BREAKING RANKS

...Penney effectively compete without it...

...Not only should a bona fide lie detector not require a stacked deck, but such practices prove that polygraphers are no more than glorified interrogators aided by what one New York attorney calls the "blue-fog test": You sit someone down in a foggy room and convince him that the fog will turn blue when he tells the truth and red when he lies...

...Although the statistics vary, no one denies the magnitude of the problem: "Employe crime is epidemic in the United States," says Dr...

...Competent polygraphers ask certain questions of the respondent to determine his polygraphic "signature" and to neutralize any undue nervousness (Is your name Mike...

...Some people enter the examining room anxious, and blurt out their every misdeed to the polygrapher before hookup, "We get better results than a priest does," John Reid, a prominent polygrapher, told The New York Times several years ago...

...Private employers are free to use a polygraph, just as workers are free to submit to it or to head for the nearest unemployment line...

...By banning polygraphs, would we be saying to employers—even the small and struggling ones—that they can't take measures to protect themselves...

...One common polygraphic technique is to pose vaguely worded, embarrassing "control" questions to which most people would have a strong emotional reaction...

...is typical of the former...

...this, the ACLU told the Senate subcommittee, "does not account for situations in which the person is so 'cool' about lying that no feelings of guilt are aroused...

...Comforted though some employers may be, polygraph justice is certainly-inconsistent with our criminal justice system—or at least with its pretensions...

...The deceptiveness of a response, such as it is, is gauged by comparing the charted bodily processes accompanying that response with the chart accompanying the other questions...

...But the use of the polygraph as a secular confessional does not dispose of the question of accuracy...

...A person accused by the state of stealing $700 from his neighbor will receive all of these protections to insure he is not wrongfully punished, but the same man suspected of shortchanging his boss by $700 will have no such safeguards against the erroneous deprivation of his means of support...

...Several thousand polygraphers practice in the United States, and estimates of the number of polygraph tests administered annually vary from 200,000 to four million...

...It's hard to tell things by looking at people...

...Therefore, much against all my beliefs in the American sys-lem...

...Nevertheless, it is clear that the vast majority of American firms have never felt the need to use the polygraph...

...Smith...

...Even conceding high degrees of accuracy, however, the human cost of polygraph errors can be stunning...

...have you ever drunk to excess, have you ever smoked marijuana, or taken any merchandise or money for $5...

...Nonsense, say the critics...

...Employe crime costs American companies between $15 billion and $50 billion a year...

...This alone is scary...

...Polygraphers and their trade associations claim the machine is on the mark between 95 and 99 per cent of the time, while critics make estimates in the range of 60 to 85 per cent...

...People's livelihoods are now balanced on the nib of the polygrapher's pen...

...I use the polygraph because I got tired of playing God," said one executive...

...Professor Ramos predicts there will be growing pressure to pass a licensing law, now before the New York Assembly, if casino gambling is legalized in the state...

...Trained neither in crime detection nor in the demands of due process, business management assesses the polygraph from a profit-and-loss perspective...

...The machine may also be woefully over-inclusive...

...If we replaced polygraphic employment screening with the personal interview, claims Barefoot, we would be reducing personnel decisions to "a coin flip...

...When society doesn't provide the means, those with means provide for themselves and the rest of us do without...

...Although folklore may have it that the pulse of the liar quickens, science has yet to reach that conclusion, Holden said...

...A personnel manager, faced with twelve applicants for one job, will find it tempting to let polygraphers narrow the field by informing him that half of the people are "Deceptive...

...That oversight might explain the story of Sister Terressa, a teaching nun and an applicant for a job in a B. Dalton bookstore in Minneapolis...

...A rubber hose, psychological or physical, is an instrument of coercion, he maintains...

...Harry Hunter, a representative of the National Association of Convenience Stores, estimated before the 1977 Senate subcommittee that inventory theft from its 525 member companies could be reduced by half through employe screening with the polygraph and other "Truth Technology" devices...

...Bank presidents do not...

...this formula leaves businesses free to "request" such submission, a suggestion few employes will feel comfortable rejecting when the solicitor is the boss...

...No businessman or polygrapher is required to affirm independently the results of tests...

