Skip to main content

What is "statement analysis"?

Image result for Maury Povich


According to its admirers, something called "statement analysis" is the new breakthrough in forensic science.

It is also sometimes called SCAN (scientific content analysis). It will replace the polygraph in law enforcement.  Maury Povich will start using it on his show.

What is this miracle?

http://skepdic.com/statementanalysis.html

Statement (or content) analysis is the notion that there are linguistic give-aways to whether someone is telling the truth.  And well, yes, as a matter of common sense and interrogatory experience this is true, the give-aways work as a matter of generality. There is nothing scientific about them.

After all, the usual give aways are well known to experienced frauds, who adapt their stories accordingly. "Don't add too much irrelevant detail to your story, they take that as suspicious," one con artist must commonly tell another. Here we stumble upon one of the great distinctions between the human and the physical sciences. Pluto doesn't care whether we call it a planet or not. Con artists definitely care that we should not call them con artists, and adapt their orbits accordingly.

That's a difference that messes with many attempts to apply "science" to psychology and social interactions.

Suppose a lot of con men learn that the "forensic scientists" are looking for those unnecessary details. They start making their lies leaner. Not only do they not get caught this way, but false positives increase as well. After all, what honest person does not include an irrelevant detail once in a while? Those details start to stand out as the real crooks get leaner.  But then the SCAN types presumably will catch up to that and reverse their rule. And the teeter-totter will continue swinging.

That's a playground toy, not a science.

I'll let you follow the link to the Skeptic's Dictionary above for more information.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge.   We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a maj...
9 comments
Read more

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere.  At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak...
17 comments
Read more

Recent Controversies Involving Nassim Taleb, Part I

I've written about Nassim Taleb on earlier occasions in this blog. I'll let you do the search yourself, dear reader, for the full background. The short answer to the question "who is Taleb?" is this: he is a 57 year old man born in Lebanon, educated in France, who has been both a hedge fund manager and a derivatives trader. He retired from active participation from the financial world sometime between 2004 and 2006, and has been a full-time writer and provocateur ever since. Taleb's writings for the general public began where one might expect -- in the field where he had made his money -- and he explained certain financial issues to a broad audiences in a very dramatic non-technical way. Since then, he has widened has fields of study, writing about just about everything, applying the intellectual tools he honed in that earlier work. As you might have gather from the above, I respect Taleb, though I have sometimes been critical of him when my own writing ab...
4 comments
Read more