Polygraph Test

[resQengine]

Does every dept. give a polygraph test? Is it a state thing? I live in New York and a few depts. I have talked to did not mention a polygraph test. If they do give one, if you lie on the test, will that prevent you from getting that job? If you dont lie and tell the truth about doing drugs once when you were 13, will that prevent you from getting the job. My question is, how much weight does that throw with your chances of getting hired? Just a few questions. Thanks for your replys.......

[kghemtp]

I must admit to knowing very little about this subject. It has been my experience that past wrongs are not automatic failures if you are honest about it. You did something as a teen. They might ask a question about doing anything like that since. If you are truthful, you're in better shape than if they find you have lied. People have made medication mistakes, and paramedics are asked about this all the time. I made a mistake (gave 1/2 of what I thought I did). Did I try to cover it up at the hospital or when the chief asked me? Not once. Did the paperwork reflect everything I REALLY did as opposed to what I originally thought? Yes. It's when ya give a wrong drug and ask a partner or nurse to overlook it because you don't want to be in trouble. I'm not a proponent of trying to condition oneself to taking polygraph tests. In New Hampshire, I have only heard of a handful of departments using polygraph tests. It would be my guess that departments KNOW people (and GREAT firefighter/EMT's) will not apply when they know the polygraph is part of the process, not because of having something to hide, but not wanting to go through the exhaustive ordeal. Heck, I've avoided a few departments for that reason. Fortunately I have nothing to hide and no history with farm animals, so it's not a big concern of mine now. Good luck!

[CaptBob]

In fact, if a department refused to hire people who honestly admitted to having experimented with alcohol or marijuana they would have few candidates to choose from. Prior minor use should not be counted against you. But, if you admit that you have, it might.

Extensive use does raise questions. If you admitted to experimenting with marijuana 200 times will certainly raise a red flag. Experimenting with cocaine or methamphetamine is much more serious. Stating that you never used anything can raise questions. But if you never have experimented with drugs, don’t feel that you need to say anything.

Polygraph

Some departments use polygraphs as part of the hiring process. Some threaten a poly to get you to open up. More than one background investigator will ask candidates if they will submit to a polygraph to verify their information. You can agree at that time to move along the process; but understand they cannot and will not give you a polygraph if it wasn't stated on the job announcement and give a poly to everyone else in the process.

If polygraphs are so great why aren't the results admissible in court cases? Criminologists say lie detector tests pass 10 percent of the liars and fail 20 percent of the truth-tellers.

If there is a polygraph in your future hiring, check out this web site: http://eatstress.com/polygrap.htm

Captain Bob

www.eatstress.com

[manofire2]

My opinion is that lie detectors won't result in hiring the best candidates, just the best liars!

[CaptBob]

Are Polygraph Tests Lying to Us?
This article is from the Baltimore Sun. It should give you an insight to the polygraph delimma:

Tests: Mixed reading of Lee's nuclear secret data, federal
employee opposition to taking lie detectors 'reignite'
80-year-old controversy.

By Michael Stroh
Sun Staff
Originally published Nov 3 2000

When physicist Wen Ho Lee first denied
leaking U.S. nuclear secrets to the Chinese, authorities from
the Department of Energy in 1998 wired him to a polygraph
to see if he was lying.

The Los Alamos National Laboratory scientist passed.

But when a polygraph expert from the FBI looked at the
same test results later, he concluded that Lee had not told
the truth.

How could the same lie detector test lead investigators to
exactly opposite conclusions?

The case of Lee, who eventually pleaded guilty to one
felony count of mishandling classified information, has left
law enforcement experts trying to answer the same
fundamental questions that have existed since the invention
of the lie detector 80 years ago: Does the polygraph
actually work? And is it fair?

"It's reignited this smoldering controversy," says Steven
Aftergood, a senior research analyst with the Federation of
American Scientists in Washington. In an essay being
published today in the journal Science, Aftergood argues
that a new federal policy requiring nearly 20,000
employees of the national nuclear weapons laboratories to
take lie detector tests is having undesirable effects.

The policy has lowered morale, Aftergood writes, and
caused some of the nation's most gifted scientists to leave,
and made it harder for the labs to recruit talented young
researchers for the weapons programs. The use of the
polygraph, he writes, "symbolizes the defeat of reason by
the national security state."

Despite such criticisms, the use of the polygraph test is on
the rise.

Congress banned private industry's use of lie detectors as a
condition of employment in 1988, but they are routinely
used for employee screening at the FBI, Central Intelligence
Agency, National Security Agency and local police
departments around the country. The percentage of law
enforcement agencies using polygraphs for this purpose
rose from 16 percent in 1962 to 62 percent in 1999,
according to a survey by Michigan State University's
School of Criminal Justice.

There's also a growing market for polygraphs outside law
enforcement. The American Polygraph Association, the
largest polygraph accrediting and licensing organization in
the country, reports that its membership has risen past 2,000
and is continuing to grow.

