While well known for its lack of accuracy – to the point where its usage is largely inadmissible in a court of law – the contentious reliability of the lie-detector test could be set for something of a boost thanks to the creation of new and improved technology.
Specifically, computer-based trials of new lie-detection system TARA (the Timed Antagonistic Response Alethiometer) have discovered that it takes test respondents some 33 percent longer to tell a lie than it does to tell the truth.
Developed by psychologist Aiden Gregg of Southampton University in England, it is hoped that the introduction of TARA will help police forces remain ahead of suspects that are increasingly able to fool existing lie-detection techniques.
According to the UK study, use of TARA revealed that 85 percent of interviewees were slower at lying than they were at telling the truth, which Gregg equates to a delay caused by the necessity for more complicated cognitive activity.
Unlike conventional lie-detector tests, TARA presents a selection of questions on a computer display and tasks respondents with entering their responses as quickly as possible through a keyboard. TARA then records the amount of time interviewees require to compose their answers and gauges its results by applying those times to a special algorithm.
Putting TARA through its paces, a Sunday Times reporter recently took the test twice, answering questions truthfully on the first attempt, and then once again with lies. The program revealed the reporter had taken an average of 1.2 seconds to answer questions truthfully, while an average of 1.8 seconds was needed when telling a lie.
Gregg said that current polygraph lie-detection tests, which gauge physical reactions in the body, implicate too many innocent people, while other approaches, such as the guilty knowledge test’s loaded questions, see too many people avoiding detection.
Gregg intends to carry his TARA technology forward by running Home Office-supported field trials in the latter part of 2009.
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