Customizing a Polygraph to a Particular Culture

How You Lie Depends on Where You Are From

Sarah Laskow | June 25, 2015

This is a universal truth: human beings are terrible at spotting liars. Say you're in a situation with two people, where one is making a statement—it might be true, it might be false—and the other person is trying to determine if that person is lying. The likelihood that you're going to make the right choice is around 54 percent —just above what you'd get if you guessed randomly. Even tests for detecting deception—not just old-school polygraphs but scans for behavioral cues and newer, brain-scanning lie detectors—are questionably accurate.
...But lie detection is not just practiced by Americans on Americans. In Turkey, a team of researchers recently created a polygraph customized to Turkish culture, since as Professor Nevzat Tarhan told the Hurriyet Daily News, “That which can be considered a ‘lie’ by regular polygraphs used in the West may not be considered a lie by Turkish people."

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