As far as I know, there is nothing wrong with Backster's mental faculties. I listened to a five-minute excerpt from his interview with Art Bell, and he seemed quite lucid.
While Backster appears to sincerely believe what he says about plant "perception," it also seems that his plant experiments were poorly designed, which would help to explain why no one else has been able to reproduce his findings.
The guy who was on the Art Bell show is Cleve Backster, a living legend in the polygraph community. He is the "father" of the CIA's polyraph program (c. 1948), and he later (c. 1960) came up with the concept of numerical scoring of polygraph charts, which made it possible for different polygraphers to generally reach the same conclusions in scoring polygraph charts.
He attached only the finger electrodes of the polygraph instrument to plants. For more on his ideas about plants (no one has been reproduce his results in the laboratory), see Backster's other website, PrimaryPerception.com.
False positive rates(along with overall positive rates) in pre-employment screening situations will vary depending on the agency. The FBI, for example, has an overall polygraph failure rate of about 50%. There is no way of knowing for sure what percentage of those are false positives, but it seems likely that many are. Before 9/11, the FBI's overall pre-employment polygraph failure rate was only about 20%. Did a flood of liars suddenly start applying for the FBI? I don't think so...
Other agencies that administer lifestlye polygraph examinations, such as the CIA and NSA, do not make their polygraph failure rates public, though I suspect that they are somewhat lower than the FBI's.
In the Department of Defense (which uses a counterintelligence-scope polygraph), virtually everyone passes: the only ones who "fail" seem to be those who make what DoD terms "substantive admissions."
For information on what you might expect during your polygraph examination, and tips on how you might protect yourself against the risk of a false positive outcome, see Chapters 3 & 4 of The Lie Behind the Lie Detector (1 mb PDF).
One of the spies I pointed out to Dr. Rovner is Ana Belen Montes, who got a job with DIA at a time when she was already a Cuban agent. She passed her polygraph. The one that's supposed to tell whether or not you're a spy...
The truth about polygraph matters (to Americans, at least) because, despite the recommendations of the National Academy of Sciences, the U.S. Government continues to rely heavily on the polygraph for purposes of national security and public safety.
When advocates of the polygraph make such dubious claims regarding polygraphy as Dr. Rovner did, I think it is important that they not go unchallenged.
And the claim that "almost no human being can beat a polygraph test" is flatly contradicted by the research to which I referred in the linked public challenge, wherein some 50% of polygraph subjects were able to fool the lie detector after receiving a maximum of 30 minutes of instruction...
Right, even a test that is accurate 96% of the time is going to produce many more false positives than true positives when the base rate is low.
But while Dr. Rovner asserts that he is "confident that polygraph tests have a 96% accuracy rate when done properly," the scientific community has no such confidence in polygraphy. The National Academy of Sciences recently published a report titled The Polygraph and Lie Detection that concluded that the theoretical basis for polygraphy is quite weak and that that almost a century of research provides little basis for the expectation that the polygraph could have an extremely high rate of accuracy.
TheMidget is correct about the purpose of the so-called "control" questions in a polygraph examination. However, it should be noted that the standby technique used by the NSA for screening applicants is the Relevant/Irrelevant (R/I) test. They've been using it since the 1950s when the first NSA polygraphers were trained at the Keeler Polygraph Institute in Chicago.
In the R/I technique, the examinee is asked a series of relevant questions (Did anyone direct you to seek employment with this agency?) mixed with irrelevant ones (Is your name _________________?). The polygraph operator asks the question series several times in different orders. If the examinee shows consistent, specific, and significant reactions to a particular relevant question each time it is asked, no matter the order in which it is asked, deception is inferred and the subject will be interrogated in an attempt to extract a confession/admission.
Polygraph "testing" has a lot to do with bureaucratic CYA. It's certainly not effective at catching spies. Aldrich Ames, Karl Koecher, Ana Belen Montes, and Larry Wu-tai Chin are some of the known spies who beat the polygraph.
If you're interested in the polygraph issue, stop by AntiPolygraph.org, where we've assembled a growing library of information on this state-sponsored quackery.
The polygraph (lie detector) was invented in the U.S. and uncritical reporting about it in the media helped to popularize it. The U.S. Government was a fairly early adopter of this pseudoscience, and almost all federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies rely on the polygraph to screen their own employees. Although the U.S. National Academy of Sciences has recently found polygraph screening to be completely invalid (and even a danger to national security), abandoning the polygraph now would mean many bureaucrats having to admit having made a mistake -- something they are loathe to do.
The part about the chickens is tongue-in-cheek
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Interviewing with the NSA
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· Score: 2, Informative
The author alludes to the part about the chickens being a joke.
