Because they get people to admit to things they wouldn’t otherwise. A polygraph test starts with the interviewer “just talking” (and those are massive, giant quotation marks there) to you for about a half hour. They slip in little statements about other, experienced officers who are currently employed despite past wrongdoings, “because they admitted” to the bad shit. Meanwhile, when you admit to bad shit, guess who’s not getting hired?
The interviewer will give you a giant list to go through, asking if you’ve done any of the hundreds of bad things, and ask you to explain any “yes” answers you give to the question of committing a crime.
So now you’re primed to confess to things, and the interviewer and agency gets to comb through those confessions to see if they don’t want to hire you. They also get to reject you if they don’t like you and blame it on you failing the ‘lie detector’ test, or the interviewer can simply say you’re lying.
spankmonkey@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Because it lets them see how people react under pressure. If people think the stress detector works, they are more likely to be honest because they are worried the people using it will think they are hiding something.it is a mechinal version of “we already know the truth, we are just asking to see if you lie to us”.
The implication of the machine often gets results even though it isn’t reliable in any way since stress is not an indication of anything specific.