Fighting lies

The computer plays Sting’s hits, there is nobody behind the desk yet, but, on its opposite, there is an armchair that seems to have been designed for the PC games from science-fiction movies, where the player is connected to the virtual world through cables and threads whose use the profanes fail to understand. It is about a game, indeed, but its results do not rely on the access to the most hidden secrets of the virtual plot, but to the most hidden secrets of those who want to prove they do not lie.

The person who accompanies the people sitting in the armchair through the “game’s” levels is the owner of the first privately managed company from Romania dealing with polygraph tests, called Polygraph Test, established last August.

Adrian Mihail Coman, a psychologist, worked with the Romanian Police for 16 years and tried to prove the efficiency of the lie detector as a tool to uncover criminals. In the beginning, Coman used to fail, as the polygraph sometimes contradicted other evidence.

It gradually proved it was right even when the other evidence was not. “It was a murder case when the suspect successfully passed the lie detector test but he was sentenced to prison as other evidence was considered and after 8 years, the real suspect was found,” Coman says.

What is the difference between the lie detector test and the other evidence to be considered in a lawsuit?

“The lie detector may point to the criminal no matter how much time has passed since the crime was committed. Witnesses may forget the details, material evidence may be destroyed, but the mind of one who is guilty cannot forget it,” the psychologist says.

The lie detector resorts to the subjects’ long memory, where essential information about unusual or unique events is stored forever and the subject cannot forget them until he dies. On the opposite, the short memory stores only day-by-day events and information is quickly deleted, as it is not useful.

The polygraph’s mechanism uses the potential conflict between the truth of the stored information and the lies of the subject who intends to hide them. The contradiction between the reply given by the brain and the reply given by the subject triggers the increase of adrenaline secretion and changes of the physiological involuntary movements, from heartbeats to muscular twitches and sweat.

The variations of physiological parameters are separately monitored by the polygraph’s components and recorded on paper or in a PC document, the resulted charts are interpreted and the margin of error is calculated in the end.

Adrian Coman, a member of the American Polygraph Association, explains that some soap-operas such as “Santa Barbara” display unrealistic scenes with characters quickly changing the file with the results when the examiner leaves the room.

“The experts I talked to told me they sent an official protest against the way this film distorted the image of the polygraph. It is not amazing that one can shop online for books on how to cheat the lie detector,” Coman appreciates.