedures for considering polygraph results and other information in making personnel decisions. We were initially told that the manual existed as a privileged document for official use only; after further requests, we were told that the manual is still in preparation. Thus it appears that various information sources are combined an in informal way on the basis of the judgment of adjudicators and other personnel.
Quality control for this phase of decision making appears to take the form of review by supervisors and of policies allowing employees to contest unfavorable personnel decisions. There are no written standards for how polygraph information should be used in personnel decisions at DOE, or, as far as we were able to determine, at any other agency.
We believe that any agency that uses polygraphs as part of a screening process should, in light of the inherent fallibility of the polygraph instrument, use the polygraph results only in conjunction with other information, and only as a trigger for further testing and investigation.
Policy decisions about using the polygraph must consider not only its accuracy and the tradeoffs it presents involving true positives and false positives and negatives, but also whether including the polygraph with the sources of information otherwise available improves the accuracy of detection and makes the tradeoffs more attractive.
This is the issue of incremental validity discussed in Chapter 2. It makes sense to use the polygraph in security screening if it adds information relevant to detecting security risks that is not otherwise available and with acceptable tradeoffs. Federal agencies use or could use a variety of information sources in conjunction with polygraph tests for making personnel security decisions: background investigations, ongoing security checks by various investigative techniques, interviews, psychological tests, and so forth see Chapter 6.
We have not located any scientific studies that attempt directly to measure the incremental validity of the polygraph when added to any of these information sources. That is, the existing scientific research does not compare the accuracy of prediction of criminal behavior or any other behavioral criterion of interest from other indicators with accuracy when the polygraph is added to those indicators.
Security officials in several federal agencies have told us that the polygraph is far more useful to them than background checks or other investigative techniques in revealing activities that lead to the disqualification of applicants from employment or employees from access to classified information.
It is impossible to determine whether the incremental. There are several scientifically defensible approaches to combining different sources of information that could be used as part of polygraph policies. The problem has been given attention in the extensive literature on decision making for medical diagnosis, classification, and treatment, a field that faces the problem of combining information from clinical observations, interviews, and a variety of medical tests see the more detailed discussion in Appendix K.
Statistical methods for combining data of different types e. In one, called independent parallel testing, a set of tests is used and a target result on any one is used to make a determination. For example, a positive result on any test may be taken to indicate the presence of a condition of interest.
In the other approach, called independent serial testing, if a particular test in the sequence is negative, the individual is concluded to be free of the condition of interest, but if the test is positive, another test is ordered. Validating a combined test of either type requires independent tests or sources of information and a test evaluation sample that is representative of the target population.
Serial screening and its logic are familiar from many medical settings. A low-cost test of moderate accuracy is usually used as an initial screen, with the threshold usually set to include a high proportion of the true positive cases people with the condition among those who test positive.
Most of those who test positive will be false positives, especially if the condition has a low base rate. In this approach, people who test positive are then subject to a more accurate but more expensive or invasive second-stage test, and so on through as many stages as warranted. For example, mammograms and prostate-specific antigen PSA tests are among the many first screens used for detecting cancers, with biopsies as possible second-stage tests.
The low cost of polygraph testing relative to detailed security investigation makes the polygraph attractive for use early in the screening series. Detailed investigation could act as the second-stage test. Such a policy presents a bit of a dilemma. If the purpose of using the polygraph is like that of cancer screening—to avoid false negatives—the threshold should be set so as to catch a high proportion of spies or terrorists. The result of this approach, in a population with a low base rate of spies or terrorists, is to greatly increase the number of false positives and the accompanying expense of investigating all the positives with traditional methods.
The costs of detailed investigations can be reduced by setting the threshold so that few examinees are judged to show significant response. However, setting such a friendly threshold runs the risk of an unacceptably high number of false negative results. A way might be found to minimize this dilemma if there were other independent tests that could be added in the sequence, either before the polygraph or between the polygraph and detailed investigation.
Such tests would decrease the number of people who would have to pass the subsequent screens. If such a screen could be applied before the polygraph, its effect would be to increase the base rate of target people spies, terrorists, or whatever among those given the polygraph by culling out large numbers of the others. The result would be that the problem of high false positive rates in a population with a low base rate would be significantly diminished see Figures and , above.
