Possible approaches to assessing the professional reliability of specialists.

Possible approaches to assessing the professional reliability of specialists.

Chekhovsky L.V.
State Research
Testing Institute of Military Medicine
Moscow

Possible approaches to assessing the professional reliability of specialists

Source: Proceedings of the international scientific and practical conference
«Current status and development prospects of the instrumental
 «lie detection» method in the interests of state and public security»
(December 2-4, 2008)

The problem of staffing state governing bodies, law enforcement agencies, and, in fact, any organizations of various forms of ownership is extremely acute and currently causes certain difficulties. Everyone understands perfectly well that the implementation of certain legislative acts, various kinds of directive documents, orders, instructions depends entirely on specific individuals implementing their provisions. The latter are far from always guided by good intentions and, unfortunately, quite often use their official position for other purposes that are contrary to the interests of society and, which is dangerous, sometimes even for the implementation of criminal intentions. This circumstance served as the reason for the search for and development of various methods and techniques for assessing the reliability of personnel.

Recently, publications and broadcasts have often been encountered in the press, on television, and on the radio, advertising the prospects of using polygraph tests for these purposes. But to what extent is it justified to consider this method the only possible one in the practice of professional selection and control of an individual during his or her professional activity?

The point is not only that the declared almost 100% reliability indicators of personnel screening studies raise certain doubts. In this regard, we note that, judging by the literature, many Western specialists are not so optimistic about this method. Thus, D. Raskin, D. Lykken, P. Ekman are categorically against the use of polygraphs «for preliminary testing upon hiring.» It is also worth recalling the relatively recent speech of M. Cai at a conference in Moscow, who noted in his report that the accuracy of the polygraph method and its reliability is and continues to be the subject of major scientific and public debate, especially when this method is used for the purposes of preliminary and even decisive testing.

In our opinion, some diagnostic difficulties in printing are largely due, first of all, to the lack of a theoretical basis adequate to the internal structural and functional organization of a person.

The standard algorithm of polygraph diagnostics is based on the empirically understandable principle of comparing the initial data with the measurements obtained in the «stimulus — response» complex. That is, the emotional stimulus causes a certain vegetative reaction, the parameters of which are recorded (changes in heart rate, changes in breathing parameters, galvanic skin response, etc.). However, the conceptual uncertainty of the semantic reliability of the obtained results remains. They (the results) are clarified by a system of questions that reduce the dispersion of the conclusion. At the same time, it is well known that any objective data can be subjected to other statistical processing and the corresponding logical interpretation to obtain other conclusions. Moreover, P. Ekman, attaching extremely high importance to the specificity of emotional signs of deception, considers one of the main disadvantages of polygraphs to be their ability to note only the degree of excitation of the autonomic nervous system and the impossibility of using them to reveal the nature of emotions.Apparently, this is the reason for the opinion held by many researchers that there are still no scientific studies confirming how accurately polygraphy methods detect lies in screening studies. Judging the accuracy of test results, as they believe, based on the experience of operational investigative activities, is impossible, since here the tests are carried out by completely different people than criminals, who may be outraged by the need to undergo such a procedure. The latter circumstance will definitely create a certain emotional background, which can have a significant impact on the results of the study.

The question of the price of lies should not be discounted. What is at stake when investigating crimes and what is at stake when hiring are significantly different in terms of possible consequences. And since the stakes are lower in the latter case, the fear of exposure in liars will be much less pronounced, therefore, physiological changes may not have pronounced manifestations. On the other hand, for many people the opportunity to get a job (service) can be of a sacramental nature, they may be afraid that they will be misjudged and it is this fear that can cause an incorrect assessment. It should also be taken into account that the reactions recorded by the polygraph can greatly depend on the individual characteristics of the person or his condition at the time of the examination. One cannot ignore the possible presence of good self-regulation skills in the subjects, which, against the background of the low price of the issue during screening, can negate the reliability of the information received.

Of great importance in the effectiveness of polygraph tests in general, and screening tests in particular, are the professional qualities of the verifier, whose professionalism is determined not only by the initial knowledge and experience, but also by human qualities (the ability to establish contact with the subject, to form the necessary level of motivation, etc.). Unfortunately, at present, a conveyor belt for training these specialists has been activated, and to what extent this is justified is a separate issue.

In our opinion, another detail is of no small importance. This refers to the labor intensity of the polygraph examination procedure, the time spent on its implementation.

Having paid attention to these circumstances, we assumed that the results of some of our studies could be of interest to specialists who are concerned with personnel issues. The fact is that our area of ​​interest includes such problems as professional and psychological selection, assessment of the functional state of the body in the process of professional activity, problems of psychosomatic diseases, assessment of the degree of emotional stress when performing certain tasks, including when extreme situations arise. If we rely on the information theory of emotions, then we can reasonably assume that a person in the process of lying usually experiences a state of emotional stress, which often develops into the so-called state of emotional tension, the physiological parameters of which are recorded using a polygraph.

We also try to establish the fact of emotional stress using psychophysiological methods in various ways, and we believe that there is a fundamental possibility of adapting them for the interests of personnel screening. In particular, the results we have obtained indicate that speech signal analysis is quite informative in this regard. However, the reliability of voice stress analyzers based on the analysis of the fundamental tone frequency and intensity of the voice signal is highly questionable. However, if it is supplemented by the study of temporal and psycholinguistic characteristics of speech, the degree of reliability will increase significantly. Obviously, this presupposes a free style of communication with the inductor and the ability to correctly formulate the tactics of the conversation, during which he gives answers to the same neutral, control and verification questions, but in an expanded form. We solved this problem using the Ikar-lab device manufactured by the Speech Technology Center (St. Petersburg). The disadvantage of the method is its significant labor intensity (processing is carried out virtually manually) and the need for a trained specialist.Another method we have tested is the analysis of thermal images of a human face. We simulated situations that cause emotional stress. With a properly set up experiment, we reliably obtained changes in the thermal image from exposed areas of facial skin. The localization of «temperature zones» is individual for each person, the dynamics of temperature changes are high enough to determine the moment of development and decline of stress. Interestingly, the intake of alcohol, sedatives, antipyretics did not have a significant effect on the dynamics of changes in temperature zones. We consider the method promising, but it requires not only methodological, but also hardware and software and mathematical refinement. In particular, we believe that the use of commercially available thermal imaging devices will cause certain difficulties due to the characteristics of the lenses, the sensitivity of the matrices, etc.

