How To Beat A Lie Detector | Random Thursday

[Music] what's the biggest lie you've ever told be honest my biggest lie is probably the name of this channel because I haven't answered a question on here in years lying is something we all do it's kind of an endemic quality that all humans seem to have in fact lying is so prevalent that telling the truth is often shocking to people as Oscar Wilde once said if you want to tell someone the truth do it with humor or they'll kill you I mean remember when Hannibal Buress did jokes about Bill Cosby being a rapist and everybody was shocked and appalled by it and then yeah of course some lives are worse than others you know padding your resume is one thing but lying to get away with killing someone it's more frowned upon so you know a device that can tell if somebody is lying sounds like a pretty great idea too bad lie detectors are total the lie detector or polygraph test was invented by a police officer named John Larson in 1921 in Berkeley California and ironically the original purpose of the polygraph wasn't to convict criminals it was actually to keep cops honest the head of the Berkeley Police Department was a guy named August Ballmer and he was actually kind of a national figure at the time leading a police reform movement and he saw a lie detectors as a more scientific approach to interrogation that would help prevent abuses of power by cops at the time the third degree was a tactic that was prevalent amongst police officers which involved basically intimidating suspects into confessing or sometimes just outright physical violence luckily cops have gotten a lot less than violence since then comments-section overload comments-section over there the polygraph was based on the systolic blood pressure test that had just been invented by William Moulton Marston who actually went on later to become a comic-book writer for Wonder Woman Wonder Woman who famously had a weapon called the lasso of truth connection the idea behind the polygraph is that when you lie it creates sort of a subconscious in congruence that shows up in the physiology of your body things like systolic heartbeat breathing rate perspiration rate blood pressure so instead of beating a confession out of people their bodies can do the confessing for them pretty great idea except that's a terrible idea because as it turns out if you're being interrogated for a crime that could put you in jail for the rest of your life or give you the death penalty whether you did that crime or not you're gonna be a little nervous about it and those heightened emotions are just straight-up gonna throw everything out of whack there's just there's just no way around it and polygraph tests were challenged in court almost immediately leading to the Supreme Court case of Frey versus the United States in 1923 where they kind of punted by saying this scientific evidence like that obtained through the polygraph should only be admissible if it was sufficiently established to have gained general acceptance in the scientific community and in the case of polygraph that scientific acceptance never quite came although it did have its supporters over the years like Leonard Keeler who established the first forensics lab in 1930 which kind of became the model that the FBI was based off of later on so this led some legitimacy to it in the criminal justice community that was never quite matched by the acceptance in the scientific community but the tide really turned in 2003 when Gary Ridgway confessed of being the Green River Killer who killed 49 people in the 80s and 90s he was actually brought in as a suspect way back in 1987 and he was given a polygraph test then which he passed with flying colors the police felt like this exonerated him so he shook their hands walked out the front door and went on to kill another dozen or so people as if that wasn't bad enough another man named Melvin Foster actually failed a lie-detector test in 1982 and made national headlines as a possible suspect as the Green River Killer ruined his name ruined his reputation he had his property search stuff taken from him the whole works and apparently he became a suspect because he came to the police wanting to help them to catch the Green River Killer in part of their psychological profile of the Green River Killer was that they thought he would be interested in police work so Melvin immediately became a suspect so may imagine you're just trying to be helpful and the next thing you know you're hooked up to a machine with cops grilling you about you being the worst serial killer in history yeah it's no wonder he failed it but you might be asking how come he failed it when Gary Ridgway passed with no problem well that's because Gary Ridgway is a psychopath and Psychopaths don't have empathy that's kind of what makes them Psychopaths so they feel no remorse for their crimes they're also usually compulsive liars which means they don't even often know the difference between the truth and a lie anymore so ironically the more psychotic you are the more likely you are to pass a lie-detector test therefore the best way to be in a polygraph test is to be a psychopath the end but let's just say you daggum aren't a psychopath and you still need to beat a lie-detector test what do what helps to know the techniques that interrogators use with lie-detector tests so let's just kind of go through that real quick first they ask what are called baseline questions these are questions that you easily know the answer too often they know the answer to things like what's your birthday where were you born what kind of