A polygraph or lie detector determines whether the person being tested has fabricated his answers. A polygraph is often used as an investigative technique, and for some fields such as law enforcement it is used for pre-employment screening. A polygraph will indicate a person's physiological changes or reactions when fabricating an answer. These reactions are recorded by the machine and will let the examiner know which question caused the stress reaction.
Perform a Polygraph Pretest
A pretest is similar to an interview and is a process in which the polygraph examiner and the examinee take an hour to get to know each other. If the purpose of the polygraph is because of an investigation, the examiner will ask about the examinee’s side of the story. The examiner will also profile the examinee while he is telling his side of the story. This will give him a better insight when performing the test. The examiner will review the questions that were specifically designed to address the issue being investigated with the examinee. The pretest is conducted before the actual polygraph test is performed.
Read More: How to Read a Polygraph Test
Ten Commonly Asked Questions
After pretesting, you can commence with performing the actual polygraph. The examiner has roughly 10 questions to ask during the polygraph. These questions will include three to four relevant questions, and the remainder are control questions. All questions are "yes" or "no" questions. Questions that ask for opinions, emotions, feelings or mindset, and hypothetical questions, are not used since the answers cannot be parsed into truthful or non-truthful categories. Below are examples of the most common questions asked during a polygraph.
- Is your name Sandy Hill? (Control question with information from pre-test)
- Are you 43 years old?
- Do you suspect anyone of selling drugs? (Relevant question from pre-test information)
- Is your cat’s name Josie?
- Were you born in 1956?
- Do you rent a house?
- Do you know who stole the drugs? (Relevant question)
- Do you live on Vine Street in Iowa? (Control question)
- Did you steal the drugs? (Relevant question)
- Is today (day of week)?
A few of those questions will be purposely misleading. Consider the question about age and the year of birth. A 43-year-old today would not have been born in 1956. These questions are included to determine both the correct and incorrect answers.
Post Test Analysis
Post test begins with the examiner analyzing the data from the responses of a physiological manner to determine deception. The examiner will be able to come to a conclusion that the examinee was being honest, deceptive or unable to determine honesty or deception, which means the test was inconclusive.