Offender
Profiling Series: Vol 1
Interviewing and Deception
Edited by David Canter & Laurence Alison
(1999)
back to Interviewing
& Deception
Interviewing and Deception
Eitan Elaad
A Comparative Study of Polygraph Tests
and Other Forensic Methods
An attempt was made to compare the accuracy of two
major polygraph methods, used in criminal investigations by the Israeli
police, with other common criminal identification methods such as: fingerprint
identification; voice identification; handwriting identification and
eyewitness identification. Results indicated that three methods were
free of false positive errors; fingerprint identification, the guilty
knowledge polygraph test (GKT) and natural handwriting identification.
While the more subjective handwriting identification task seemed to
be rather easy, fingerprint identification and the GKT are standard
and relatively objective procedures that require more expertise. Furthermore,
they differ from the handwriting identification procedure by providing
control over the probability of false positive errors.
Eitan Elaad has been with the National Police of Israel since 1976. He received his Ph.D. in psychology from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1988. He is a member of the Society for Psychophysiological Research (SPR) and for many years lectured in the Department of Criminology at Bar-Llan University. His research has focused on psychophsiological detection of deception and concealed knowledge. He also studied social factors which have influence on deception and its detection, forensic methods and decision making processes.
