For those of you who may not read through the studies here are some excerpts from the conclusion of the National Academy of Sciences report entitled:
The Polygraph and Lie Detection (2003)
Board on Behavioral, Cognitive, and Sensory Sciences and Education (BCSSE)
Committee on National Statistics (CNSTAT)
8
Conclusions and Recommendations
We have reviewed the scientific evidence on the polygraph with the goal of assessing its validity for security uses, especially those involving the screening of substantial numbers of government employees. Overall, the evidence is scanty and scientifically weak. Our conclusions are necessarily based on the far from satisfactory body of evidence on polygraph accuracy, as well as basic knowledge about the physiological responses the polygraph measures. We separately present our conclusions about scientific knowledge on the validity of polygraph and other techniques of detecting deception, about policy for employee security screening in the context of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) laboratories, and about the future of detection and deterrence of deception, including a recommendation for research.
SCIENTIFIC KNOWLEDGE
Basic Science
Polygraph Accuracy 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 physiological responses measured by the polygraph are not uniquely related to deception. That is, the responses measured by the polygraph do not all reflect a single underlying process: a variety of psychological and physiological processes, including some that can be consciously controlled, can affect polygraph measures and test results. Moreover, most polygraph testing procedures allow for uncontrolled variation in test administration (e.g., creation of the emotional climate, selecting questions) that can be expected to result in variations in accuracy and that limit the level of accuracy that can be consistently achieved.
Theoretical Basis The theoretical rationale for the polygraph is quite weak, especially in terms of differential fear, arousal, or other emotional states that are triggered in response to relevant or comparison questions. We have not found any serious effort at construct validation of polygraph testing.
Research Progress Research on the polygraph has not progressed over time in the manner of a typical scientific field. It has not accumulated knowledge or strengthened its scientific underpinnings in any significant manner. Polygraph research has proceeded in relative isolation from related fields of basic science and has benefited little from conceptual, theoretical, and technological advances in those fields that are relevant to the psychophysiological detection of deception.
Future Potential The inherent ambiguity of the physiological measures used in the polygraph suggest that further investments in improving polygraph technique and interpretation will bring only modest improvements in accuracy.
These are the people who created this report:
Appendix L
Biographical Sketches of Committee Members and Staff
STEPHEN E. FIENBERG (chair) is Maurice Falk university professor of statistics and social science, in the Department of Statistics and the Center for Automated Learning and Discovery at Carnegie Mellon University. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and currently serves on the advisory committee of the National Research Council’s Division of Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education. He is a past chair of the Committee on National Statistics and has served on several of its panels. He has published extensively on statistical methods for the analysis of categorical data and methods for disclosure limitation. His research interests include the use of statistics in public policy and the law, surveys and experiments, and the role of statistical methods in censustaking.
JAMES J. BLASCOVICH is professor and chair of psychology and codirector of the Research Center for Virtual Environments and Behavior at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is president-elect of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology (Division 8 of the American Psychological Association). His research interests include the psychophysiology and social psychophysiology of motivation and emotion, stigma and prejudice, and social influence processes in immersive virtual environments.
* JOHN T. CACIOPPO is the Tiffany and Margaret Blake distinguished service professor at the University of Chicago. He has pioneered the field of social neuroscience and cofounded the Institute for Mind and Biology to support multilevel integrative analyses of social behavior. His current research focuses on the mechanisms underlying affect and emotion and the cognitive and neural substrates of racial prejudice.
RICHARD J. DAVIDSON is the William James and Vilas Research professor of psychology and psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he directs the W.M. Keck Laboratory for Functional Brain Imaging and Behavior. His research is focused on the neural substrates of emotion and disorders of emotion, and he is an expert on the use of psychophysiological and brain imaging measures to study emotion.
PAUL EKMAN is professor of psychology at the University of California, San Francisco. His areas of expertise are deception and demeanor and emotional expression. He is the author or editor of 13 books and has been the recipient of a Senior Scientist Award (Career Award) from the National Institute for Mental Health. He received the American Psychological Association’s highest award for basic research, the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award, a Doctor of Humane Letters from the University of Chicago, and was named William James Fellow by the American Psychological Society.
DAVID L. FAIGMAN is a professor of law at the University of California, Hastings College of the Law. He received both his M.A. (psychology) and J.D. degrees from the University of Virginia. He writes extensively on the law’s use of science and constitutional law. His books include Legal Alchemy: The Use and Misuse of Science in the Law, and he is a coauthor of the four-volume treatise, Modern Scientific Evidence: The Law and Science of Expert Testimony. The treatise has been cited widely by courts, including several times by the U.S. Supreme Court. He lectures regularly to state and federal judges on issues concerning science and the law.
PATRICIA L. GRAMBSCH is associate professor of biostatistics in the School of Public Health, University of Minnesota. Her research expertise includes stochastic processes and mathematical modeling, with emphasis on time-to-event data. Her clinical collaborations involve clinical trials for chronic disease treatments and preventions. She is a fellow of the American Statistical Association.
