What do Brexit and polygraphs have in common? Both are timely and controversial, and worth learning more about. In the BBC’s World at One show of January 21, 2019, Sophie van der Zee, Assistant Professor in the department of Applied Economics at Erasmus School of Economics, gives her opinion about the pitfalls of using polygraphs in a response to the news that the United Kingdom’s Home Offices proposes lie detector tests when domestic abuse offenders are released from prison, also known as polygraphs, to tackle domestic abuse.
In the UK polygraphs are already used in the management of released sex offenders, and are used by both probation and the police. It is the latest example of an increasing interest of using the polygraph in the criminal justice system. Even though polygraphs are used widely, there are still some deep concerns about using them which flow from the fact that these so cold lie detectors do not detect lies.
‘What a polygraph does is that it shows you data, and it is up to the polygraph examiner to examine this output and to make a decision. I do not know about any research in the legal domain, but there has been some interesting research looking into the vetting process when hiring people, in which very large difference were found between the conclusions that polygraph examiners drew, based on the examiner. So, it would really matter if I would have been interviewed by person A or by person B,’ says Van der Zee.
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The entire BBC World at One show can be found here. The interview with Sophie van der Zee starts around 36:40 (in English).
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