How Can You Cheat a Lie Detector?

You know that a polygraph (lie detector) is now frequently used not only in criminology, but also in a usual business. If you are going to apply to a high position in a company, you’ll be likely to pass a lie detector once a year. If you’re looking for the ways that will help you to beat a lie detector, you’ve come to the right place.

First of all, let’s answer one question: why is a lie detector still used by many companies if it can be so easily cheated? Basically, it’s not difficult to answer the interviewer’s questions without blood pressure raising, a rapid heartbeat and other biophysical changes (body’s state is exactly what the program was designed to measure). The point is that your cheating will be soon exposed. For this purpose, you will be asked simple questions during the first twenty minutes of the test, which will allow the examiner to set up a lie detector specifically for you.

In other words, your homogeneous reaction to all questions of the lie detector may not prove your lie but it definitely won’t help you. So you shouldn’t suppress your emotions. Instead you need to react correctly to the key words of the test. Thus, answering the questions, your task is to provoke fake reactions to completely harmless questions, which theoretically can excite you (for instance, about the family) and hide your emotions by lying to provocative ones.

General Tips

Provoking fake reactions to harmless questions is pretty easy and can be achieved with the help of various physical stimuli (like a pin in your boots or muscle tension) as well as different thoughts. Try thinking about porno, squaring a double-digit number, or concentrating on the pattern on the wall, etc.

One of the ideal ways to cheat a lie detector is acting. Any good actor will easily pass a polygraph if he simply believes in his own lie. After all, if you yourself believe in your fictitious story, for you it will not be a lie, but the truth, and therefore the body will react in the way you need. If you have no idea how to do it, here are some effective tips.

To believe in your own lie, you should prepare the story in advance, think about each detail so that while telling this story, you wouldn’t need to make it up as you go along. The details in this case are very important. Colors, smells, your mood at that moment are the proposed circumstances, and if you keep them in mind, you’ll completely immerse yourself in the atmosphere of your lies.

While cheating a polygraph, don’t be afraid of excessive emotions, on the contrary, use and transform them. For example, turn you fear to anger, repentance to humility etc. To control blood pressure, you can bit the tip of your tongue between polygraph’s questions or when the interviewer is distracted. The last but not the least, control your breaths. Breathe in every 2–4 seconds. It’s also not recommended to hold your breath because of a rapid heartbeat.

How to Cheat a Polygraph? Countermeasures

Today prectically everybody believes that a polygraph is super-effective. Small errors are usually told to be unqualified specialists’ fault but the reliability of the technology is never called into question. This myth is supported by both the polygraph examiners themselves and other individuals and businesses. First of all, people support the idea about polygraph’s reliability to create commercial demand for this kind of service.

Secondly, they do it to exert psychological pressure on the testees, depriving them of their will to resist and thus increasing the effectiveness of the tests. This approach helps to ensure victory even before the battle starts. Thirdly, there’re some socio-psychological aspects of this phenomenon. Even in the ancient times people knew that the crowd’s fear and admiration of something powerful and mysterious are the basic of controlling people.

That’s why, when the test starts, examiners usually try to inspire the “victim” with the idea of the futility of resisting the lie detector. They will tell you in a friendly manner that the lie detector “sees everything” and it will be impossible to cheat it. So the first thing you need to do to beat a polygraph is to overcome you fear of it. Remember that a lie detector can’t read your mind and thus learn something about you. It only records the state of your body during the test. And a polygraph, like any machine, can be cheated.

You can take one of 3 most popular countermeasures to beat a lie detector. Their detailed description can be easily found on the Net. Let’s take a brief look at them.

Lower Your Sensitivity

In particular, you need to try to lower the sensitivity of your own sensory analyzers. For this purpose you can simply drink alcohol a day before the test. In this way, you’ll become weakly sensitive, your reactions will be slow and you won’t be able to react objectively to external stimuli. As a result, the lie detector won’t be able to make definite conclusions.

Another way is to take special medicin. However, you must know and understand your body’s reactions to chemicals. In other words, if the testee has taken psychotropic substances for the first time, it may be a new mental state for him/her and he/she may behave inappropriately, which will be immediately noticed. You can also try non-chemical methods. For instance, don’t sleep for several days. Because of a chronic lack of sleep, a person falls into a state close to trance (something btw. sleep and wakefulness). So the physiological reaction to all questions will be equally insignificant. But note that an experienced polygraph examiner will surely notice it.

Suppress Your Emotions

Another way to beat a lie detector is to suppress all emotions in the way that no stimulus causes a reaction. In other words, you should try to answer all questions automatically, without paying any attention to them. You just need to focus on the flower near the window or think about one of your childhood memories. This method requires an ability to self-concentrate, anyway, it’s rather effective.

Train Your Reactions

This approach states that what matters is not the absence of a reaction, but the ability to show the desired reaction, meaning that your replies must look natural. If you want to provoke a reaction to a question, just try to multiply a few multi-digit numbers in your mind or think about something that causes fury or sexual emotion.

For instance, if you don’t want to show that you’re homosexual, it’s necessary to multiply numbers in your mind when you are asked, “Do you prefer women?” And when you need to pretend to be a homosexual (e.g. to get out of the army duty), you should multiply numbers when you’re asked, “Do you prefer having sex with people of your gender?” Thus, the sexual reaction to pictures from your imagination “overlaps” with the asked question and it seems that it was the question that caused such a reaction. With a certain sensitivity, willpower and skill, this method works.

The physiological reactions specific to psychological stress can be also caused by pain. Some people even thought out to put a pin in a boot and to press it when they need to cause fake reaction. You can also create fake reactions by the tension of your muscles, but you should do it in the way that the examiner couldn’t notice it. For example, you can press you tongue to the hard palate. However, now it’s difficult to hide this movements from examiners because even an amateur polygraph examiner knows this way of beating a lie detector. Besides, the test is often recorded on video cameras and even slight movements of your face are easily detected. So be careful while using this method. Remember that any suspicious or ambiguous behavior will be interpreted not in your favor.

Sum Up

In conclusion, let’s check again what methods are widely used to beat a lie detector. They include controlling your breath and blood pressure, believing in your lie and acting, lowering sensitivity by drinking alcohol, taking special medicine or a lack of sleep, and suppressing your emotions. Note that every method requires preliminary training if you really want to cheat a lie detector. If you have any kind of experience in beating a polygraph, comment this article and share your own tips with me.