...A NYCLU survey of employers in Rochester concluded that those who use the machine do so because of its "relative cheapness and speed as compared with other investigative methods.1" Employers who reject the polygraph similarly do so on business grounds: They believe the polygraph is simply not cost-effective or that it is a bad management tool which alienates employes...

...One official who took the test termed it "a singularly unpleasant experience...

...A few of these laws also restrict the types of questions polygraphers may ask...

...They protest the extreme intrusiveness of many of the questions, the intimidating, sometimes outright bullying behavior of the examiner, and the indignity and humiliation of their subjection to a dehumanizing procedure...

...Banking on the respondent's belief in the machine, polygraphers hope to extort a confession rather than rely on a reading of the squiggles on the graph paper...

...These all may be perfectly respectable publications of their type, but they are not scientific journals and none of them requires their contributors to pass the scrutiny of sharp-eyed scientific editorial review...

...Are polygraphs, its proponents ask, less accurate than such typical hiring justifications as "I didn't like the way he looked," or "He fidgeted when I asked about his previous jobs...

...When the Senate Subcommittee on the Constitution was considering Birch Bayh's bill to ban polygraphs,' a Midwestern oil company executive vigorously protested: "I am trying to operate thirty-two service stations in the greater Kansas City area and my employes are robbing me blind...

...Finally, polygraphs have long been used by law-enforcement agencies in criminal investigations and by defense attorneys—such as former polygrapher F. Lee Bailey—who wish to introduce lie-detector evidence to exculpate their clients...

...A host of devices has been developed to grapple with these crimes...

...Some polygraph reports are based neither on the machine nor on confessions...

...Have you ever stolen anything in your life...

...Hundreds of thousands of people take the test each year, and the stakes, for them, are much greater than a trip to the woodshed with the PresiFrancis J. Flaherty is a 1981 graduate of Harvard Law School and a former executive editor of the Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review...

...Businesses threaten to leave the state...

...Reilly signed what was subsequently proved to be a false confession...

...Moreover, pathological liars or hardened criminals—the respondents that polygraphers and their business clients want most to catch—may be especially immune to the machine...

...While being interrogated and tested by Connecticut state police polygraphers...

...Letter from a young woman to the Governor of'Florida (submitted to a hearing of a Senate subcommittee by Robert Ellis Smith, publisher of Privacy Journal) pected of being exaggerated, misleading, or downright false...

...The result, predictably enough, is that a political hot potato becomes lukewarm legislation if it becomes anything at all...

...In A Death in Canaan, journalist Joan Barthel recounts the celebrated case of Peter Reilly, an eighteen-year-old accused of the gruesome murder of his mother...

...But due process and human dignity are involved here, even if myopia blinds American business to these issues...

...When an applicant sits down for an interview with an employer, he may be nervous but his soul is intact...

...It is difficult to identify with the subway rider who is glad to see the Angels and not with the drugstore owner near bankruptcy because of lightfingered clerks...

...others consider the loss of employe good will too great when the polygraph is introduced into the work place, or find the reduction in internal theft too small to justify the $100 or more each polygraph test can cost...

...About 20 per cent of America's largest corporations use it, and the incidence is much higher in industries in which employes come into frequent contact with money or goods...

...If a company employs 10,000 people, 90 per cent of whom are honest, a polygraph of 95 per cent accuracy will incorrectly classify 450 honest employes as liars or worse and 50 deceptive workers as good scouts...

...When public agencies do not protect them, citizens who can will protect themselves: Polygraphers are the business-wo rid analogues of the Guardian Angels, the red-bereted volunteers who patrol the subways of the nation in response to the shortage of city police...

...licensing bills are under consideration in seven...

...Some want to verify statements made on job applications or in job interviews...

...Although such constitutional guarantees as the right of privacy and the right not to incriminate oneself seem endangered by polygraph use, those provisions are of little help...

...And a frustrated shopkeeper in Albany, New York, gave up on lie detectors when it became clear to him that the polygrapher he had on retainer consistently rejected those job candidates he considered most promising...

...The polygraph is particularly popular...

...Labor union resistance to the polygraph is one of them...

