ANSWERS: 6
  • When asking this question, keep in mind that lie detectors do not "detect lies", they only detect deceptive behavior. There is no 100% accurate lie detector, but a good one with someone that knows how to use it can have up to 90% accuracy. The supreme court ruled in 1998 that "There is simply no consensus that polygraph evidence is reliable". Polygraphs have also been accused of giving a lot of "false positives" (accusing someone of lying when they are telling the truth).
  • Rainey, I had to take one before I went to work for a mjor company. The tester was former Army intelligence. I beat it w/o really trying. One question was "Have you ever stolen anything in your life?" NO Everyone has taken a cookie or something.On another question he asked if i have ver been fired fro a job NO but the machine registered a lie. To this day I have never been fired from any job. They hired me anyway.
  • this really depends on the talent of the one giving the test and also about the person taking the test, but in most cases they are to accurate i would not want to take one.
  • If you think they are reliable because of certain physcial reations to the questions, then, once upon a time, there was a boy whose nose grew longer every time he told a lie.
  • They are like home pregnancy tests - they are probably right, but you need to get some scientific confirmation to be sure.
  • Nobody really knows. There have been several studies that have addressed this question, and they have resulted in answers of 61% to 93%. However, the only studies that get anywhere near the 90% mark are those that discard "inconclusive" results. Of course, many would argue an "inconclusive" test is an inaccurate result. One of the biggest problems is how do you test the accuracy of a lie detector? The theory behind the test is to detect changes in the sympathetic nervous system as a result of telling a lie. But how do you know if someone is lying or not in order to conduct a meaningful study? Moreover, a broad realiability statistic tells little about the accuracy of a test. It is generally accepted that a lie detector is far more likely to give a false positive than a false negative. Thus, even if a lie detector result is correct 93% of the time, that does NOT mean that a test resulted finding a person lied is 93% accurate.

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