If such an independent screen could be applied after the polygraph, the result would be to reduce the numbers and costs of detailed investigations by eliminating more of the people who would eventually be cleared. However, there is no test available that is known to be more accurate than the polygraph and that could fill the typical role of a second-stage test in serial screening. We have not found any scientific treatments of the relative benefits of using the polygraph either earlier or later in a series of screening tests, nor even any explicit discussion of this issue.
We have also not found any consideration or investigation of the idea of using other tests in sequence with the polygraph in the manner described above. The costs and benefits of using the polygraph at different positions in a sequence of screening tests needs careful attention in devising any policy that uses the polygraph systematically as a source of information in a serial testing model for security screening. Some people have suggested that polygraph data could be analyzed and combined with other data by nonstatistical methods that rely on expert systems.
There is disagreement on how successful such systems. For screening uses of the polygraph, it seems clear that no such body of knowledge exists. Lacking such knowledge, the serious problems that exist in deriving and adequately validating procedures for computer scoring of polygraph tests discussed above also exist for the derivation and validation of expert systems for combining polygraph results with other diagnostic information.
Insufficient scientific information exists to support recommendations on whether or how to combine polygraph and other information in a sequential screening model. A number of psychophysiological techniques appear promising in the long run but have not yet demonstrated their validity. Some indicators based on demeanor and direct investigation appear to have a degree of accuracy, but whether they add information to what the polygraph can provide is unknown see Chapter 6.
The practical use of polygraph testing is shaped in part by its legal status. Polygraph testing has long been the subject of judicial attention, much more so than most forensic technologies.
In contrast, courts have only recently begun to look at the data, or lack thereof, for other forensic technologies, such as fingerprinting, handwriting identification and bite marks, which have long been admitted in court.
The attention paid to polygraphs has generally led to a skeptical view of them by the judiciary, a view not generally shared by most executive branch agencies. Judicial skepticism results both from questions about the validity of the technology and doubt about its need in a constitutional process that makes juries or judges the finders of fact.
Doubts about polygraph tests also arise from the fact that the test itself contains a substantial interrogation component. Courts recognize the usefulness of interrogation strategies, but hesitate when the results of an interrogation are presented as evidentiary proof.
Although polygraphs clearly have utility in some settings, courts have been unwilling to conclude that utility denotes validity. The value of the test for law enforcement and employee screening is an amalgam of utility and validity, and the two are not easily separated. An early form of the polygraph served as the subject of the wellknown standard used for evaluating scientific evidence—general acceptance—announced in Frye v.
United States and still used in some courts see below. It has been the subject of a U. Supreme Court decision, United States v. Scheffer , and countless state and federal deci-. Polygraphs fit the pattern of many forensic scientific fields, being of concern to the courts, government agencies and law enforcement, but largely ignored by the scientific community.
A recent decision found the same to be true for fingerprinting United States v. Plaza, Although the district court subsequently vacated this decision and admitted the evidence, the judge repeated his initial finding that fingerprinting had not been tested and was only generally accepted within a discrete and insular group of professionals.
Hines [] on handwriting analysis and the more general discussion in Faigman et al. The lack of data on regularly used scientific evidence appears to be a systemic problem and, at least partly, a product of the historical divide between law and science. Federal courts only recently began inquiring directly into the validity or reliability of proffered scientific evidence. Until , the prevailing standard of admissibility was the general acceptance test first articulated in Frye v.
United States in Using that test, courts queried whether the basis for proffered expert opinion is generally accepted in the particular field from which it comes. In Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, Inc. Supreme Court held that Frye does not apply in federal courts. Under the Daubert test, judges must determine whether the basis for proffered expertise is, more likely than not, valid. The basic difference between Frye and Daubert is one of perspective: courts using Frye are deferential to the particular fields generating the expertise, whereas Daubert places the burden on the courts to evaluate the scientific validity of the expert opinion.
