Boddhisatva@lemmy.world 2 days ago
“There’s no unique physiological sign of deception. And there’s no evidence whatsoever that the things the polygraph measures — heart rate, blood pressure, sweating, and breathing — are linked to whether you’re telling the truth or not,” says Leonard Saxe, a psychologist at Brandeis University who’s conducted research into polygraphs. In an exhaustive report, the National Research Council concluded, “Almost a century of research in scientific psychology and physiology provides little basis for the expectation that a polygraph test could have extremely high accuracy.”
The real question is, why do people think that they work? Why do government agencies use them to grant clearances when there is no evidence that they can reliably detect falsehoods and ample evidence that they are known to give false positives when people are actually telling the truth?
Go take some classes on stress management and biofeedback and learn to control all those things they are testing for. Then you won’t need to worry about what the questioners mean when they ask you something.
GoodLuckToFriends@lemmy.today 2 days ago
The only real measure that they can read is your breathing rate. Everything else is so variable naturally that it’s just noise.
Boddhisatva@lemmy.world 1 day ago
You can learn to consciously control a lot of things that various ‘lie detectors’ monitor. I took a stress management/biofeedback class in college where we learned to raise and lower galvanic skin response, heart rate, and blood pressure. It was a fun class, and in learning to control them, you can also reduce the chance of getting a false positive by keeping any of those variables from drifting to far from the expected range.