NCJ Number
211801
Journal
Polygraph Volume: 34 Issue: 3 Dated: 2005 Pages: 197-209
Date Published
2005
Length
13 pages
Annotation
College students (n=120) were divided into groups distinguished as guilty of a mock crime, innocent and informed of crime details, and innocent and uninformed of crime details and then given polygraph exams with an altered form of Control Question Test (CQT).
Abstract
Ambiguous, lie-engendering control questions were altered to form clear direct questions that provided virtually no incentive to deceive. Each participant in the "guilty" condition read and performed a set of instructions that required him/her to enter a specific professors office without knocking, remove $20 out of a wallet in a jacket hanging over a chair, place the stolen money in his/her left shoe, place the wallet back into the jacket, and report back to the researcher. The dependent measures for the groups were derived through "blind" scoring of physiological recordings by comparing the relative magnitudes of responses in "control" and "crime-relevant" question pairs. This article resents the details of the examination procedure. The study found that when control questions were positioned before crime-relevant questions, most "guilty" and "innocent" participants were correctly classified. Most participants were determined to be "guilty" when crime-relevant questions were positioned before control questions. Lying on crime-relevant questions in the second position resulted in skin resistance and blood volume questions responses larger than orienting responses to initial control questions. The study hypothesized that with "crime-relevant" questions first, guilty participants and knowledgeable participants would be classed as guilty more so than innocent uninformed participants. With "crime-relevant" questions second, guilty participants were predicted to be accurately classed as guilty. These hypotheses were confirmed. 3 tables and 19 references