This difference of perspective has begun to significantly change the reception of the scientific approach in the court-room. The polygraph is not unusual in this regard. In fact, topics such as bite mark and hair identification, fingerprinting, arson investigation, and tool mark analysis have a less extensive record of research on accuracy than does polygraph testing. Historically, the courts relied on experts in sundry fields in which the basis for the expert opinion is primarily assertion rather than scientific testing and in which the value of the expertise is measured by effectiveness in court rather than scientific demonstration of accuracy or validity.
These observations raise several issues worthy of consideration. First, if the polygraph compares well with other forensic sciences, should it not receive due recognition for its relative success? Second, most forensic sciences are used solely in judicial contexts, while the polygraph is also used in employment screening: Do the different contexts in which the technique is used affect the determination of its usefulness?
And third, since mainstream scientists have largely ignored forensic science, how could this situation be changed? We consider these matters in turn.
Without question, DNA profiling provides the model of cooperation between science and the law. The technology was founded on basic science, and much of the early debate engaged a number of leading figures in the scientific community. Rapidly improving technology and expanded laboratory attention led to improvements in the quality of the data and the strengths of the inferences that could be drawn.
Even then, however, there were controversies regarding the statistical inferences National Research Council, , a. Nonetheless, from the start, judges understood the need to learn the basic science behind the technology and, albeit with certain exceptions, largely mastered both the biology and the statistics underlying the evidence.
At the same time, DNA profiling might be somewhat misleading as a model for the admissibility of scientific evidence. Although some of the forensic sciences, such as fingerprinting see Cole, , started as science, most have existed for many decades outside mainstream science. In fact, many forensic sciences had their start well outside the scientific mainstream. Moreover, although essentially probabilistic, DNA profiling today produces almost certain conclusions—if a sufficient set of DNA characteristics is measured, the resulting DNA profiles can be expected to be unique, with a probability of error of one in billions or less except for identical twins National Research Council, a.
In fact, the one. The accuracy of polygraph testing does not come anywhere near what DNA analysis can achieve. Nevertheless, polygraph researchers have produced considerable data concerning polygraph validity see Chapters 4 and 5.
However, most of this research is laboratory research, so that the generalizability of the research to field settings remains uncertain.
The field studies that have been carried out also have serious limitations see Chapter 4. Moreover, there is virtually no standardization of protocols; the polygraph tests conducted in the field depend greatly on the presumed skill of individual examiners.
Thus, even if laboratory-based estimates of criterion validity are accurate, the implications for any particular field polygraph test are uncertain. The results were as follows:. These figures clearly demonstrate the effectiveness of the polygraph as an investigative tool. In one interesting case which involved a polygraphist with the Oregon State Police USA investigating a theft a polygraph was used to conduct a searching peak of tension test. When a control question technique showed him to be responding deceptively in this matter, a Peak of Tension Test was administered to determine if the location of the body could be discovered.
The first searching peak asked the following questions:. When strong autonomic reactions occurred in response to question 4, the man was presented with another series of questions worked in a similar manner but relating to the specific farm buildings.
Large responses were found to questions associated with the shed. Dramatic results have also occurred whist looking for weapons and other exhibits used in a crime. Another case in point was the murder of two girls, Kynara Carreiro and Krisin Wiley, aged seven and ten years respectively, in Houston, Texas in A 34 year old neighbour, Rex Mays, had long been suspected of stabbing and slashing the two girls to death, but there was insufficient evidence to charge him.
Mays consented to a polygraph examination, and when told that he had failed the test, Mays confessed. Both passed the tests which showed they had no knowledge of, or involvement in the murders, Police continued the investigation which resulted in the arrest and conviction of Charles Manson and members of his "family".
The work load of this unit consists mainly of major felony cases including homicide and child sexual abuse investigations. Although the polygraph is not a panacea for every investigation it has proven to be an effective investigative tool, especially in the absence of other corroborative evidence.
Because of the polygraph, we are better prosecutors and guarantors of justice". Internationally the polygraph will continue to greatly enhance the investigative process as another weapon in a growing arsenal of investigative and scientific tools available to investigators.
Davis, R. Zimmer, eds. Jeff Kennet, Premier of Victoria. Wigmore J. February 1 st , Norman Ansley : The validity and reliability of polygraph decisions in real cases.
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