CarbonIceDragon@pawb.social 2 days ago
They dont work, because not lie detectors at all. To my understanding they’re basically just a tech-assisted version of trying to tell if someone is lying by trying to watch their emotional reaction. They might be able to tell you if someone is stressed, under the notion that someone lying will be more stressed than when telling the truth from the effort and worry of being caught, but that isn’t really true necessarily.
throwawayacc0430@sh.itjust.works 2 days ago
I wonder why the intelligence agencies (FBI, CIA) still use these to access new recruits 🤔
spankmonkey@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Because it lets them see how people react under pressure. If people think the stress detector works, they are more likely to be honest because they are worried the people using it will think they are hiding something.it is a mechinal version of “we already know the truth, we are just asking to see if you lie to us”.
The implication of the machine often gets results even though it isn’t reliable in any way since stress is not an indication of anything specific.
GoodLuckToFriends@lemmy.today 2 days ago
Because they get people to admit to things they wouldn’t otherwise. A polygraph test starts with the interviewer “just talking” (and those are massive, giant quotation marks there) to you for about a half hour. They slip in little statements about other, experienced officers who are currently employed despite past wrongdoings, “because they admitted” to the bad shit. Meanwhile, when you admit to bad shit, guess who’s not getting hired?
The interviewer will give you a giant list to go through, asking if you’ve done any of the hundreds of bad things, and ask you to explain any “yes” answers you give to the question of committing a crime.
So now you’re primed to confess to things, and the interviewer and agency gets to comb through those confessions to see if they don’t want to hire you. They also get to reject you if they don’t like you and blame it on you failing the ‘lie detector’ test, or the interviewer can simply say you’re lying.
Rivalarrival@lemmy.today 2 days ago
Plausible deniability. The real part of the security clearance is the background check they perform, including the interviews. If they find out from some secret source that you immigrated from North Korea, they won’t tell you they figured that out. They’ll just tell you that you didn’t pass the polygraph and send you home. Your North Korean handler will report back that they need to train future spies how to defeat the polygraph, but fail to close the actual hole in their security.
kambusha@sh.itjust.works 2 days ago
Well, the cat’s out of the bag now.
TheFANUM@lemmy.world 2 days ago
They don’t. Only shady police that already lie about everything and use it as a tool to lie more effectively
bradorsomething@ttrpg.network 1 day ago
The most important part of it is “is there anything you’d like to admit, before we take the test?”