By now you have all heard and read about the accusations levelled against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh by Christine Blasey Ford, a psychology professor at Palo Alto University. But one detail deserves special attention. It seems Mrs. Blasey “passed a polygraph test”, which was, according to her attorney, consistent with believing the incident to be true.
I want to pause for a moment here to make this general point: the “polygraph test” is pseudoscientific nonsense, easy to manipulate, and it has no place in the public life of a decent nation.
Rank Pseudoscience
The very basis of the polygraph test is wrong—there are no reliable physiological trends that indicate people are lying. Responses vary immensely from person to person, depend on variables such as how much sleep a person received, what they ate that morning, their general level of emotional well-being, and many others. The whole basis of the polygraph is wrong, turning the test into highly deceptive pseudoscience. The test is an excuse to put people through a high-stress interrogation.
The polygraph administrator is an interrogator by another name. It is the interrogator that matters, not the machine. A sufficiently sympathetic interrogator will always pass you, while a sufficiently hostile interrogator will always fail you. And when the interrogator behind the machine is trying to be unbiased, he’s relying on pseudoscience colored by his own biases. That is no way to run a railroad, or a Federal government.
Discriminatory Nonsense
In addition to being nonsense, the polygraph system discriminates against two groups of people—the anxious and those with overly picky consciences. Anxious people tend to look guilty to interrogators, including those hiding behind the polygraph; those suffering through anxiety suffer discrimination in employment too. Those with picky consciences tend to be uncomfortable during interrogations, failing the arbitrary parameters of the test. So, if you are a nervous wreck who obsess over your failings, not only are you probably miserable, but you’ll suffer discrimination based on nonsense too.
The polygraph also discriminates in favor of one kind of people that do not show signs of deception and can charm strangers—psychopaths. Organizations that use the polygraph as a tool of hiring or advancement are letting through the kind of people you’d lest want in your ranks, those with little loyalty or a drive for cooperation. Hard to imagine a worse incentive system.
The polygraph has no place in public life. It is a tool that was wrong from the beginning, continues to be wrong now, and creates a system of perverse incentives, in which the innocent get caught and the predatory advance. We would be better off appointing Federal Astrologers. Astrology is merely arbitrary, which is a considerable advance over the polygraph.