...On the other hand, fairly strict prohibitory laws, now pending in Michigan and Ohio, have good prospects of passage...

...A store manager in Rochester, New York, for example, fired his polygraph firm after he discovered that stores not using polygraphed suffered no greater losses than his...

...In retailing—renowned for its reliance on the lie detector—such giants as Sears Roebuck and J.C...

...A 1981 report of the New York Civil Liberties Union cites several cases of employers who abandoned the lie detector...

...Did you have to leave your hometown because of delinquent bills...

...But most polygraphy occurs in non-unionized industries, and because unions cannot make pre-employment use of the lie detector a mandatory subject of bargaining and because such non-monetary bargaining chips as use of the polygraph are usually the first to leave labor's side of the table in times of inflation and recession, unions can provide only limited protection against the lie detector...

...Couched among these innocuous questions are the "relevant" queries (Did you take some money out of the cash register on June 16...

...Although there are at least half a dozen polygraphic techniques, all lie-detector "theory" rests on the equation of relatively active bodily signs with deceptiveness...

...Have you ever been arrested...

...But inadequate taw enforcement is not a burden equally borne by bus rider and business executive...

...More sophisticated machines also measure pupil dilation and other bodily signs...

...The primary use of the machine is as a confessional device...

...Bank tellers take polygraph tests...

...Critics retort that the polygraph is certainly more psychically assaulting than an interview...

...In A Tremor in the Blood, his critique of the polygraph, Lykken recounts the story of a Southern California bakery facing financial ruin because one of its 125 workers was tossing bits of glass and wire into the mixing drum...

...What is your husband's salary...

...The test is "voluntary," of course, but to those in need of work that fact should be sadly reminiscent of Anatole France's observation that the law, in its majestic impartiality, punishes the rich and the poor alike for the crime of sleeping under bridges...

...dent: Workers who get a failing grade usually lose their jobs...

...Some merely prohibit employers from "requiring" present or prospective employes to submit to a polygraph...

...Collectively dubbed the "Truth Technology" by Lykken, the arsenal includes lie detectors, voice stress analyzers, written honesty tests, psychological stress evaluators, "fidgetometers," and other techniques and machines marketed by such business-security firms as the Truth Verification Corporation and the New York Lie Detection Laboratories...

...All over the country," the ACLU representatives said, "our offices receive scores, sometimes hundreds of calls each year from people who have been embarrassed, offended, outraged by their experiences in polygraph examinations...

...But, for whatever purpose they are used, these control questions leave subjects enraged and humiliated...

...The polygraph certainly makes short work of the vagaries of hiring: It reduces the complex and uncomfortable task of evaluating and comparing multidimensional job applicants to a simple binary system of "Deceptive" and "Truthful...

...Resume-padding, an issue in the case of Washington Post reporter Janet Cooke, seems to be increasingly common...

...We are seeing a return to the conditions of the Middle Ages when the nobility and the rich merchants, represented now by the corporation and the private company, provided their own guards and police, small private armies in some instances, to protect themselves and their property...

...Polygraphers also ask vague and threatening control questions as an inducement to confession...

...The laws restricting polygraphs also range from toothless to tough...

...A quickened heartbeat, polygraph thinking goes, results from the stress of telling a lie...

...It was front-page news across the nation...

...The young, the gullible, the scared, or the naive often become convinced during interrogation that they have done everything the polygrapher seems to be accusing them of...

...Whether you have or have not this makes you feel as if yon have...

...The man (here [hen says he's going to try to put you at ease as he then commences to ask you a lot of questions such as do you have any hidden motives for applying for this job...

...One woman threw up after her test...

...Lykken believes that confessions extracted in the polygraph room are the fruits of a bloodless "fourth degree" which deserve as much skepticism as confessions won under the physical intimidation of the "third degree...

...Descended from the ple-thysmograph of Nineteenth Century Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso, it merely measures respiration, perspiration, and blood pressure...

...In New Jersey, the legislature is under pressure from Atlantic City casino owners to repeal the state's polygraph law, one of the toughest in the country...

...The story of the polygraph is, in fact, merely an episode in a long chain of social decisions that come down hard on those at the base of the social ladder...