Anyone can beat a polygraph test. You don't need to be of a certain personality type. Once you understand the trickery behind the "test," it becomes a relatively simple matter to manipulate the outcome. See AntiPolygraph.org's free e-book, The Lie Behind the Lie Detector (1 mb PDF) for a full run-down.
Your experience of telling the truth but being branded as a liar by the polygraph is one that has been shared by many. See, for example, the public statements by polygraph victims here:
(If you'd like to submit such a statement of your own, contact info@antipolygraph.org.)
Re:This is a repost that needs to be said....
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Interviewing with the NSA
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· Score: 5, Informative
You're right. Polygraph "testing" is a pseudoscientific fraud that is in the same league as phrenology and graphology. You'll find a thorough debunking of it on the website AntiPolygraph.org.
Slashdot Mirror
While Backster appears to sincerely believe what he says about plant "perception," it also seems that his plant experiments were poorly designed, which would help to explain why no one else has been able to reproduce his findings.
He attached only the finger electrodes of the polygraph instrument to plants. For more on his ideas about plants (no one has been reproduce his results in the laboratory), see Backster's other website, PrimaryPerception.com.
Other agencies that administer lifestlye polygraph examinations, such as the CIA and NSA, do not make their polygraph failure rates public, though I suspect that they are somewhat lower than the FBI's.
In the Department of Defense (which uses a counterintelligence-scope polygraph), virtually everyone passes: the only ones who "fail" seem to be those who make what DoD terms "substantive admissions."
For information on what you might expect during your polygraph examination, and tips on how you might protect yourself against the risk of a false positive outcome, see Chapters 3 & 4 of The Lie Behind the Lie Detector (1 mb PDF).
One of the spies I pointed out to Dr. Rovner is Ana Belen Montes, who got a job with DIA at a time when she was already a Cuban agent. She passed her polygraph. The one that's supposed to tell whether or not you're a spy...
When advocates of the polygraph make such dubious claims regarding polygraphy as Dr. Rovner did, I think it is important that they not go unchallenged.
And the claim that "almost no human being can beat a polygraph test" is flatly contradicted by the research to which I referred in the linked public challenge, wherein some 50% of polygraph subjects were able to fool the lie detector after receiving a maximum of 30 minutes of instruction...
But while Dr. Rovner asserts that he is "confident that polygraph tests have a 96% accuracy rate when done properly," the scientific community has no such confidence in polygraphy. The National Academy of Sciences recently published a report titled The Polygraph and Lie Detection that concluded that the theoretical basis for polygraphy is quite weak and that that almost a century of research provides little basis for the expectation that the polygraph could have an extremely high rate of accuracy.
Since it was Dr. Rovner's press release, I presume that it is he who selected the title, "Polygraph Unbeatable, Says California Psychologist."
In the R/I technique, the examinee is asked a series of relevant questions (Did anyone direct you to seek employment with this agency?) mixed with irrelevant ones (Is your name _________________?). The polygraph operator asks the question series several times in different orders. If the examinee shows consistent, specific, and significant reactions to a particular relevant question each time it is asked, no matter the order in which it is asked, deception is inferred and the subject will be interrogated in an attempt to extract a confession/admission.
This technique has no scientific basis whatsoever, however. For further reading, see Chapter 3 of The Lie Behind the Lie Detector, available free from AntiPolygraph.org.
If you're interested in the polygraph issue, stop by AntiPolygraph.org, where we've assembled a growing library of information on this state-sponsored quackery.
The PDF was not produced by the author. Steven Aftergood runs the Federation of American Scientists' government secrecy project.
The polygraph (lie detector) was invented in the U.S. and uncritical reporting about it in the media helped to popularize it. The U.S. Government was a fairly early adopter of this pseudoscience, and almost all federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies rely on the polygraph to screen their own employees. Although the U.S. National Academy of Sciences has recently found polygraph screening to be completely invalid (and even a danger to national security), abandoning the polygraph now would mean many bureaucrats having to admit having made a mistake -- something they are loathe to do.
The author alludes to the part about the chickens being a joke.
Anyone can beat a polygraph test. You don't need to be of a certain personality type. Once you understand the trickery behind the "test," it becomes a relatively simple matter to manipulate the outcome. See AntiPolygraph.org's free e-book, The Lie Behind the Lie Detector (1 mb PDF) for a full run-down.
http://antipolygraph.org/statements.shtml
(If you'd like to submit such a statement of your own, contact info@antipolygraph.org.)
You're right. Polygraph "testing" is a pseudoscientific fraud that is in the same league as phrenology and graphology. You'll find a thorough debunking of it on the website AntiPolygraph.org.