How Beer Helped to Improve Statistical Analysis

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Statistical Significance

If you’ve ever had to measure the effectiveness of a new product or process design, you know how valuable significance testing can be. But did you know how beer made that testing much easier?

Relevance and significance are two of the most important concepts in modern statistical analysis. Relevance helps us to understand the connection between the research and the problem to be solved and significance tells us if that research represents a change that is greater than can be attributed to chance. While relevance is typically determined through methods of logic, significance is a purely mathematical exercise.

In most statistical trials, managers ask for large numbers of data points in order to reach a desired confidence level. Traditionally the magic number has been 30 data points. (Actually, there is no magic to the number 30. It just seems that in most distributions the standard error reduces to about 1.0 somewhere between 20 and 30 data points.)

 But what about when such large sample sizes are impractical?

Anyone who has ever taken an introductory class in statistics has learned to use the Student’s T-test of statistical significance. The “Student’s T-test” is one of the most basic tests of small-sample significance in statistics. But many people might be surprised to learn that it really has nothing to do with students, and almost everything to do with beer.

In 1906, William S. Gosset was a bright young chemist working for the Guiness Brewery in Ireland. Gosset developed a small-sample method for measuring the deviation of means in the production of Guiness’ dark beers. This allowed for accurate tests of significance without the need for excessively large sample sizes.

His method was so successful he submitted it for publication in Biometrika, a professional journal published by his friend and professor Karl Pearson. And here, believe it or not, is one of the few times in history where a story about math gets interesting.

A popular version holds that Guiness had a policy against its employees publishing their work. So Gossett compromised with his employer and used the pen name he had published under before: Student. Some still like to contend that Gosset never let his employer in on the fact that he was publishing and submitted his work under cloak and dagger. Probably not true, but makes for intriguing reading.

It is far more likely that Gosset published under Student because Guiness did not want its competitors to learn that it was using statistical analysis as a part of quality control. This was a new concept at the time and the brewery probably wanted to keep it under wraps as long as possible. That did little to diminish the drama, however, as the new formula only added to the animosity between Professor Pearson and one of his chief rivals R.A. Fisher, with whom he continued to bicker for many years.

And it all started over a glass of beer.

So, the next time you are tasked with testing the significance of a difference in means with a small-sample data trial, it might be appropriate to raise a glass of beer to good Mr. Gosset.

Improper Design of Experiment: How 1970s Sexism Almost Killed the Computer Revolution

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Sexism in Experiment Design

All the marketing research technologies in the world cannot overcome the disadvantages of poor research planning.

As marketers we get excited about the potential of advanced tools like neuromarketing and predictive analytics but they are rendered worthless when coupled with a poor design of experiment. The design of experiment (or DOE) helps us to structure our research questions to maximize the relevance of the results. In short: are we asking the right question and are we asking the right people? If the answer to either is no, then it really doesn’t matter what confidence level our research returns; the results are pointed in the wrong direction. As a statistics mentor of mine once said, significance without relevance is simply a way to go wrong with confidence.

In the 1970s, one company’s research team had struck gold in the fledgling personal computer industry. They had a phenomenal product and they were asking the right question. But, arguably due to a sexist view of a woman’s role in the workplace of the future, they asked the wrong people. They failed in design of experiment.

Birth of the Personal Computer Age

The personal computer, the mouse, email, word processing, the first paint program, the Ethernet and the laser printer were all created and introduced by one company in 1977. That company was Xerox. But a marketing blunder fueled in part by 1970s sexism sent each of these products out to be development by other companies.

In 1969, at Rochester, NY-based Xerox Corporation, CEO Peter McColough and his chief scientist Jacob Goldman had the foresight to steer the world’s leading copier maker directly into the computer age. They purchased a computer company in Palo Alto, CA and created a pure research facility filled with high tech equipment, bean bags, sodas and some of the brightest minds in the still young computer industry. The facility would become known as Palo Alto Research Center, or PARC, and it would develop for Xerox a modern personal computing paradise. And it would be lost.