...Finally, the fines and jail terms prescribed for violation of these laws rarely rise above the misdemeanor level...

...Faced with an upsurge in employe crime, American businesses are relying more and more on the devices— more formally termed polygraphs—to weed out dishonest workers...

...For more recalcitrant subjects, the post-test interrogation is used: An examiner dissatisfied with the answers he's been getting will turn off the machine, sit face to face with the subject, and—regardless of the recordings on the polygraph—say, "The machine tells me you've been lying about the cash shortage, Mr...

...How often do you change your underwear...

...in police journals...

...The New York legislature perennially considers polygraphs...

...Polygraphers readily admit that some people unjustly lose their jobs because of the lie detector, and they may even agree that the impact of unfair firings can be devastating...

...Employers use the polygraph in a number of ways...

...Generally, our Federal and state constitutions protect us only against governmental actions...

...These bills have been introduced in legislatures every year since the early 1960s...

...The news leaks from his Administration threatened to become a flood, he said...

...There are few alternatives to potent prohibitory laws...

...But, they assert, no system for deducing the truth— neither background checks nor personal interviews nor the American jury—is really reliable...

...Were you popular...

...The irony of the use of these deceptive practices by truth merchants is not lost on polygraph critics...

...The employers hardest hit by employe crime are usually the small ones unable to pass costs on to the consumer...

...This spate of bills is "an annual ritual," says Kirk Barefoot...

...And even a perfectly objective polygrapher can be fooled: A tack in one's shoe, a small dose of the tranquilizer meprobamate, and even variations in posture can wreak havoc on a respondent's vital signs...

...unions threaten to withdraw political support from legislators who won't vote their way, and the lawmakers scramble for the brush...

...To license polygraphers would be to give them the imprimatur of the state," says Paul Samuels, a lawyer with the Legal Action Center in New York City...

...Demeaned," "shattered," "demoralized" is how examined employes described themselves to NYCLU researchers...

...Of course, unless you are stupid or completely in some kind of euphoria the question that you await is Have you ever stolen anything...

...Whether in the form of vandalism, sabotage, embezzlement, outright theft of cash or equipment, or pilferage of merchandise (better known as "inventory shrinkage"), employe misconduct accounts for a sizable part of the annual cost of crimes committed against business...

...However, most businesses that rule out use of the polygraph do so for a predictably businesslike reason: They find, as one department store supervisor said, that "the costs outweigh its benefits...

...Should the employer have him arrested...

...Its most Common use, according to Kirk Barefoot, is as a preventive device administered to job applicants to see if they have larcenous or deceptive propensities...

...The New York Times wondered whether recourse to the detectors would "cause an erosion of trust" among high Government officials...

...that polygraphy is steeped in a false aura of scientific precision, and that failing to land a jobbecause the boss didn't like your looks is preferable to being labeled a liar in a polygraphic report that may end up on the desk of other prospective employers...

...One must realize growing up in America, the lirst time one sees a lie detector test is normally on a detective show on television, where the gangster, who is normally lying, is screaming— Til take a lie detector test...

...Horror stories abound...

...Some firms also require their employes to submit to periodic polygraph tests—say, once every six months—to deter dishonesty...

...statements made under its influence should be believed only when accompanied by independently confirmatory evidence...

...Some of the psychological assumptions of Truth Technology are patently sophomoric...

...The machine is a prop, says Lykken, and the examiner merely a modern Merlin, a Diogenes with a souped-up bag of tricks...

...Employers, public and private, use polygraphs for various reasons...

...Even if the stress resulting from the utterance of a lie ineluctably leads to increases in the monitored vital signs, other human emotions such as rage or anger or embarrassment or fear might also cause these bodily responses...

...But critics see in the polygraph more than dubious science...

...An applicant who fails the test or refuses to take it will usually not get the job even if he or she has impeccable credentials...

...When management instituted a polygraph policy, losses were cut to 1 per cent...

...Let there be no doubt," Privacy Journal publisher Robert Ellis Smith told the Senate hearings, "that polygraphing in employment is a matter of class status...

...There is "no way...

