This might sound like an odd question, but hear me out.
One first must ask, what is “a political issue”. Most political issues are yes-or-no questions. Things like do you support firearms, do you want the US to refrain from war, do you think the police should be policed, etc. Things become political issues over time, and typically they involve aspects of the government that are up for debate.
You know what is an aspect of the government that is up for debate? Lie detectors. Or sort of.
Lie detectors are a tool people in the government use to get the truth out of people. However, they’re quite well-known to just not work that well, they don’t correspond well enough to honesty to count as honesty-measuring tools.
People all across the political spectrum will cringe at their existence. Ask a Democrat what they think of lie detectors and they’ll most likely look down on them. Ask a Republican what they think of lie detectors and they’ll most likely look down on them. Everyone who has done their homework looks down on them.
But in a world that talks about police reform and technology implementation, these archaic devices are still there, still in places that reside over law, still used to measure the honest of prisoners, still treated like serious tools, and are still allowed to cause innocent, honest people to suffer in prisons for things they didn’t do.
So, then, if Democrats know better, and Republicans know better, and most of the layperson world knows better, what entity is out there saying “you all disagree with its existence, but we are pro-lie-detector when it comes to the issues and will keep it in power”? If bipartisan opposition for something isn’t enough to make change, how does this not signal something more powerful than the two parties is in power? Why is this not treated as a political issue, be it a bipartisan one or one which, when declared a political issue, we can enjoy the shifts in opinion for them which would ironically be better for taking them out of power?
I’m all for banning lie detectors because they are a piece of theatre used to extract confessions (themselves a tool with far too much weight levied against people with no legal support and/or neurodivergence), but I’d probably grapple with your definition of political a bit. (tbh you may have heard this before, I’m not super willing to have the argument today, but that was my first thought walking in)
I don’t disagree. Just compared to everything else going on, it seems to fit.
Lie detectors don’t really work. They’re sometimes used anyway, though, cause the world sucks like that.
I’m surprised no politician in our history has promised to remove them, maybe save a little money in the process in our budget-restricted world.
That’s why I was wondering.
To be fair, in the US we did ban admission of polygraph evidence in court, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg in terms of problems they and other psuedoscientofic “investigation” techniques create.
I think that while a lot of reasonable people know that lie detectors are bunk, a surprisingly large number of people don’t know that at all - and many of the people who seemingly know better still haven’t actually confronted what that knowledge means. Like if you say to someone, “I took a lie detector test”, it lends credibility to what you’re saying for a lot of people even though it shouldn’t lend any at all.
Take this out to the whole world of phony pauedoscientific criminal investigation techniques, and the number of people in a world poisoned by shows like CSI who would rightly support banning such things is going to be shockingly low, even though everyone with knowledge on the subject can probably tell you that’s what should happen.
So that’s why there’s no public pressure to do it really. Add to that the fact that law enforcement doesn’t want their psuedoscience taken away from them because they see it as a useful tool in getting convictions, and any politician who tries to take this issue on is going to be acting alone against entrenched power for basically no political gain.
They are a political issue!
It’s just that there’s a bipartisan consensus on lie detectors, because powerful people benefit from them.
I thought the bipartisan consensus was that they don’t work as well as people assume they should.
There’s a difference between rhetoric and policy.
The rhetorical consensus is as you say, lie detectors don’t work and everyone knows it.
The policy consensus, though, is that lie detectors are essential tools that allow interrogators to get whatever results they want from suspects and witnesses. They’re useful, even if they don’t actually detect lies. It’s useful to be able to call someone a liar and back it up.
No one cares how well they work to detect lies if someone “failing” or refusing to take a polygraph test can be used as evidence. No one in a position to ban their use, anyway.
Lie detectors LIE. They measure small body changes, supposedly to find a baseline for a true statement, and a change, indicating a lie. At best, they may measure a change, that can be for many reasons. They can be most useful to law enforcement. Telling a defendant that his/her test was guilty can force an innocent person to take a plea of reduced charges. (Police ARE allowed to lie.)
As a result of my torture trauma past, I will never take a chance over it. The environment of being questioned is would be a huge trigger, as I careen in trying to simply getting through a questioning without a full fight or flight meltdown. I consider myself to have a high probability of being a false positive. I have never needed to test it out, fortunately. Courts do not recognize them as reliable, either, but lawyers will use a good result to clear a client, though. Sociopaths, by their lack of conscience, can fool these tests, too.
Brain wave tests supposedly work better, but that is just researchers reports. AFAIK, no rigorous meta studies have been done.
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Ban them, they don’t work.
True chads advocate for truth serums. Wanna be in politics? Gotta get dosed to the gills with truth serum every time you speak. /s
Truth serums don’t really work either, they’re made to make someone talkative and say things the other person might want to hear. Sometimes this happens to include the truth.
The sad part though is, even then, truth serums probably work even better than lie detectors.
