Lie Detection infographic description

The infographic is titled, Thinking Critically About: Lie Detection. The learning objective question 12-5 reads, how effective are polygraphs in using body states to detect lie? A headline at the top reads, polygraphs are not actually lie detectors, but rather arousal detectors. They measure emotion-linked changes in breathing, heart rate, and perspiration. Can we use these results to detect lies?

A conversation between a patient and a doctor reads as follows.

Doctor: In the last 20 years, have you ever taken something that didn’t belong to you?

Patient: No!

Doctor: Did you ever steal anything from your previous employer?

Patient: Uh, no.

First query in the EEGE E G report shows, many people tell a little white lie in response to this control question, prompting elevated arousal readings that give the examiner a baseline for comparing responses to other questions. The second query in the EEGE E G report shows, this person shows greater arousal in response to the critical question than she did to the control question, so the examiner may infer she is lying.

A textbox below reads, but is it true that only a thief becomes nervous when denying a theft? Firstly, we have similar bodily arousal in response to anxiety, irritation, and guilt. So, is she really guilty, or just anxious? Secondly, many innocent people do get tense and nervous when accused of a bad act. (Many of those sexually assaulted, for example, have “failed” these tests because they had strong emotional reactions while telling the truth about the rapist, Lykken, 1991).

Two pie-charts below are labeled, innocent people and guilty people respectively.

The first pie-chart labeled, innocent people shows about two-third people as innocent and one-third people as guilty. The second pie-chart labeled, guilty people shows one-fourth people as innocent and three-fourth people as guilty. A corresponding text reads, about one-third of the time, polygraph test results are just wrong (Kleinmuntz & Szucko, 1984). If these polygraph experts had been the judges, more than one-third of the innocent would have been declared guilty, and nearly one-fourth of the guilty would have gone free. The C I A and other U S agencies have spent millions of dollars testing tens of thousands of employees. Yet the U S National Academy of Sciences (2002) has reported that, no spy has ever been caught [by] using the polygraph.

Text at the bottom of the infographic reads, The Concealed Information Test is more effective. Innocent people are seldom wrongly judged to be lying. Questions focus on specific crime-scene details known only to the police and the guilty person (Ben-Shakhar and Elaad, 2003; Verschuere and Meijer, 2014; Vrij and Fisher, 2016). (If a camera and computer had been stolen, for example, only a guilty person should react strongly to the brand names of the stolen items. A slow response time may also indicate a lie. It typically takes less time to tell the truth than to make up a lie, Suchotzki et al., 2017).