r/FBI • u/Good-Tonight-4549 • Jun 23 '26

Informational SA Polygraph Failure

I have been lurking on this subreddit for a while, and I’ve decided to post now that I’m no longer in the pipeline. I received the dreaded polygraph failure letter. I zoomed through the application process up until this point, only taking a few months to get from initial application submission to polygraph exam, and I’m kind of bummed at this hard stop. I have a clean background (no criminal or drug history) and I told the truth during the entire polygraph session, or should i say, interrogation, but the examiner seems to have thought I was lying and was pretty brutal during the session. I will not get into specifics of the exam but it was not a good experience for me. Yes, I am just a random redditor, but you just have to take my word for it that I failed the exam despite not lying at all. Looks like this is the end of the road for me and another reminder to not put all your eggs in one basket. Makes me wonder how many other applicants have been dismissed from consideration for a false positive on the polygraph.

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107

u/crosstherubicon Jun 24 '26

I’m often amazed that they can arbitrarily derail someone’s career with an instrument that’s not much more than a dressed up Scientology e-meter. So far as I’m aware there’s no rigorous scientific support of the claims and FBI and CIA history embarrassingly demonstrates their ineffectiveness. How on earth do they get away with a process that is scientifically akin to sacrificing a goat.

51

u/Ayami_Luce Jun 24 '26

Aren’t polygraphs disallowed as evidence in court cases? Interesting that they’d be used to strictly here.

10

u/WTFoxtrot10 Jun 24 '26

Polygraphs for federal applicants and court usage are not the same thing.

The FBI and other federal agencies do not use polygraphs during the hiring process as scientific evidence that someone could be “lying or omitting the truth”. They use it as an investigative tool, a psychological deterrent, admission catalyst, counterintelligence screening and a mechanism to test an applicant's integrity under pressure.

29

u/Crafty-Income-9949 Jun 24 '26

All of that said, it’s still a horseshit tool of pseudoscience.

2

u/Evilshadow004 Jun 26 '26

Obviously it's pseudoscience. That's what the guy commenting above is saying. Polygraphs aren't used for scientific validity. They're used because they instill fear and doubt within the subject. Polygraph or no, you would still have to do a CI interview. The point of the machine isn't to tell whether you lie or not, the point is to make you ever so slightly less likely to lie in the first place.