...A review of all pertinent studies, claims Lykken, reveals that "no pattern of physiological response is unique to lying...

...At 11 A.M...

...Answer "No" and you won't get the job...

...Such grave economic penalties, coupled with doubt over the accuracy of lie detectors and concern over the threat they pose to personal privacy and human dignity, have transformed this attempt to stem internal theft into what may be the most significant civil-liberties issue of the 1980s...

...Business can stop inventory shrinkage with polygraphy, while workers' rights to a fair deal in employment decisions fall through the social safety net...

...Therefore, although you are broke, you go home feeling like a thief...

...Seventeen states and the District of Columbia place varying restrictions on employer use of the polygraph, and twenty-three states license polygraphers...

...Polygraph critics instead favor an outright ban on the machine's use in employment, and David Linowes further urges a prohibition on their manufacture and sale...

...Befuddled by rising crime, American business has eagerly embraced the promise of these devices...

...all the safeguards we extend in court to people accused of crimes— the reasonable-doubt standard, the presumption of innocence, and the right to present evidence, employ counsel, and confront accusers—are of no consequence to the worker in the polygraph room...

...But the most common use of polygraphs is as a theft prevention and detection measure in American business...

...Do you know where your employer's missing camera is...

...Even if the polygraph or some other device were a truly reliable, objective 'lie detector,' " the ACLU told the 1977 Senate subcommittee, "the nature of the examinations administered to employes and applicants would be argument enough to justify a ban on polygraph testing...

...And so, in late January, twenty-five senior officials—including Navy Secretary John F. Lehman and General David C. Jones, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff-dutifully trundled off to a Pentagon basement, rolled up their sleeves, and submitted to lie-detector tests in an unsuccessful effort to uncover the quisling who had leaked information about a military-budget meeting two weeks earlier...

...Increasing use of the polygraph shows that many businesses subscribe to what Peter Ramos and Harry Hunter have to say...

...she exclaimed...

...The Adolph Coors Brewery, according to David Linowes, former chairman of the Privacy Protection Study Commission, has asked such questions as: Have you ever participated in any type of march, riot, sit-in, or demonstration...

...asks one polygrapher hired to screen applicants by a New York City drugstore...

...a recent attempt to prohibit them failed when, according to Peter Ramos, "the jewelry industry told [New York Governor Hugh] Carey they would leave the state if the bill passed...

...Wichita State University researcher Peter Holden told the 1977 Senate subcommittee that "there remains little empirical evidence that the act of lying causes anything at all to occur in human beings...

...Despite the basic psychological assumptions embedded in the theory of the polygraph, few members of the American Psychological Association are even familiar with the polygraph, let alone convinced of its validity...

...Half of the nation's major banking and retailing firms, for example, regularly use polygraphs, and they are especially common among retailers of jewelry and pharmaceuticals...

...Innocent parties will, in theory, respond more strongly to those queries than to the "relevant" questions which are the polygraphed primary interest...

...Have you ever used any other name...

...Did you take some jewelry from your employer's store last week...

...Another suffered an asthma attack...

...Even subconsciously, such polygraphers might be inclined to the safety of calling a truthful respondent deceptive...

...But even this degree of accuracy has not yet been proven, according to Lykken: "A substantial proportion of the literature of polygraphs has appeared in law journals...

...Moreover, there has been a change in the type of employe being tested, says Peter Ramos, a polygrapher and assistant professor of criminal justice at the State University of New York at Farmingdale: "It used to be primarily the low-level worker, but more often we're getting middle-management people to polygraph now...

...What is your rent...

...is an example of the latter...

...Outraged retailers returned the adulterated goods, and the polygrapher hired by the company successfully ferreted out the saboteur, a long-time worker miffed at being passed over for a promotion...

...or in trade journals like Polygraph, Journal of Polygraph Studies, Security World, or Banker's Monthly...

...the fines, which seldom exceed $1,000, might not deter a deep-pocketed employer even if frequently levied...

...The assumption behind this—that there is honor (or solidarity) among thieves—ignores the possibility that the quality of mercy might also inform a "No" answer...

...as private parties, employers and employes are not so bound...

