Seeing the Lie in Detectors

Washington is finally tumbling to the truth about lie detectors. The U.S. Senate has followed the House of Representatives in voting, by a big margin, to ban polygraph tests in about 85% of the situations in which American companies now use them to examine employees.

It would make better law if the ban were complete, but that approach also would make no law at all. President Reagan would veto a blanket ban, and there is even a chance that he will veto this bill--although the odds in favor of some kind of polygraph restraints are the best that they have been in 25 years.

The truth about the lie detector--as John Gibbons, the director of the Office of Technology, said five years ago--is that it is “more of a fear detector.” The office is a congressional think tank that was created to study technology and its effect on society.

No matter how hard polygraph operators hawk their services, there is no evidence that the machines can pick a culprit out of a crowd. Bad guys can hide the truth from the machine, and good guys can choke up. What the tests show about a person’s heart beat, pulse, rate of breathing and perspiration depends a lot on the polygraph operator. Different operators can read the same results in different ways.

As a result, according to Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah), a conservative who sponsored the polygraph legislation with Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) in a team that the Senate found irresistible, “some 320,000 honest Americans are branded as liars every single year.”

The bill passed by the House last November and last week’s Senate measure are not identical, and it will take a conference committee as long as a month to iron out the differences. The White House obviously will be involved in negotiations, because the President prefers the Senate bill to the House bill, having already threatened to veto the House version.

California is sort of above this battle, having known the truth about lie detectors for some time. It is unlawful in this state to compel an employeeto take a lie-detector test either to get a job or to keep a job. Neither the Senate nor the House would offer that level of protection to other Americans. But even if the congressional measure is second best, it should be approved and signed into law. Anything to kill the myth that machines can know the truth where humans cannot.