A Stellar Nursery

When McColough and Goldman developed PARC they did everything right. They picked the right people, they made available the right resources and they gave it an almost unlimited budget for research and development. Its staff list was a veritable Who’s Who of the computing world: George Pake, Robert Taylor, Butler Lampson, Alan Kay, Adele Goldberg, Lynn Conway and many others.

Their directive was simple: Use your imagination and skills to determine where this company needs to go with computers. And that they did. Within seven years they had developed—or perfected—all the components of the modern personal computer. They had created for their Xerox bosses a desktop computer called the Alto featuring the first WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) display. The software package included the first word processing program. It could send email to other computers via the Ethernet, a new network protocol they developed just for that purpose. Documents could be printed out on a lightning-fast laser-driven printer. And the system could be controlled by a revolutionary pointing device they called a mouse.

Excitedly, they prepared to present their new system to the Xerox bosses.

Paradise Lost

The PARC team spent weeks preparing for their executive presentation. Believing that a live demonstration would make the most impact, they got several of the Xerox secretaries to help them train a handful of the executives for a live show. It was the 70s, and female secretaries did most of the real office work—typing, filing, communicating and scheduling. Who better to help train the male executives?

On November 10, 1977, the revolutionary system was presented to the Xerox brass at an aptly named event called Futures Day during a conference in Boca Raton, FL. The top executives watched as some of their counterparts took the stage, writing documents, sending messages back and forth to connected computers, controlling software with the space age pointing device and printing at the speed of light. But the dramatically staged presentation closed to the sound of crickets.

The executives were largely underwhelmed. Most of them were former copier salesmen who were used to rating their business success on the volume of a copier’s clicks—the copy counter, the currency of the old Xerox world that told the company how successful the machine was. The executives looked on this new hardware the way a 15th century sail maker might stare confusedly at a jet engine. They could not understand how to make use of this new world of digital connectivity and productivity.

But the people who could understand it were the executives’ wives. In that 1970s world of Xerox the salesmen’s wives were mostly former secretaries, the backbone of the office, the job description that included the tasks of typing, filing, scheduling, communications and planning that kept the office running, the very tasks this new system was designed to revolutionize. While the executives largely avoided the elaborate demonstration suites the engineers had set up to entertain post-demonstration interest, their wives flocked to it. They wanted to see the machine, the software, the new pointing device, and the laser printer. Their praise was effusive and on point. They knew this would be big stuff.

But, Xerox being a corporation of the era, listened to the silence of its executives. While top management hesitated, wondering what to do next with all this stuff, its architects quietly left to work for—or, in a few cases, found—such companies as Apple, Sun Microsystems, Microsoft and Adobe Systems. The revolution would take place elsewhere.

The Responsibility of Marketers

The failure of Xerox to exploit the fruits of PARC’s labor can’t be blamed entirely on myopic sexism; given the era, there surely were many companies with the same malady. What seems to have been missing was a voice of reason that could have helped top management and the engineers overcome their prejudices and direct their critical questions to the people who would best know the product’s potential.

As marketers, we are very rarely the innovators in our companies. But we generally are the best communicators, and we often understand better than most the complexity in the relationship between our products and our stakeholders. We have a responsibility to the innovators on our teams to help them understand the markets they are focused on, to see through the prejudices in the market place and to properly define the battle spaces where future revolutions will be taking place.

Helping talented engineers solve the right problem is a small part to play in a revolution. But it is no less critical.

________

Further Reading:

The definitive book on the Xerox PARC story is Michael Hiltzik’s Dealers of Lightning: XEROX PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age. It is a highly entertaining read with critical lessons for anyone in the fields of engineering or marketing.

How the Brain Connects Music to Advertising

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Music and Advertising

Originally Published May 2013

There’s little doubt that music improves the quality of advertising, or any visual presentation for that matter. But we rarely give much thought to the physiological factors that create music’s impact.

I should disclose up front that I am not a professional music theorist. My knowledge on the subject comes through the teachings of others and from some professional application. Although I’m an experienced drummer and visual artist, I can claim no original discovery in the field of music theory.