...Then he continues to ask you about ten questions pausing fifteen seconds after every question...

...Despite the introduction of countless bills during the past several years, Congress has yet to enact a Federal polygraph statute...

...Qualified applicants are denied jobs if they fail a test or refuse to take one, and those already employed may be summarily dismissed for the same reasons...

...according to Peter Ramos, that the police will fully investigate routine internal business thefts...

...These techniques, critics stress, are more likely to be known to clever criminals than to honest workers caught up in the suspicions of their superiors...

...Compounding this problem is the possible bias of polygraphers hired to protect businesses from dishonest workers...

...They said I had the lowest score on the 'honesty test' that they had ever seen...

...Many state licensing statutes also contain generous "grandfather" clauses exempting from some or all of their strictures polygraphers who have been practicing for a specified number of years...

...The polygraph does away with the tension of uncertainty...

...you go to the [security] company...

...His reportage and commentary have appeared in Harper's, Commonweal, the Hudson Review, and other publications...

...An applicant for a drugstore job was asked: Are you prejudiced...

...1 know people with psychological quirks who will confess to anything," says Barefoot...

...I was told that I would have to submit to a lie detector test...

...The best way to stop employe theft is simply not to hire those employes inclined to steal," claims the American Polygraph Association...

...Have you ever been dismissed from a company where you previously worked...

...The upswing in crime and the decline in the public commitment to fight it have forced law enforcement agencies to ration their slim resources...

...The licensing requirements vary greatly, ranging from Kentucky's minimal provision that an applicant be eighteen or older and in business for two years, to Illinois's relatively stringent requirements that applicants possess a college degree, complete a six-month polygraphy internship, and pass a state examination...

...I felt like I was raped," said one man who passed his test...

...Sometimes the deception is cruel and double-layered: A few years ago, Pennsylvania police put a colander on the head of a suspect, "hooked" him up to a photocopying machine, and told him it was a lie detector...

...The 1981 NY-CLU polygraph study reported the following questions asked of a woman applicant for a job as a dressing-room attendant in a department store: Did you have a happy childhood...

...Then, now that you are supposed to be relaxed, he tells you to turn the chair around, this is so you are not facing the machine, he puts something around your arm as if a doctor was taking your blood pressure, a chain around your waist, and two small bands around two fingers of your right arm...

...Walter Davis, an official of the 700,000-member Retail Clerks International Union, estimated at the 1977 Senate hearings that one-fifth of his union's collective bargaining agreements restrict management's use of the lie detector...

...If these prophylactic measures fail and "inventory shrinkage" occurs, suspected workers may be tested...

...The lie detector, its critics contend, has created an underground criminal-justice system where guilt is presumed, where a person's private affairs are indiscriminately exposed, and where livelihoods are caught in the clutches of a scientifically dubious gadget...

...After weeks of nervous waiting for word on her application, Sister Terressa called the store...

...One written "honesty test," for example, asks job applicants, "An employer discovers that a long-service, trusted employe has been taking a few dollars out of the cash register every week...

...But the reach of the lie detector extends well beyond the well-heeled halls of Washington, where its use is rare enough to make the front page...

...What you have," wrote former Senator Sam J. Ervin Jr., "is an invasion of personal rights through economic power...

...the lie detector, with its doubtful ability to probe the human psyche, is an affront to the integrity and dignity of the individual...

...Former Attorney General Benjamin Civiletti may be best remembered for his threat to test Justice Department workers to discover who leaked ABSCAM to the press, and at the CIA, hooking up employes to the polygraph is as routine as "having breakfast," according to a Reagan Administration official...

...In Congress, the House is now considering a bill to ban polygraph questions which touch on a subject's union affiliations, sexual habits, and some other topics...

...Finally, people who simply do not believe the machine works will feel no stress when lying and consequently deprive the examiner of the "clinical" evidence necessary for detection...

...David Lykken, a professor of psychology and psychiatry at the University of Minnesota Medical School and an outspoken opponent of employer use of the lie detector...

...Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger said use of the machines, though necessary, was "very distasteful, very unhappy...

...Traumatic though these indignities are, the polygraph can lead to more concrete harm...

