{"id":228,"date":"2018-10-29T10:07:25","date_gmt":"2018-10-29T14:07:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.katecooch.com\/blog\/?p=228"},"modified":"2018-10-29T10:09:41","modified_gmt":"2018-10-29T14:09:41","slug":"the-history-of-polygraphs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.katecooch.com\/blog\/2018\/10\/29\/the-history-of-polygraphs\/","title":{"rendered":"The History of … Polygraphs"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Recent news has brought polygraphs into the spotlight.\u00a0 What is their history?\u00a0 How effective are they?\u00a0 Let\u2019s find out.<\/p>\n

Throughout time people have tried to come up with ways to determine if someone is telling the truth.\u00a0 For example, the Hindus used a rice test.\u00a0 A person suspected of lying had to chew dried rice and spit it out onto a leaf from a sacred tree.\u00a0 If they were able to do this they were telling the truth.\u00a0 The idea was that you would have less saliva in your mouth if you were nervous about a lie.\u00a0 In medieval Europe trial by combat was a way of figuring out who was telling the truth.\u00a0 Parties in a dispute would fight out their differences.\u00a0 The person who won was considered to be in the right.<\/p>\n

Starting in the late 1800\u2019s criminologists, scientists and psychologists began working on the ideas of first measuring blood pressure to determine if someone was being truthful and then of measuring breathing.\u00a0 If blood pressure went up significantly or if breathing was more erratic a person was probably stressed out because they were lying.\u00a0 William Marston, a scientist and psychologist, worked on one of these early versions of a lie detector but he had greater success creating Wonder Woman who coincidentally had a lasso of truth.<\/p>\n

In 1921 John Larson, a medical student who worked on the side as a Berkeley, California policeman, invented what he called a polygraph (from Greek meaning \u201cmany writings\u201d because of the lines produced).\u00a0 His machine measured blood pressure, heart rate and respiration and recorded them as different lines on a piece of paper.<\/p>\n

The modern polygraph was invented in 1926 by another Berkeley police officer named Leonard Keeler who improved on Larson\u2019s design.\u00a0 He added a component that measured how well an interviewee\u2019s skin conducts electricity, i.e. are they sweating because they are uneasy about lying.<\/p>\n

Like rice and combat the modern polygraph is controversial because of differing views of its effectiveness.\u00a0 One of the most successful ways it is used is to prompt a confession before the actual test is even administered.\u00a0 If a person believes the polygraph will work they are convinced they will be caught and confess.<\/p>\n

Polygraph results from testing are not 100% accurate.\u00a0 Estimates of their effectiveness are anywhere from 70% to 90%.\u00a0 Their precision heavily depends on how good the administrator of the test is.\u00a0 As a result, early on in their use, in a case called Frye v. United States, polygraph tests were prohibited from being used in court.\u00a0 Polygraphs are currently used to test certain government employees such as those in intelligence and federal law enforcement.\u00a0 However, people can \u201cbeat\u201d a polygraph by causing themselves pain during the pre-test when the tester asks questions to get a baseline for what a lie looks like on the test paper for that individual.\u00a0 Another way to pass a polygraph is by daydreaming to calm your nerves.\u00a0 Soviet spy Aldrich Ames was able to pass repeated polygraphs when he worked for the Central Intelligence Agency.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Recent news has brought polygraphs into the spotlight.\u00a0 What is their history?\u00a0 How effective are they?\u00a0 Let\u2019s find out. Throughout time people have tried to come up with ways to determine if someone is telling the truth.\u00a0 For example, the … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[72],"tags":[74,75,73,76],"class_list":["post-228","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-law-enforcement","tag-lie-detector","tag-lying","tag-polygraph","tag-truth"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p29EPY-3G","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.katecooch.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/228","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.katecooch.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.katecooch.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.katecooch.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.katecooch.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=228"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.katecooch.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/228\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":241,"href":"http:\/\/www.katecooch.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/228\/revisions\/241"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.katecooch.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=228"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.katecooch.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=228"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.katecooch.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=228"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}