Understanding the Power of Music

The philosopher Plato, writing in his epic work The Republic, recognized that music had the ability to enter most powerfully into the innermost part of the soul and lay forcible hands upon it. He not only knew music’s power; he was somewhat wary of it. Plato, like many of the ancient philosophers of his day, was in love with rational thought and had no patience for any other type of thinking. In fact it is their prejudice handed down over hundreds of years that has led us to look down on irrational thoughts and actions. However Plato also knew that emotions could be powerful motivators of human behavior. And music seemed particularly able to evoke these emotions. But he had no idea why.

Most often when we ask anyone in the advertising business to quantify the positive effects of music, they turn first to a series of statistics showing the preference audiences have for ads and presentations that include a soundtrack. But what drives that preference? Would any music do? What’s the difference between music and noise? If music is universal, why don’t we all like the same kinds of music? Lots of questions. And, surprisingly, there are some answers.

Music is a complex structure of many components. Two of the most important, particularly from a physiological perspective, are rhythm and melody. Rhythm is the pulse and pattern that form the clock speed of music while melody contains the pitch profile, what we might refer to as the tune. Rhythms exist throughout nature and originate in our own bodies as heart rates and breathing rates.

Melody has roots in the natural world as well. Much like the Golden Mean and other mathematical ratios that provide a foundation for what we consider to be visual art, fixed ratios of pitch—believed to have first been identified by the philosopher Pythagoras—are perceived by the ear in a similar fashion and form the basis of how we distinguish music from noise.

Melodies are thought to mimic the pitch and frequency profiles of human emotions. Dirges and requiems have been said to imitate the wails and moans of sinners and mourners while the more upbeat works of happier composers reflect the quick, staccato exhalations of laughter. Other researchers have suggested that the similar pitches of sustained high notes on the violin and infants’ shrieks are what makes horror movie music so effective.

But to fully understand just how these aspects of music can affect the listener’s brain, it is helpful to review a little about the way incoming information is processed.

How the Brain Listens

The brain receives input from a variety of different channels—visual, auditory, olfactory, tactile, etc.—and this information is transduced into data streams that are coming in at varying data rates. This input goes through a bundle of neurons called the reticular activating system or RSA, which filters out very high data rate information (the 26 TVs and 18 conversations around you in a restaurant) and the very low data rate information (the clouds and sun moving across the sky).

The filtered sensory input then goes through the limbic system which consists of several different structures along a pathway known as the Papez circuit. The limbic system is an older part of the brain that was once thought to be the very center of emotion, and its structures have demonstrated the ability to store information that is emotionally important such as threats to our existence (negative emotions like fear) or experiences that make us exceedingly happy. These limbic structures compare incoming information to the stored copies and, if they find a match, they trigger a hypothalamic response through the autonomic nervous and endocrine systems that we perceive as a physiological change. In other words, we feel an emotional response.

All of this happens before any information is sent to the conscious neocortex. For instance, if you are in the woods and you notice something wiggle at your feet, your heart rate increases, your diaphragm contracts sharply, and you jump back with a sudden gasp before realizing it was just a piece of rope you had stepped on. The limbic system, based on visual information that matched that of a snake stored in memory, produced an autonomic response before the cortex had an opportunity to analyze what had actually happened.

Another relevant physiological function is entrainment, which is the body’s way of adapting to a new condition or environment. It can do this in a number of ways—physically, biochemically, etc.—and it’s the process the body uses for learning habits and assimilating new patterns. Imagine a band begins to play and the audience begins clapping along. A spattering of hand-smacks quickly condenses into a roomful of people clapping in unison. That’s entrainment.

Music’s Assault on the Brain—and the Body

We perceive music in a number of ways, not just through our auditory senses. The pace and pulse of the music’s rhythm produce waves of energy in the air that impact various receptor cells in many parts of the body, particularly in the skin and subcutaneous tissues. The pitch profile of the music’s melody is likewise felt in addition to being heard. All of this information across a range of senses is delivered to the RSA, through the limbic system and on to the neocortex.