...Some of these laws cover only present employes, freeing the employer to test job applicants, and most of these prohibitory statutes also provide specific exemptions either for employes of law-enforcement agencies or for all government workers...

...Employe crime receives a particularly low priority...

...We're getting more calls from $60,000 accountants who were polygraphed," adds Norma Rollins of the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU), "and they are mad...

...There are less complicated ways to instill belief in the machine and thus increase the chance that the examiner will get a confession...

...Moreover, when test results are forwarded to other prospective employers, the worker under examination is all but blackballed from future jobs...

...Are you wearing a shirt...

...Whenever polygraphers introduce a licensing bill, their critics propose a total ban...

...Moreover, the sporadic enforcement of these laws against errant employers, and the frequent absence of a right of wronged employes to sue such employers, hobble these statutes...

...Your arm is then placed on two sponges and you are told 10 close your eyes and keep them closed...

...Statutory bans are before the legislatures in eight other states...

...Other employers, however, find it reassuring to throw a sticky problem into the laps of the experts...

...Often, elaborate deceptions are worked on the respondent to instill an awe of the machine, but this may not be necessary...

...Though perhaps overdramatic, David Lykken's observation rings true: "Increasingly, business is doing its own police work, hiring security personnel or engaging the services of private detective agencies...

...The premises of the polygraph are two: first, that lying will involuntarily and inevitably lead to a quickening of the monitored physical processes in the person tested (the "respondent," in the jargon of the trade) and, second, that lying is the only explanation for heightened vital signs...

...Listen, I don't know anything about polygraphs and I don't know how accurate they are, but I know they'll scare the hell out of people.' -President Richard M. Nixon July 14, 1971 BY FRANCISJ, FLAHERTY Ronald Reagan had had enough...

...Former American Polygraph Association President J. Kirk Barefoot, testifying about an anti-polygraph bill before the Senate Subcommittee on the Constitution in 1977, estimated that "three of four employes handling money or merchandise steal from their employers" and that "three out of five business bankruptcies result from employe theft...

...Although they agree that incompetent polygraphers make things worse, civil libertarians and labor unions oppose any licensing law, no matter how stringent...

...The "clinical lie" test, a popular technique, requires the examiner to judge whether the respondent's "behavior symptoms" (avoidance of eye contact, a dry mouth) suggest deceptiveness...

...The polygraph is a simple machine...

...Governmental employers regularly use the polygraph...

...Or should we, by not banning polygraphs, signal to workers that their dignity is expendable when their bosses' profits are at stake...

...Have you ever had any extramarital affairs...

...Confessions extracted with the aid of lie detectors are often sus'You Go Home Feeling Like a Thief Pear Sir: Upon applying for a job at_Bank...

...A confession often follows...

...Did you ever attempt suicide...

...But what do we say to the business being ripped off by its workers...

...Her persuasive and outraged testimony about the experience led the Minnesota legislature to ban such tests...

...Professor Ramos cites the case of Wil-loughby Peerless, a large East Coast camera store chain, which sustained annual inventory shrinkages of 13 to 14 per cent at-its Philadelphia outlet...

...HH hough the cktims of its accuracy B are doubtful, its potential for S abuse great, and its threat to hull man dignity clear, the polygraph I must be seen for what it is: an attempt by American business to protect itself (and the consumers who pay the crime-incurred markup on goods...

...A lie detector, its proponents claim, records the "internal blushes" of a liar...

...I took the lie detector test feeling very much like a criminal...

...The lobbying is intense: On one side stand the multi-million-dollar business-security industry and such concerned employers as banks, armored-car companies, and drug and jewelry retailers, and opposing them are labor unions and civil-liberties groups...

...Some firms prefer tighter inventory control to the polygraph...

...In whatever way the lie detector may be used, some business executives and polygraphers are quick to testify to its effectiveness...

...Other employers see in the polygraph an opportunity to enforce their values and antipathies: "Are you a homosexual...

...Because few laws restrict the types of questions allowed in polygraph examinations, some employers ask questions more relevant to ideology and voyeurism than to employment...

...But, in one sense, the accuracy question is irrelevant to the polygraph debate...

...The questions go on through two pages...