Tag: lie detectors

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The Discovery of Consciousness

A BREAKTHROUGH by a talented University of Huddersfield student has shown for the first time that people with psychopathic tendencies who have high IQs can mask their symptoms by manipulating tests designed to reveal their personalities. It raises the possibility that large numbers of ruthless risk-takers are able to conceal their level of psychopathy as they rise to key managerial posts.   University of Huddersfield Academic Journal

Wow. Shocking. So this “talented” student has discovered consciousness. This is a “breakthrough”.

I assume these tests were normally conducted by employers to evaluate employees and judge how suitable they might be for senior level positions. Managers. Leaders. Supervisors.

What Carolyn Bate did was apply these tests to a number of students. First she measured their IQs. Then she had them answer a number of questions the answers to which will help assess whether the person is capable of empathy or other normal feelings of compassion or kindness. After collecting this information, Carolyn had the subjects go through a different test utilizing Galvanic Skin Response– a lie-detector, really– to measure responses to a series of pictures which are intended to evoke feelings of empathy and compassion.

Carolyn found that the GSR responses among her participants were much as she would have predicted – except for the fact that it was only those with lower levels of intelligence who displayed the expected levels of excitement.

In other words, smart people were able to fool the lie-detector. I mean, the Galvanic Skin Response machine. They were able to fake the right emotional responses.

Like Generals and politicians and hedge-fund managers and brokers and bankers and investors and General Motors executives and arms manufacturers and football players and so on and on and on.

This kind of muddies the issue. Do organizations use the Galvanic Skin Response machine to test their employees?

Can it be that most psychology students, until now, have assumed that people filling out their questionnaires simply responded to their queries with uninhibited instinctive honesty?

Oh woeful day! Now they will have to go back over all of their studies and begin to account for the fact that people might have understood what those questions were about and how their responses might be interpreted and whether or not they like those interpretations and whether or not they really like the feeling of revealing their true thoughts to a stranger, even if it’s all supposed to be anonymous and private.

But Carolyn misses the biggest point of all: how many corporations would not, in fact, leap at the chance to hire a true psycho who was capable of concealing his complete lack of empathy for customers, investors, civilians, and reporters?

Is “Huddersfield” a real name?

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Tyranny

The Bush administration has been diligently addressing some very important issues. Recently, articles in the Washington Post and the New York Times showed that the government was holding detainees illegally in foreign countries where they are tortured for information, and that the government was eavesdropping on telephone conversations without a warrant.

In a right-side up world, the government would now be arresting and charging those responsible for these criminal acts. If they were authorized by officials in the White House, they would have resigned and would be facing indictments. If the President himself authorized them, he would be facing impeachment.

Not this government. This government is arresting and charging those who told you that your government is breaking the law and that it is spying on you and torturing people.

It is totally weird that the mainstream press, and the Democrats, are not screaming bloody murder. The Bush administration has undertaken activities that are literally stunning in the depth and breadth of their violations of human rights and democratic principles. But, in a world that could only have been envisioned by Josef Goebbels

In my darker moments, the only conclusion I can draw is that all those flag-waving, patriotic, gun-toting Americans who sit there idly watching TV and not caring about these actions do not deserve democracy. In fact, they are no longer entitled to democracy. You have approved and accepted and embraced tyranny. Your government showed you a bogey man and said “boo” and you cried and wet your pants and said, please, oh please, stop them, I’ll let you do anything, I surrender all of my rights. It was that easy.

I never would have believed it. I grew up watching the Watergate scandal unfold, convinced that when Americans become aware of malfeasance by their own government, they react with disgust, they tell the pollsters that the government has no support, which empowers the loyal opposition — who are presently themselves timorously cowering in the corner–to take decisive action. Sadly, I believe that most Americans don’t care about Bush’s dictatorial powers because the word “terrorist” has become, in his mind, synonymous with “Arabic”.

On Mary O. McCarthy.

If Mary O. McCarthy really is guilty of leaking information about the CIA’s illegal activities to the press, I hope some organization with guts announces that she will given a real “Medal of Freedom”.  She is someone who has made a genuine sacrifice on behalf of democracy and civil liberties.

Did you know:

CIA employees are all required to take a “lie detector test” every five years.

The world is indeed very topsy turvey.  Lie detectors don’t work.  They never have and they probably never will.  Doesn’t matter.  Porter Gross over at the CIA looks like a fine hunter of leakers.  That’s all that matters.  His bosses think he’s a bloodhound.   I cannot believe though that not a single CIA employee has yet taken his or her employer to court over the issue.  I repeat– check this with objective analysts if you doubt me– the polygraph does not work.  It never has.  It probably never will.  There is a good reason why results from a polygraph are not admissible in court.  And anybody under suspicion of anything who would agree to take a polygraph is a fool.

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Lie Detectors Lie

If I had a dime for every time I’ve heard some prosecutor or detective or lawyer tell us that someone is a suspect for a particular crime because he failed a lie detector test, I’d be rich.

But the truth is, according to a panel appointed by National Research Council, a branch of the National Academy of Sciences, lie detector tests are worthless. Actually, it’s worse than that. They are worse than worthless.

Just how useless are they? If you took a sample company or organization of 10,000 employees, of which 10 were spies or saboteurs, and you required every one of the them to take a lie-detector test, you would have 1,606 suspects.

That narrows it down considerably.

Two of the 10 spies will have escaped detection completely. There is no way to distinguish the 8 remaining genuine spies from the 1,598 innocent employees. Among the 2 would be the infamous mole Aldrich Ames who passed twice.

This study did not take into account the fact that when evil corporations or governments realize that all employees are being screened with a polygraph, they can actually do their own screening and train their spies to pass the polygraph.

The “lie detector”, of course, doesn’t actually detect lies. It records various bodily functions like respiration, blood pressure, and sweating. The “expert” polygraph administrator (like an “expert” witch doctor) calibrates the responses by comparing the results to those obtained from known factual truths.

As any amateur would guess, it is quite possible for a nervous, upset, or annoyed employee to “fail” the test simply because he is nervous, upset, or annoyed, as I would be if my employer demanded that I participate in this exercise of quackery.

There is no such thing as a lie detector. Polygraph examinations don’t work. Forget about it.

In Fort Jackson, N.C., your Department of Defense has a “Polygraph Institute”, where expensive and useless research is conducted into this joke.

I’ll bet you’d be really upset if those dollars ended up going to welfare mothers instead. The army would probably argue that some day the lie detector might work. As might the welfare mother, but I think her odds are better.

I believe the police understand that lie-detectors don’t work. They certainly know that you can’t use the results of a lie-detector test in court. So why do it? It seems obvious: to intimidate suspects. It is not all that unusual in cases of wrongful convictions to find that the police actually told the suspect that he might as well come clean because the lie-detector showed that he was lying.

It also seems likely that some suspects will be spooked enough by the process to simply confess.

And we also know that some suspects will actually believe the lie-detector over their own memory. They will actually make a false confession.

2011-06-06