So I'm going to be polygraphed tomorrow...

[Riesstiu IV]

...as part of the interview/hiring process for a police department. I've been given the questions beforehand. It's nothing too horrendous and I can answer the questions truthfully but I am pretty nervous. I'm really worried that it's going to affect the results... Hell I'm always nervous for job interviews but this is completely new territory for me. Does anyone have suggestions?

[Darius871]

Press on a tack in your shoe, squeeze soap under each armpit, and mutter profanities throughout.

[loinburger]

The control questions will hopefully establish that you're nervous, so that when you fail the real questions by the same margin as the control questions then you'll be good to go.

A friend of mine took a polygraph for the NSA and kept failing the question about whether she'd used pot (near the end of the test). She hadn't, but the polygraph said she was lying. Finally the guy administering the test said something along the lines of "Geez lady, everybody who works for the NSA is a pothead, don't sweat it," but she couldn't just say she'd used pot because then once again the polygraph would say she was lying. So they just retested her the next day when she wasn't as nervous, and that time she passed.

[Riesstiu IV]

Nice to know, Loin. Surprisingly, one of the questions is "Have you ever had sexual contact with a incapacitated dickgirl? If so, how was it?"

[Tuberski]

According to "Penn & Teller's:Bull****"

Clench your butthole before you answer every control question:

Or as the former polygrapher says:

Doug Williams explains how to artificially produce reactions by constricting one's anal sphincter muscle and trains a volunteer how to fool a peak of tension test. In what is for me the most memorable line of the show he quips: "A polygraph examiner is nothing but an ******* with a little training. In order to beat this ******* with a little training, your *******'s got to have a little training."

ACK!

[Tuberski]

The control questions will hopefully establish that you're nervous, so that when you fail the real questions by the same margin as the control questions then you'll be good to go.

A friend of mine took a polygraph for the NSA and kept failing the question about whether she'd used pot (near the end of the test). She hadn't, but the polygraph said she was lying. Finally the guy administering the test said something along the lines of "Geez lady, everybody who works for the NSA is a pothead, don't sweat it," but she couldn't just say she'd used pot because then once again the polygraph would say she was lying. So they just retested her the next day when she wasn't as nervous, and that time she passed.

Which is the only way that a polygraph works, they say you lied about something and then get the truth out of you afterwards.

ACK!

[SlowwHand]

...as part of the interview/hiring process for a police department. I've been given the questions beforehand. It's nothing too horrendous and I can answer the questions truthfully but I am pretty nervous. I'm really worried that it's going to affect the results... Hell I'm always nervous for job interviews but this is completely new territory for me. Does anyone have suggestions?

They ask preliminary questions and adjust the test equipment to your normal paranoia level.

[Darius871]

Finally the guy administering the test said something along the lines of "Geez lady, everybody who works for the NSA is a pothead, don't sweat it,"

That's obviously a trap anyway no matter what anyone tells you; even when confronted with the National Academy of Sciences Polygraph Review and other studies exposing how utterly baseless polygraphs are when it comes to detecting actual deception, agencies still justify them based on the fact that the subjects' perception that they work frequently induces them to make statements inconsistent with prior statements on the SF-86 form, other interviews, etc.

In other words, the theory is basically that losing X good candidates to false positives is a worthwhile tradeoff for getting an inadvertent confession from Y bad candidates, though the values for X & Y vary from agency to agency (rumor is the FBI's fail rate is almost 50%). Viewing the test in this way, your main concern should of course be consistency and avoiding getting tripped up by any follow-up questions, not whether you're generally "nervous" (as Loin said, they control for that by setting up a baseline).


EDIT: Tubes beat me to it

[Darius871]

Oh and P.S., don't let your googling lead you to antipolygraph.org; they're nothing but a bunch of whiner rejects whining about being rejects. Geez what a pathetic site.

[Legend]

As Costanza says: "It's not a lie if YOU believe it".

[Darius871]

Oh BTW Riesstiu, incidentally one of the first questions is usually something like "have you ever conducted research or otherwise sought out any information regarding how to evade detection of deception by a polygraph?" Merely by virtue of having posted this thread you're bound to fail.

[Riesstiu IV]

Ah, but I didn't ask specifically how to cheat the polygraph, rather I wanted to know how not to be a nervous wreck. You and Tubes are the ones who just happened to post the evasion techniques.

[Darius871]

Ah, but I didn't ask specifically how to cheat the polygraph, rather I wanted to know how not to be a nervous wreck. You and Tubes are the ones who just happened to post the evasion techniques.

Well, that quote's just off my foggy recollection; it could have been something much broader like whether or not you sought information on how polygraphs work, which is itself frowned upon. It also varies from agency to agency. Since this is only local PD they probably won't be that aggressive.

[ZEE]

im interested in contributing to this thrade but am too lazy too read the posts in it.

[Solomwi]

Well, that quote's just off my foggy recollection; it could have been something much broader like whether or not you sought information on how polygraphs work, which is itself frowned upon. It also varies from agency to agency. Since this is only local PD they probably won't be that aggressive.

Damn, why would that be frowned upon? If I'm making the hiring decision, I want somebody who did his homework, rather than somebody who sauntered blindly into something that unnerves the **** out of most people.