Private polygraph examiners handle everything from fishing
tournaments to divorce cases. Winners of the annual Big
Rock Blue Marlin Tournament in Morehead City, N.C., for
example, must submit to a polygraph before collecting any
prize money (to make sure they haven't stuffed rocks in the
gut of their prize catch).

Lie detectors aren't designed to detect lies as much as the
subtle physical changes that may occur when a person tells
a lie. The word "polygraph" means "many writings," and
that is what the polygraph machine produces: lots of
squiggly lines on a scrolling piece of paper.

The test works like this: A subject is seated in a chair. Two
rubber belts are wrapped around his chest and stomach to
measure breathing patterns. A blood pressure cuff is
wrapped around an arm. A metal plate attached to the
fingers measures sweat gland activity.

The polygraph examiner then asks the person a series of
questions. Some of the queries are "control" questions
unrelated to the matter under investigation but establish a
base line of the person's blood pressure, respiration and
perspiration. Other questions directly address the actions
under scrutiny.

The examiner interprets the person's physiological response
to each of the questions, as recorded on scrolling paper, to
judge whether the person is lying. And thus the uncertainty
about polygraph results: they are a matter of judgment.
"There's no red light or siren that comes on when the person
lies," says Milton O. "Skip" Webb Jr., president of the
American Polygraph Association.

The roots of the modern lie detector stretch back to
antiquity. Like modern methods, early techniques to ferret
out lies often relied on the behavior exhibited by liars -
sweaty palms, dry mouth, shifting gaze, racing pulse.

In China, for example, suspected liars were fed a handful of
dry rice. If they could spit it out, the thinking went, they
were telling the truth. If the rice stuck to their tongue, they
must have something to hide.

The modern quest to detect liars using technology began
with Cesare Lombroso, an Italian criminologist who in
1895 published a book called "The Criminal Man" in which
he described his efforts using an early instrument to
measure changes in blood pressure to determine whether
several criminal suspects had lied.

In 1915, Harvard psychologist William Moulton Marston
picked up on these early studies and devised a primitive lie
detector based on blood pressure. According to
psychologist and polygraph historian David Lykken, it was
Marston, a colorful P.T. Barnum-like character, who was
among the first to realize the lie detector's commercial
possibilities.

In 1938, Look magazine described how Marston sometimes
used his lie detection techniques in marital counseling. He
also showed up in full-page ads testfying to the close shave
offered by Gillette razors: "New Facts about Shaving
Revealed by Lie Detector!" (Using the pen name "Charles
Moulton," Marston would also invent the comic strip
character Wonder Woman, whose magic lasso could force
those held to tell the truth. )

But John A. Larson, a Berkeley, Calif., police officer, is the
person generally credited with inventing the modern
polygraph machine. In 1921, Larson, who eventually
became a doctor, devised an instrument that could
simultaneously record blood pressure, pulse and
respiration. Later tinkerers improved upon Larson's design
by adding sensors to measure perspiration.

Over the years scientists have tried to determine whether
the polygraph actually works. But accurate studies are hard
to do. "The science is not solid," says Aftergood, in part
because investigators can rarely learn independently
whether a subject who passed a polygraph test was indeed
telling the truth.

In some studies, volunteers are recruited to be pretend
criminals and then subjected to a lie detector test. But the
results of such work, critics argue, don't mimic reality. "It's
impossible to make the stakes as high in an experiment as
they are in real life," says Aftergood.

Still, proponents of the polygraph argue the device is
accurate in better than 90 percent of cases, and note that it's
not uncommon for other types of test results to be open to
interpretation.

"Your doctor can have you take a chest X-ray and say, 'I
don't see anything.' Then he sends it over to a radiologist
and the radiologist finds something the first doctor doesn't
see," says Webb. "Happens all the time."

But enough guilty people have slipped past the polygraph to
have given law enforcement officials pause. Most federal
and state courts do not allow polygraph results to be
entered as evidence.

CIA employee Aldrich Ames, for example, passed lie
detector tests despite selling U.S. secrets to the Russians
for more than eight years. There's also a mini-industry of
Internet sites and books such as "Deception Detection:
Winning the Polygraph Game" that purport to teach people
how to beat the test.

"College students with 15 minutes of explanation can beat
the lie detector," says David Lykken, a retired psychologist
from the University of Minnesota. "Anybody who is
working as a spy has been taught how to beat the
polygraph." The advertised techniques range from curling
one's toes to biting one's tongue during control questions to
mislead the examiner.

Still, even critics of the polygraph acknowledge that it has
led to admissions of guilt that they might not otherwise have
gotten.

"The polygraph itself functions as a prop more than anything
else," says Aftergood. "Yet, there are cases every year in
which the prop works."

By Michael Stroh
Sun Staff
Originally published Nov 3 2000


Absolutely nothing counts 'til you have the badge. Nothing!

"Captain Bob"

www.eatstress.com