Talk:Polygraph

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Effective

Johndoe2230 I don't know what you mean by "are 98% effective". Effectiveness is neither reliability nor validity, so I don't know what you mean. I cannot make heads or tails of it. How do you define effectiveness? How do you measure it? What are WP:RS for it? What you wrote is grammatically correct, but it does not have meaning. In plaintext: tell us where did you read that polygraph examinations are 98% effective. Tgeorgescu (talk) 23:02, 16 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Data and sources are so important! I also noticed that there are about 5 sources or so that were published within the last 5 years. There are great articles related to polygraphs and deception that are a little bit more updated. Everything else is from decades ago.. AmarillaAerre (talk) 14:32, 5 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

"Junk science"?

Even though a few sources are cited, should it really be referred to as "junk science"? This doesn't sound very neutral. 2601:49:8400:26B:F89F:F8CE:B532:A6BB (talk) 14:01, 4 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]

"Neutral" does not mean "some say this, some say that" on Wikipedia. It means "follow where the sources go". See WP:FALSEBALANCE. --Hob Gadling (talk) 14:13, 4 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]

An opinion stated as a fact

The article says: "Marston's machine indicated a strong positive correlation between systolic blood pressure and lying." This sounds like a fact, while it only describes Marston's claims.

Question

In the lede it says "often incorrectly referred to as a lie detector test"; why is this term incorrect? I'm not necessarily against it, but it's not very clear why it's incorrect. xRozuRozu (t • c) 00:34, 15 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

There's a pretty good explanation at the end of that paragraph. (The machine is detecting physiologic responses that may or may not be associated with a lie.) Larry Hockett (Talk) 00:42, 15 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]