You said no — the lie detector determined that was a lie — or was it?
Watching The Maury Povich Show is definitely a guilty pleasure of mine. It’s like a train wreck — it’s so awful but you just can’t look away… A common segment on the show involves a couple: partner A believes that partner B is cheating on them while partner B denies ever even having the thought of doing such a thing to the love of his/her life. More often than not, when Maury reaches out of the envelope and reads the lie detector results aloud to the couple and the audience, partner B did in fact cheat on partner A. Even after these results are revealed, partner B will sometimes still deny having cheated, claiming the test is wrong.
The test administer stands by his results, saying that they are wholly accurate, but are they really? Can partner B be telling the truth though the polygraph says otherwise?
Many studies have indeed shown that polygraph tests are ineffective and inaccurate, as they fail to differentiate between anxiety and lies. Even the Supreme Court of Canada dismisses the results from polygraph tests as evidence in court.
Is there something better that we can use?
Well, there are many visible, but unconscious, tells when someone is fibbing: they tend to touch their noses and faces a lot, they cover their mouths, they try to take up as little space as possible, and their emotions are limited to the mouth (someone who is faking a smile will only move their lips, without engaging their eyes) to name a few. A liar’s eyes may dart about and you can even tell whether they are making up a story or recounting a true event depending on where they focus their eyes.
It may be worthwhile to develop some kind of checklist or scoring card where people trained in deciphering lies from body language can keep track of the suspect’s movements by watching a taping of a structured interview. Perhaps a better lie detector test can be made by incorporating these automatic habits that we engage in when we lie.
Though the validity of these markers of deception is not fully clear, it may be worth while to look into. Maybe partner B really didn’t cheat on partner A… But they probably did.
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