car you drive this sets a baseline truth response that they can measure everything else against then they ask questions that you might be more likely to lie about but are irrelevant to what they're there to question you about things like have you ever watched porn do you take drugs have you ever committed a crime do you watch the Kardashians you know really embarrassing stuff and this gives them an idea of your baseline live response and then they hit you with the relevant questions these are the things that they really want to find out about and then they monitor those and measure them against the baseline lie and truth' responses and it's only really considered a lie if it goes above the baseline live response so with all that in mind the name of the game here is to throw off the baseline responses so they've got an inaccurate thing to measure your actual lies against one way to do that is through just pain just cheer body pain people have been known to put tacks in their shoes and kind of like push their toes against them to get that sharp pain response and throw things out of whack in those baseline responses a lot of interrogators became hip to that so now you use let's take your shoes off whenever you do a lie-detector test but you could also bite your tongue or the inside of your mouth in lieu of torturing yourself another tactic might be to try to think of a really difficult math problem in your head something that you might have to stress a little bit to figure out something hard like 6 times 12 shut up I never math good of course the cherry on top is to control your reactions when you're actually doing the relevant questions lying for the relevant questions as much as possible this means things like controlling your breathing thinking of something calming trying to calm your your system and your body down as much as possible and some people actually say that the simple fact that you're kind of hacking this lie-detector test can actually be a calming effect on your body because you feel like you're more in control now polygraphs aren't admissible in court so it's not likely that you would need to lie to get out of a murder situation or something like that police don't really use it in that way anymore I'll get back to that in a second but it is used often as a recruitment tool for organizations like the FBI and the NSA and this is actually a pretty controversial practice according to George Mack who runs a site called anti polygraph org a lot of times these organizations will use that polygraph test to basically collect information about these potential employees that they can later use to blackmail them into doing unethical police stuff and there are also cases of people who were denied positions in these organizations because they failed a polygraph test for whatever reason and it might be for all those reasons that we just discussed a minute ago because nervousness I mean we often get nervous and job interviews and that kind of thing so it's it's it's kind of frowned upon it's still being done but it is very controversial now just because polygraph results aren't admissible in court doesn't mean they're not still helpful to police because often just the threat of making someone take a polygraph test is enough to get them to confess to a crime and those confessions they are admissible in court so really perhaps the best way to beat a polygraph test you just don't take one alright I hope you enjoyed that I certainly thought that was interesting so I thought you guys might like it too don't go committing crimes because of this please disclaimer if this is your first time watching my channel thank you for joining I'm glad to see your face if you would like to check out more of the stuff that I do I can't talk if you don't watch me stumble through more videos a good place to start might be this one right here Google thinks you'll like that one or any of the other things that might pop up on my channel if you do like them I invite you to subscribe because I do videos just like this on science II kind of topics every Monday and every Thursday also if you're looking for some cool new t-shirts mugs hats hoodies you name it there's all kinds of cool designs by a guy who lives in Prague and he's been awesome to work with you have some really cool nerdy stuff that you can find over at answer's no joke on sweatshirts all right I'll leave you with that for now thank you guys again for watching you guys go out and I'll have an eye-opening rest of the week and I'll see you on Monday hope you guys take care

Channel: Joe Scott

Views: 176,552

Keywords: Answers with joe, random thursday, polygraph test, lie detector, how to beat a lie detector, wonder woman, systolic heart rate, FBI, NSA, law enforcement, green river killer, serial killer

Id: FIHAfuJU634

Length: 8min 56sec (536 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 06 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/BaccarWozat]

What's the point? Lie detectors are not admissible as evidence of lying. You literally cannot be forced to take one.

[u/rocker5969]

It's the baseline you need to beat. When they ask you the true questions, think of your greatest fear or humiliation. I used the fear of death - always guaranteed to start a panic attack and fuck up the baselines.

[u/Sir_Holo]

It's the post-testing interview that you have to be careful about. Lie detectors are there to sow self-doubt, and to elicit confessions, whether they are real or not.

[u/obmasztirf]

Just act like a fucking crazy person on pcp the entire time. They can't force you to take the test properly.