PETER B. IMREY is a staff member of the Department of Biostatistics and Epidemiology, Cleveland Clinic Foundation, having previously been a professor in the Departments of Statistics and Medical Information Sciences, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research includes statistical methods for categorical data analysis and epidemiologic studies, and he is active in extensive collaboration in design and analysis of biomedical and public health investigations. He is chair of the Statistics Section, American Public Health Association (APHA). He has previously served on the governing councils of APHA and the International Biometric Society and chaired the American Statistical Association’s Biometrics Section and Section on Teaching Statistics in the Health Sciences.
EMMETT B. KEELER is a senior mathematician at RAND in Santa Monica, California. He teaches policy analysis methods as a professor in the RAND Graduate School and an adjunct professor in the Public Health School, University of California, Los Angeles. His research has dealt with the theoretical and empirical effects of financing arrangements on health care utilization, quality, and outcomes. His current research deals with evaluating attempts to improve the quality of care and developing a business case for providing higher quality care.
KATHRYN B. LASKEY is an associate professor of systems engineering at George Mason University. She was previously a principal scientist at Decision Science Consortium, Inc. Her primary research interest is the study of decision, theoretically based knowledge representation, and inference strategies for automated reasoning under uncertainty. She has worked on methods for knowledge-based construction of problem-specific Bayesian belief networks, specifying Bayesian belief networks from a combination of expert knowledge and observations, and for recognizing when a system’s current problem model is inadequate. She has worked with domain experts to develop Bayesian belief network models for a variety of decision and inference support problem areas. She received a joint Ph.D. in statistics and public affairs from Carnegie Mellon University, an M.S. in mathematics from the University of Michigan, and a B.S. in mathematics from the University of Pittsburgh.
SUSAN R. McCUTCHEN has been on staff at The National Academies for over 20 years and worked in several Academy divisions and with many different boards, committees, and panels in those units. The studies in which she has participated have covered a broad range of subjects, including international affairs, technology transfer, aeronautics, natural disasters, education, needle exchange, and human factors. She has assisted in the production of a large number of Academy publications. A French major, with minors in English, Italian, and Spanish, her B.A. degree is from Ohio’s Miami University, and her M.A. degree from Kent State University.
KEVIN R. MURPHY is a professor of psychology at Pennsylvania State University. His research areas include performance evaluation, psychological measurement, research methods, and honesty in the workplace. He serves as editor of the Journal of Applied Psychology, and he has consulted extensively with the Armed Forces and with private industry on the design and evaluation of personnel selection and appraisal systems.
MARCUS E. RAICHLE is professor and codirector of the Division of Radiological Sciences, Mallinckrodt Institute of Radiology, Washington University School of Medicine, St. Louis. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the Institute of Medicine, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Focusing on research on the functioning of the human brain, his work has been widely published in leading scientific journals. Dr. Raichle is also a member of the Society for Neuroscience, the American Neurological Association, the American Academy of Neurology, and the International Society on Cerebral Blood Flow and Metabolism.
RICHARD M. SHIFFRIN is Luther Dana Waterman research professor, distinguished professor, and director of the Cognitive Science Program, Indiana University. A recent winner of the Rumelhart Prize and member of the National Academy of Sciences (in which capacity he has been involved in many NRC and NAS activities), he constructs and tests models of cognition, especially memory, perception, attention, and decision making. Much of his research involves the extraction of signal from noise, in both perception and memory.
ALEKSANDRA SLAVKOVIC (consultant) is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Statistics at Carnegie Mellon University. She holds a B.A. (honors) in psychology from Duquesne University and an M.S. in human-computer interaction from the School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University. Past and current research interests include usability evaluation methods, human performance in virtual environments, statistical data mining, and statistical approaches to confidentiality and data disclosure.
PAUL C. STERN (study director) also serves as study director of the Committee on the Human Dimensions of Global Change. His research interests include the determinants of environmentally significant behavior, particularly at the individual level, and participatory processes for informing environmental decision making. His recent books include Environmental Problems and Human Behavior, 2nd ed. (with G.T. Gardner, Pearson, 2002), Evaluating Social Science Research, 2nd ed. (with L. Kalof, Oxford University Press, 1996); Understanding Risk: Informing Decisions in a Democratic Society (edited with H.V. Fineberg, National Academy Press, 1996), International Conflict Resolution after the Cold War (edited with D. Druckman, National Academy Press, 2000), and The Drama of the Commons (edited with E. Ostrom, T. Dietz, N. Dolsak, S. Stonich, and E.U. Weber, National Academy Press, 2002). He received his B.A. degree from Amherst College and his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Clark University.
JOHN A. SWETS is chief scientist emeritus at BBN Technologies in Cambridge, Massachusetts, lecturer on health care policy at Harvard Medical School, and senior research associate at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences (immediate past chair of the psychology section) and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was a member and chair of the Commission of Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education of the NRC, and he is now a member of the NRC’s Board on Behavioral, Cognitive, and Sensory Sciences. Other NRC activities include chairs of committees to design an international fire-alarm signal and to evaluate techniques for the enhancement of human performance, and recently served on two committees of the Institute of Medicine. His research emphasis has been on the development of signal detection theory for sensory and cognitive functions and on the theory’s application to the diagnostic process in several practical fields.
