Polygraphs

The flip of a coin would often be just as accurate of a methodology for determining the fidelity of a subject’s testimony as a polygraph machine. I do not discount the desire to correlate certain objective parameters to the more tenuous suppositions of a witness being interrogated. This is certainly a noble pursuit, since the ultimate end of the matter is to extract the truth, or at least decipher the truth. One must ask, however, whether hooking a subject to a polygraph machine is any more humane than strapping them down for a water-boarding session. The latter supposes that the subject values their life above truth, but the former supposes that they value trivialities above truth – for example, being slightly humiliated by having anodes and cathodes attached to their skin with the idea that they can still lie with a good chance that their disingenuous statements will not be discovered. There is an alternative method for discerning the truth in certain accounts, which avoids all the hardware and trappings of wires that makes the witness look like they have been sentenced to capital punishment after all and are but a stiff jolt away from having the veil of eternity torn before them. The method to which I refer is that of tabulating the occurrence of unique words between separate accounts of the same event. This technique has a higher probability of distinguishing truths from falsehoods than rolling a die and letting even numbers correspond to truths and odd numbers correspond to lies. The reason is this: typically, a liar (I will no longer use euphemisms to denigrate a person who has not told the truth) will stick with a very prescribed storyline when giving an account that they know is false so as to avoid being caught changing their story, which is what most people presume a liar does in the first place. But we (and I say “we” because we have all been liars at one point or another) are smarter than that. We know that if we changed the story it will appear to be a lie – thus, smart liars that we are, stick to the same story. But not only that; even more, a liar will typically use almost the exact same words in each account so as to not deviate to the right or left. Interesting, that even in our lying we have a guiding principle. Thus, detecting unique words in separate accounts of the same event is like mining gems from a polygraph vault, without image of the gorgon Medusa being cast upon the subject, albeit an electrifying one. Counting unique words will, perhaps, distinguish a truth from a lie with a much higher degree of certainty than the archaic method of measuring pulse and brain activity. Still, I can’t help but think that all this detective work could be avoided if we would simply prescribe to the truth, whatever it may be.