Re:Attempts to Censor AntiPolygraph.org
by ap_org on Saturday June 29, 2019 @06:39AM
(#20311839)
Polygraphs measure heart rate, breathing, and palmar sweating, which are affected by nervousness, but are not systematically correlated with lying. Voice stress analyzers don't actually measure stress in the voice.
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Even worse than that, there are in fact plenty of people who will systematically fail to show nervousness when lying, or more generally in socially-stressful situations, viz. psychopaths (in a broad sense, including Dark Triad traits more generally). As it happens, their lies are incredibly easy to detect for other reasons (basically, they never keep their stories straight, especially since they like to embellish them with all sorts of fanciful details), but still, it's hard to imagine a more catastrophic failure of this whole "lie detectors as infallible" paradigm.