A control question test oriented towards students.

Full Abstract

Control Question Tests were altered for 12 of 24 students who were examined with a polygraph about a mock crime which half of them had committed. The altered tests substituted control questions about students' cheating and plagiarism for the standard questions about crime issues. Responses to the altered tests were compared with those from tests using regular control questions which are usually about criminal issues. All tests were conducted by a professor. Detection scores derived from response magnitudes of skin resistance differed between innocent (M = 2.0) and guilty participants (M = -1.9). Guilt and innocence interacted with the type of test. Those examined with control questions oriented towards students scored as more innocent when actually innocent (M = 4.3) than guilty students examined with the student form (M = -3.0) or the crime form (M = -0.8) of the test and innocent students (M = -0.3) examined with control questions oriented towards crimes. The discussion is augmented by results from a direct analysis of magnitude of scores.

Author information

Author/s: Bradley, M T (MT); Black, M E (ME);

Affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of New Brunswick, Saint John, Canada. Bradley(-atsign-)Unbsj.ca

Journal and publication information

Publication Type: Journal Article

Journal: Perceptual and motor skills (Percept Mot Skills), published in UNITED STATES. (Language: eng)

Reference: 1998-Oct; vol 87 (issue 2) : pp 691-700

Dates: Created 1999/01/19; Completed 1999/01/19; Revised 2004/11/17;

PMID: 9842625, status: MEDLINE (last retrieved date: 2/18/2009)

Sourced from the National Library of Medicine. Abstract text and other information may be subject to copyright.

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