Now Bill was leaving. A second examiner had joined me meanwhile in the darkened room, and the two examiners, who said they had gone to a different polygraph school than Mr. Probe, explained that they used different techniques to try to check a man out on homosexuality without putting the question to him directly. While the machine is on they ask one or more of these questions:
“Have you had any past or present physical ailments we should know about?”
“Are you holding back something important that was not covered in the examination?”
“Are you holding back information, any incident or condition, which might open you up to blackmail?”
One of the men added, laughing, “If you really throw the homo question to them directly while the machine is on the needles really jump.”
With Bill safely gone, Mr. Probe joined our discussion.
He said Bill looked “real good” on the second chart. As far as homosexuality was concerned, there was nothing suspicious in his responses to the question about physical or mental ailments, or source of shame, he said, and added: “If I had been really concerned about this homosexuality in a job where he was going to be working, for example with youngsters, I would have thrown the question at him during the test itself.” But here, he said, there was nothing definite. “I may verbally mention to the client his theatrical background and may mention he needs watching.”
The examiners wanted me to watch more tests; but I said I had had enough. I had had enough to the point of nausea.
Subsequently I dropped Mr. Probe a note requesting a summary of the report he turned in on Bill. He sent me an extract. It noted the discrepancy about a college degree and the fact that he had been unable to state flatly that he was seeking permanent employment. But he did give Bill credit for being honest and pointed out that while slightly nervous on the second test there had been no specific reaction to any of the pertinent questions. And then, in his letter to me, he concluded:
“In rendering a verbal report of results of the interview and examination to our client . . . I pointed out that I did not have any substantiating evidence on which to conclude that this man had possible homosexual [sic] tendencies, but that it was a great possibility. I then advised our client of the discussion I had with the applicant regarding homosexual activities. It was recommended that should the client organization be desirous of ascertaining whether or not this Subject had homosexual tendencies that we could conduct a background investigation or re-examine him on the polygraph at a later date.”
In short, on no basis other than hunch based on facts already presumably stated in Bill’s application about his environmental background, Mr. Probe had raised in the prospective employer’s mind a terrible question (in our society) about Bill’s manliness.
It should be further noted that most if not all of the derogatory points he reported came not from anything on the polygraph charts but were based on facts discussed while the machine was not turned on!
This fact alone would lead the author to concur with the statement of psychiatrist Joost A. M. Meerloo that the lie detector is primarily a “tool for mental intimidation.” Two Harvard psychologists and a graduate student in industrial management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who made a study of the polygraph as an examining tool reported much the same conclusion. The squiggles intimidate. As for the machine itself, these investigators pointed out that, though lying will produce physiological changes, “other factors often produce physiological changes which are very similar. For example there is the real danger that the changes which occur are not the result of a ‘feeling of guilt’ itself, but rather of recalling some information, or of a shift in attention, or perhaps a sudden fear of the consequences of being pronounced guilty.”2 Their report was entitled “Don’t Trust the Lie Detector.”
The three investigators concluded that the lie detectors might at best be 70 per cent accurate in drawing out truth. Major practitioners such as Dale and Reid claim 95 to 98 per cent accuracy. But such claims usually carry the qualifying phrase, “in the hands of a competent examiner.”
If there is such a thing as a competent examiner, he is not much in evidence. Except in a few states (notably New Mexico and Kentucky) just about anyone can set himself up in business as a polygraph examiner by reading a book. Reid reportedly hires only college graduates and certifies them for polygraph work only after a six-month apprenticeship. But most of the polygraph schools run about six weeks and may require no college training whatever. (Enthusiasts of the polygraph talk of improving its accuracy by adding devices that will measure brain waves, heart action, and eye twitching.)
As to the ethics of forcing job-seekers to submit to such a degrading experience, one comment seems appropriate. Any company that treats its future employees to such an indignity deserves the worst from those employees in terms of loyalty, commitment, and honesty—and probably will get it. One hopeful development is that unions are finally starting to fight the polygraph and seeking legislation to get it outlawed. Perhaps they became alarmed because the examiners in some instances were grilling employees or applicants about union activities. Such questions have now been ruled unlawful by the National Labor Relations Board. Unions in general have been so preoccupied with meat-and-potatoes issues in the past that they have paid too little attention to trends in the modern work world that are operating to undermine individual privacy and human dignity.
3. The Use of Personality Tests
Each year considerably more than a million job-seekers must bare themselves to a battery of personality and other psychological tests before they are hired. Since the wide-scale use of such devices for screening job applicants has already been quite thoroughly explored,3 I shall confine myself here to noting some of the privacy-intrusion aspects. For example, upon reexamining one of several batteries of tests and forms I completed or examined a couple of years ago while posing as an aspiring manager or making believe I was one, I find I was requested to supply the following quite personal facts about myself (along with many more):
—What I think of my mother and father.
—Whether I find my children upsetting.
—How often I am bothered by either constipation or loose bowel movements.
—The degree to which I am disturbed by marital troubles at home.
—How much I am disturbed by loneliness, feelings of guilt, frightening dreams.
—How close I think I am to a nervous breakdown.
—Whether I consider myself ugly.
—How much I am troubled by itching.
—How far my wife, father, and mother got in school.
—Whether I am at all worried about my health.
And here are some of the sentences I was instructed to complete:
“One of the things wrong with me . . .”
“My greatest fear is . . .”
“I failed . . .”
“Most girls . . .”
“I suffer . . .”
“My greatest worry . . .”
Business critic Alan Harrington sees these test forms so widely used as a new type of confessional. “Instead of confessing to God through a priest or confessing to one’s self through a psychologist, the Corporate Man confesses to the Form,” he stated. “He acknowledges his strengths and weaknesses as they have been defined by others.”
A great deal of confessing is taking place. Most of the nation’s major corporations as well as hundreds of smaller ones will employ only applicants who have been psychoscreened. Virtually every aspiring manager under the age of thirty already has gone through at least one testing of his personality at some stage during the past decade.