The Polygraph Divide: What Was Once Known as Lie Detector Tests Have Been Widely Discredited. So Why Do So Many People Pretend Otherwise?
Like many people, I find escape from the drudgery of everyday by listening to podcasts about people who have been killed in colorful, unusual and surprising ways and the monsters who killed them.
I’m not entirely sure why that is. What my eight year old son Declan calls my “murder shows” appeal to the seedy voyeur in degenerates who takes unseemly pleasure in exploring all of the awfulness, ugliness and brutality this sick, sad world has to offer.
I don’t just listen to one murder podcast: I listen to them all, with the prominent exception of one I am not going to mention on account of its host being unhealthily obsessed with me.
It’s one of the biggies and there is something SERIOUSLY wrong with the host in question.
The only Lie Detector Test I trust is the one endorsed by Henry Rollins AND his Band that yells “You’re a Liar!” whenever you speak an untruth.
True crime podcasts tend to follow a familiar template. They generally have the same beats and structures. One of these beats involves a suspect being asked to take a polygraph, or lie detector test.
“The belief underpinning the use of the polygraph is that deceptive answers will produce physiological responses that can be differentiated from those associated with non-deceptive answers; however, there are no specific physiological reactions associated with lying, making it difficult to identify factors that separate those who are lying from those who are telling the truth” explains a uniquely useful sentence on Wikipedia.
We might like to think that if someone is lying their heartbeat will increase and they’ll begin sweating profusely. That seems intuitive. After all, unless we’re sociopaths or particularly skillful liars the act of lying probably makes us nervous because we feel guilty and are worried about being found out.
It consequently seems to make sense that by measuring the physiological responses of someone we can ascertain their level of truthfulness. But that just isn’t the case. As Wikipedia asserts, “there are no specific physiological reactions associated with lying."
In my mind at least polygraphs have been thoroughly discredited. It feels like bogus pseudoscience. A lot of the true crime podcasts that I listen to treat polygraphs as fundamentally worthless.
Alternately they posit that polygraphs are effective only in the sense that if someone refuses to take one it is seen as a sign of guilt because if they had nothing to hide or no crimes to cover up they wouldn’t have a problem answering any and all questions while hooked up to a gizmo seemingly slightly more useful and valid than L. Ron Hubbard’s beloved e-meters.
In that respect these tools only have the power that we give them.
It no longer makes sense to call polygraphs lie detector tests because study after study has illustrated that they’re pretty much useless when it comes to detecting lies.
Yet a lot of the true crime podcasts that I listen to DO treat polygraphs as useful, valid and legitimate (Dateline, cough, cough). They treat failing a polygraph or refusing to take one as signs of guilt and volunteering to take a polygraph and/or passing one as signs of innocence.
I suspect it might be a generational thing. Older generations grew up seeing polygraphs as magical machines that can conclusively determine whether someone is lying or not.
When you hold that belief for decades it can be hard to let go of it despite clear-cut evidence to the contrary.
There are also plenty of folks with vested interests in polygraphs being seen as useful tools instead of instruments of flimflammery.
The folks selling polygraphs obviously do not want their products to be seen as meaningless and that is two billion dollar a year industry.
Police officers also have a vested interest in people thinking that polygraphs are legitimate because it can be used as damning evidence of guilt.
Younger podcasters are more likely to call bullshit on polygraphs because they grew up in a culture where they have been widely debunked, although not everyone seems to have gotten the memo.
Polygraphs are so innately flawed that they’re not performed in many countries outside the United States but one of our many annoying national qualities is a stubborn reluctance to concede when we’re wrong even in the face of overwhelming evidence.
Will we ever give up polygraphs or will we continue to pretend that there’s a fantastical contraption capable of determining truth or fiction? I suspect we will eventually give up on polygraphs on account of their proven uselessness but it will take some time and some doing. After all, there are two billion reasons to keep the grift going, and I have discovered that in capitalism people REALLY love making money, even if it’s for something that has been proven wrong over and over again.
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