However, one point should be noted. It is known that a person can hide true knowledge about some subject, situation, action. But he can also hide some features of his character, true motives of his behavior, attitudes, pathological inclinations and official and economic ambitions. And, what is important, some of them can be of an unconscious nature. An individual himself may not know why in a certain situation he can perform this or that action or is already acting this way. That is, the formed attitudes, character traits, pathological inclinations, official ambitions play a decisive role in shaping people's behavior in various situations, are the cause of certain of their actions and they can be the root cause that prompts illegal actions. Consequently, there is a problem of obtaining the maximum possible information about a person's inner world, since it can play a significant role in the correct selection of personnel, the appointment of people to responsible positions. And this, in turn, presupposes the need to study a person's inner world.

Until relatively recently, psychological testing procedures using form methods were used to solve this problem, but their effectiveness is relatively low, which is due, on the one hand, to their low specificity, and on the other hand, to the labor intensity of analyzing the primary material. (By specificity we mean the inability to adapt them to certain risk factors that are standard for a particular organization) The problem of specificity is not solved by developing appropriate computer programs based on these methods. In addition, in psychological methods, the emotional-expressive component of human behavior during testing, which makes it possible to identify a real attitude to a particular stimulus at a given moment in time, is dropped from the analysis.

To a large extent, the problem of specificity is being solved, as already indicated, by using a polygraph to identify risk factors when hiring personnel, as well as during their scheduled and random (unscheduled) checks. At the same time, S.I. Ogloblin and A.Yu. Molchanov propose to understand risk factors as «antisocial or asocial, as well as anti-corporate acts (fact!) that take place in the biography of a candidate or an existing employee (worker) and are considered unacceptable in a given organization»

We draw attention to the word «fact». By the way, what if the fact had behind it events of an extraordinary nature and a situation arises that can be characterized by the well-known everyday expression about «liver collapse».

To a significant (if not full) extent, the problem of specificity, labor intensity, ensuring the possibility of analyzing the emotional-expressive component of an individual's behavior and, importantly, removing the verifier beyond the boundaries of the verification procedure, has the method of egoscopy developed by a team of researchers from the State Research and Testing Institute of Military Medicine of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation in cooperation with the Medikom MTD company in Taganrog and the NPC Firm NELK CJSC, as well as with the corresponding hardware and software.

We pay special attention to removing the verifier beyond the boundaries of the research procedure, since, and this is emphasized by many researchers, the success of the study is largely determined not only by his professional, but also by his personal qualities, which determine the degree of the psychotraumatic effect of the procedure or, as S.I. Ogloblin and A.Yu. Molchanov say, «establishing and maintaining psychological contact.»

The development was based on the main postulates of the theory of virtualistics, the authors of which are representatives of Russian science. In the practical implementation of the new concept, we found that the greatest information content was demonstrated by projective pictographic and associative methods in combination with synchronous measurement of some psychophysiological parameters.

The egoscopy method is based on the joint analysis of trends in physiological indicators and parameters of behavioral activity when performing specific tasks of diagnostic scenarios with a special pen on a special tablet. That is, during the testing process, the parameters of the pictographic activity of the subject are recorded and analyzed on a special sensory graphic tablet synchronously with polygraphic signals (EEG, ECG, GSR, PPG, breathing, EMG, etc.).

The parameters of behavioral activity are quantitative indicators calculated based on pen movement trends on paper and the degree of pressure on the pen (up to 256 gradations of the degree of pressure on the pen are recognized), as well as latent periods of delay before completing a task and before moving on to the next task.

To conduct egoscopic studies, we developed a basic set of scenarios that develop known methods. At the same time, the possibility of adapting scenarios by the user to solve various specialized problems is included.

This allows us to evaluate and present the structure of intrapersonal conflict after psychological trauma and/or information impact, the structure of the discrepancy between the I-structures as the cause of neurosis and/or inadequate behavior, the structure and significance of addictions, inclinations, bad habits, interpersonal and professional consistency, conscious lies and unconscious (ritual) lies.

The fundamental differences between the egoscopy method and other methods of personality research are:

• a new approach that combines and complements the advantages of projective methods of personality research and assessment of emotional reactions accompanying the performance of tasks based on the analysis of trends in physiological indicators;

• auto-documentation of projective methods, including automatic saving of the results of the implementation of projective methods (drawing, writing), using a graphic tablet.

• ease of working with the obtained graphic images (grouping, scaling, centering, merging, sorting), as well as various printing options.

• original methods of data processing, representing a cumulative analysis of physiological reactions related to different body systems (ANS, CNS) and behavioral activity parameters.

• the technology of conducting the study and the structure of the scenarios are built in such a way as to minimize the possibility of influencing the results of processing by various psychological defenses and targeted attempts to distort information.

• unlike the emotional involvement of a traditional polygraph examiner in lie detection, the analyst in egoscopy is taken outside the testing procedure. This raises his legal status to the level of an impartial expert, operating with reliable results of scientific research using the device as an indifferent recorder.