At this point the music’s rhythm and melody have been perceived through a variety of senses and have begun to trigger emotional matches in the limbic system as well as conscious associations in the neocortex. The listener is feeling the effects of the positive emotional responses at the same time she is consciously remembering the band, the tune, or the happiness she may have felt the first time she heard the song.

If she makes a positive association with the music in her neocortex, her body begins to entrain itself to the rhythm and melody. She now begins to assimilate the emotional expression contained within that music.

If all this is happening during a commercial, the music has opened a series of neural pathways leading to the most trusting part of her brain just in time for the sponsor’s logo or tag line to be seen, heard and associated with the positive emotions.

The result is a positive emotional experience—part conscious and part subconscious—that will be associated with the visual presentation the music accompanies. And emotion has been shown to have a strong influence on behavior, much stronger than cognitive factors.

This is great news for advertisers, and it underscores the value music can bring to a visual presentation. Music has the ability to engage multiple sensory systems, penetrate deeply into the body, activate the emotions through the limbic system, and produce physiological effects that influence behavior.

Plato, it seems, was right all along.

___________

For Reference and Further Reading:

The Emotional Brain. LeDoux, Joseph. (1996). New York, NY: Simon and Schuster.

The Music Effect: Music Physiology and Clinical Applications. Schneck, Daniel J. and Berger, Dorita S. (2006). London, UK: Jessica Kingsley Publishers.

Managing Conscious and Subconscious Deceit When Gathering Marketing Intelligence

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photoRoddyLie2

Originally Published April 2013

Our customers lie. Maybe not on purpose. And maybe not to be harmful. But they lie. And if we want to manage these lies effectively we have to understand better how they are produced by the conflict between the cognitive brain and the emotional brain.

Deception in Consumer Research

When we as marketers ask consumers to respond to surveys or participate in focus groups we know there is a chance of getting less-than-truthful responses. This deception can be intentional and malevolent or it can occur without conscious control. And in the increasingly popular social media channels where there is more anonymity and less personal engagement, deception is even more likely.

Consumers can lie because they don’t like the product but don’t want to be rude. Or they may succumb to social pressures in a group setting and lie about their likes or dislikes of a product in order to gain acceptance to that group. And sometimes, due to an array of individual factors including memory transference, consumers may report false impressions of products that they genuinely believe to be true. For these and a variety of other reasons these deceptions show up in consumer insights testing.

This known possibility of deception in the feedback loop creates a bias that has traditionally been mitigated through large and costly sample sizes. But recent work in the fields of neuromarketing, psychology and physiology is suggesting that there are better methods for gathering consumer insights with more accurate data and with much smaller sample sizes.

Several years ago, in an effort to design a more effective method for measuring advertising impact, I launched an independent research program to study the physiological connection between emotions and consumer reactions. In the process I learned a great deal about how the physiology of our ancestors has shaped the way we make buying decisions today.

The Ancient History of Emotional Behavior

As humans, we have evolved over millions of years with all of the innate behaviors and complex reward systems necessary for our two most important personal goals: our survival and the survival of our offspring. That is, we are pre-wired to survive and make babies. Almost everything we do in life that genuinely makes us feel good is related in some way to one of these very important goals. And that feeling is tied directly to emotional responses.

Emotions are thought to have evolved as a way for our brains to manage our behavior toward those personal goals. Based in a primitive part of the brain called the limbic system, our emotions are integrated with the body through the endocrine system and the autonomic nervous system to provide a complex psychophysiological response process that makes us feel good or feel bad based on our success or failure at satisfying our personal goals. Involuntarily, we smile and feel exhilarated when things go well and we frown or cry when they go badly.

Our emotions also can influence key bodily functions—heart rate, respiration, perspiration, etc.—to prepare us for actions related to those goals (i.e., the fight or flight response). But our emotions can also manifest themselves through changes in other parts of the body, most notably through our facial expressions. The face is innervated by both the somatic and autonomic nervous systems which puts it under the influence of both conscious and unconscious control. So, the face can respond to subconscious emotional stimuli much like other physiological functions.

