Lie detection

Lie detection, also referred to as deception detection or polygraph test, uses questioning techniques along with technology that record physiological functions to ascertain truth and falsehood in response. It is commonly used by law enforcement and has historically been an inexact science. There are a wide variety of technologies available for this purpose. The most common and long used measure is the polygraph, which the U.S. National Academy of Sciences states, in populations untrained in countermeasures, can discriminate lying from truth telling at rates above chance, though below perfection. They added that the results apply only to specific events and not to screening, where it is assumed that the polygraph works less well.

The cumulative research evidence suggests that machines do detect deception better than chance, but with significant error rates and that strategies used to "beat" polygraph examinations, so-called countermeasures, may be effective. Despite unreliability, results are admissible in court in some countries such as Japan. Lie detector results are very rarely admitted in evidence in the US courts.

In 1983 the U.S. Congress Office of Technology Assessment published a review of the technology and found:

In the 2007 peer-reviewed academic article "Charlatanry in forensic speech science", the authors reviewed 50 years of lie detector research and came to the conclusion that there is no scientific evidence supporting that voice analysis lie detectors actually work. Lie detector manufacturer Nemesysco threatened to sue the academic publisher for libel resulting in removal of the article from online databases. In a letter to the publisher, Nemesysco's lawyers wrote that the authors of the article could be sued for defamation if they wrote on the subject again. The full text of the article is available online.

Extraneous noise can come from embarrassment or anxiety and not be specific to lying. When subjects are aware of the assessment their resulting emotional response, especially anxiety, can impact the data. Additionally, psychological disorders can cause problems with data as certain disorders can lead a person to make a statement they believe to be truth but is actually a fabrication. As well as with all testing, the examiner can cause biases within the test with their interaction with the subject and interpretation of the data.

The study of physiological methods for deception tests measuring emotional disturbances began in the early 1900s. Benussi was the first to work on practical deception tests based on physiological changes. He detected changes in inspiration-expiration ratio—findings confirmed by N.E. Burtt. Burtt conducted studies that emphasized the changes in quantitative systolic blood-pressure. William Moulton Marston studied blood-pressure and noted increase in systolic blood pressure of 10 mm Hg or over indicated guilt through using the tycos sphygmomanometer, with which he reported 90-100% accuracy. His studies used students and actual court cases. Then in 1913 W.M. Marston determined systolic blood-pressure by oscillatory methods and his findings cite definite changes in blood pressure during the deception of criminal suspects. In 1921, Larson criticized Marston's intermittent blood pressure method because emotional changes were so brief they could be lost. To adjust for this he modified the Erlanger sphygmograph to give a continuous blood pressure and pulse curve and used it to study 4,000 criminals.

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