
If You Want to Catch a Liar, Make Him Draw - fogus
http://neuronarrative.wordpress.com/2009/09/22/if-you-want-to-catch-a-liar-make-him-draw/
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dkl
I hate stuff like this. The article is about generalizations made from a group
of people. If you apply that to a single person (to "catch a liar"), you will
only sometimes be correct. Catching a liar is something that you should only
do when you know you are correct, and all lie detection schemes cannot do
that. Sort of like our system of justice which would rather a guilty person go
free that convict an innocent person. Well, in theory at least.

~~~
hegemonicon
Expecting perfection is unreasonable - everything has a failure rate. The
question is what's an acceptable percentage of false positives.

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moe
I wonder how effective this will be after it gets published in mass media. I,
for one, will now surely remember to use a "shoulder-surfing" perspective if I
ever get into such a situation...

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NathanKP
That is a good point. A trained criminal will probably not fall for this
because they will study articles such as this to learn about what they should
draw, how they should respond, etc.

Even a lie detector can probably be fooled by someone who knows how to keep
themselves calm while lying.

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igorhvr
There is no such thing as a "lie detector". It is all nonsense. And it is
dangerous and harmful that people think that lie detectors are worth
something.

If you want to understand why, you can read what is on
<http://antipolygraph.org/>

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NathanKP
I actually agree with you. The polygraph isn't useful. To my way of thinking
people can scam it just like they could scam the drawing test. But what is
even worse about the polygraph is that it will often misreport someone as
lying when they told the truth.

That's why polygraph test aren't usually accepted in court in my country.

For that matter, though, I don't think any type lie detector test, polygraph,
drawing, etc is really worthy of being used as court evidence. It may help law
officials who suspect that someone is lying, but it isn't going to be
conclusive proof no matter how you do it.

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_debug_
Except, such papers forget the power of reflexivity : after the douchebags
read the paper, they will start dissimulating very cleverly, rendering the
results effectively useless.

It's like that article back in the 90's which said that "gets-things-
done"-type of people often folded their shirts up to their elbows, and all the
mouths started imitating this.

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akd
Why will only "douchebags" have a need for these techniques?

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dasil003
This comment is indescribably hilarious.

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andreyf
_Using the “sketching the agent” result alone, it was possible to identify 80%
of the truth tellers and 87% of the liars – results superior to most
traditional interview techniques._

What a great example of the base rate fallacy. See:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_rate_fallacy>

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bsaunder
hmmm... While reading through I visualized drawing the top-down perspective.
Guess I'm guilty.

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redorb
thats the same way I felt, I see myself as a over-view type of person at most
times... I always see things from the 50k ft level.

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NathanKP
I guess I've been using Google Earth too much. I see things from several miles
up. ;)

But seriously, a good criminal would check Google Street View to see what the
area looks like before the drawing test. Then they would be able to draw it.

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lazyant
(not directly related to this article) The more I read about the brain, the
less I believe in "free will". We have a nice illusion though...

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known
People lie if truth hurts their self-esteem.