The Cognitive Brain (Almost) Takes Over

This system of emotions and physiology helped manage human behavior for millions of years. Then, around 10,000 years ago when humans began settling into larger clans, villages and cities, the behaviors that satisfied our personal needs quickly came into conflict with the needs of the other humans in those larger communities. Too many people in one place, each satisfying his or her own personal needs, will certainly lead to discord. In order for us to live together in these large groups, we needed to learn to “play nice in the sandbox.” We needed behaviors that satisfied our personal goals, but stopped short of interfering with the ability of others to enjoy the same.

To live harmoniously in large groups, humans had to develop the concept of reciprocal altruism which is basically the you be nice to me and I’ll be nice to you philosophy. It has been theorized that laws and religions were cultivated in an effort to provide the internal (religious) and external (legal) behavioral modifications necessary for people to act in a more civil manner. As this behavior modification was a conscious effort, it came under control of the cognitive part of the brain.

However, as we developed this outer layer of cognitive civility our emotions stayed tuned to our inner layer of personal goal satisfaction, still dominated by the limbic system. And it is this emotional part of the brain, being well integrated with our physiology, that has the ability to exert greater power over our behavior by manipulating the way we physically feel. In short, emotional motivators are far more powerful than cognitive ones.

Listening to the Emotional Brain

What does this mean to researchers interested in eliciting accurate data from consumers? It means we should pay more attention to the consumer’s physical response to our messaging. A consumer may be feeling a positive emotional response to a product but, due to a variety of reasons originating from cognitive processes, the response is withheld from surveys or focus group participation. This is a bias that could lead to false negatives in consumer insights research.

But a consumer experiencing a positive response likely would be unable to withhold the changes in physiology—heart rate, respiration, skin conductivity, subtle facial expressions, etc.—that are indicative of emotional responses. Likewise, false positive responses could also be detected in the same manner. And this is the finding most valuable to consumer insights researchers: a situation where a subject professes a cognitively-driven positive response but lacks the behavioral influence of a positive emotional response.

By measuring physiological responses (including facial expressions) we should be able to offer a much better analysis of consumer experience testing than was previously available through traditional focus groups, surveys or audience testing methods. And by reducing the bias associated with deception, we will do so with smaller sample sizes and reduced long term costs.

For further reading:

Understanding Emotions, by Keith Oatley, Dacher Keltner and Jennifer M. Jenkins (2006). Blackwell Publishing. Maiden, MA USA.

A Prehistoric Sales Tool That Still Works

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facial expressions

Originally Published February 2013

One of our most valuable sales tools allows us to establish interpersonal relationships, manage conversations and broadcast our feelings to an attentive world. It was millions of years in the making and we scarcely give it a second thought. It’s our face.

What the Face Can Say

Many successful sales professionals seem to agree that the key to a solid business relationship begins with the establishment of a good personal relationship between the sales person and the decision maker. Trust must be established before product information can be shared and believed.

But how do we know we are building and managing those relationships effectively? What is the feedback mechanism that tells us we’re doing the right things? Good sales people will say they have good instincts or that they are good at reading people. Somehow they just know what their customers are thinking.

What they are likely referring to is an innate ability to observe and understand facial expressions. A skill that was buried deep in our subconscious brain for millions of years and that has been all but adapted out by generations of reliance on spoken language, written language and, as of recently, email and social media.

Prehistoric Origins

Well before the appearance of spoken language, our biological ancestors communicated with each other through body posture and facial expressions. Critical emotional states such as fear, anger, happiness and sadness were transmitted to specific muscles groups in the face where they were converted into expressions. Understanding the meaning of these expressions was very important to assessing the level of harmony—or threat—in the surrounding environment. It was a crucial skill that was passed down through generations and, according to leading researchers, is still with us today.

Dr. Paul Ekman is regarded as the world’s leading authority on facial expressions and their associated emotions. He has spent his entire career traveling the continents and comparing the way different cultures display and decode facial expressions. What he has found is that facial expressions are almost universal in nature and meaning. An expression of disgust on a face in London is readily recognizable to an observer from New Guinea (researchers and ethologists have theorized that this supports the evolutionary origin of expressions as a primal means of communicating within the species).

The Physiology of the Face

Our faces are able to display so much information about what’s going on inside us because of the way they are structured. Unlike most areas of the body, the face is innervated by both the somatic and autonomic nervous systems. Remembering our high school biology, the somatic system primarily controls motor functions under conscious control, while the autonomic system manages bodily systems without conscious input. This is why we are able to make some deliberate, exaggerated facial expressions in addition to the spontaneous ones that we don’t or, in some cases, can’t control.

The limbic system, an older part of the brain that mediates emotions, affects the autonomic nervous system in response to emotional activity. When we experience strong emotions it is this system that transduces them for display on the face.

Evolution’s Gift to the Sales Team

After millions of years of evolution we have slowly adapted to other forms of communication including speech, writing and email. But still, deep in the recesses of our primal brain, we have maintained the ability to recognize, and be sensitive to, the facial expressions of others.

When we say someone’s face just lit up, we are likely reacting to an expansion of the orbicularis oculi which tightens the skin around the eyes and allows more light to enter the eye sockets, a sign we correctly interpret as an awakening or sudden understanding. We respond to lowering brows and wrinkled corrugators as a sign of anger, and to a tightening of the lip corners as a signal of restraint. We may not be able to note these observations without training, but we are programmed to observe them and react to them.

Ekman and his team have used this research to develop highly specialized facial recognition programs that are used by government agencies and security firms around the world. But we don’t need to be a highly trained expert to make effective use of this information in the sales and marketing world. By studying the faces of those with whom we communicate, and by learning the basics of expression recognition, we can become more aware of how our words are affecting the conversation. Also, like actors, if we can learn to produce subtle, realistic expressions on demand, we might be able to make better conscious management of the conversation by offering our partners important subconscious clues to assure them of the direction the conversation is taking.

Continued research in the field of facial expression recognition may soon give us even better techniques for the industries of sales, security and any capacity where a heightened awareness of emotional disposition would be a benefit. But for now, sales teams have the opportunity to enhance their effectiveness at building relationships by using a tool that has been with us for eons.

If the eyes are the window on the soul, the face is the door.

For further reading:

Telling Lies: Clues to Deceit in the Marketplace, Politics and Marriage by Paul Ekman (2001). New York, NY: W. W. Norton and Company, Inc.

Ethics, Liars and Polygraph Countermeasures

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polygraph countermeasures

Originally Published February 2013

For better or worse, deception is a part of human nature. Sometimes it’s well intentioned and sometimes it’s for personal gain at the expense of others. It also can be done consciously or subconsciously. And while most deception is frowned upon in general, there are some situations where it would be acceptable to most people.

But whatever the origin, intent or nature, deception in humans usually involves a discrete but detectable conflict between the higher cognitive brain and the primal emotional brain. And it’s this conflict, this struggle between the higher thinking brain and the primitive feeling brain, that initiates the physiological processes that can bring our deceptions to the attention of the outside world.

The Polygraph Connection

As a part of my research on using physiological measurement to track consumer insights, I spent a great deal of time studying facial expression analysis and learning the polygraph examination process. While both of these techniques are used in psychophysiological marketing research, they are also widely used by security professionals in their efforts to detect deception in human subjects. And it is this aspect of my work that consistently draws the most interest from friends and colleagues alike. People, it seems, are fascinated by scientific processes that detect—or seek to detect—deception.

Does It Work?

In discussions about biometric analysis in consumer insights testing, as soon as any reference is made to similarities with polygraph examinations, the question invariably heard next is does the polygraph really work? And the answer, as all philosophers are likely to say, depends on what you mean by work. As a lie catcher, the polygraph has demonstrated that it can perform slightly better than chance in detecting deception. While it has strong advocates and detractors alike in the scientific community, a comprehensive 2002 study by the National Academy of Sciences seemed largely unimpressed.

I certainly do see the merits of using physiological measurement to accurately assess emotional affect (there is, after all, considerable scientific evidence in support of a positive connection between discrete emotional states and physiological response). But I’m skeptical of the polygraph’s ability, as a lie catcher, to use it to detect deception. And this is not because I doubt its technical capabilities, but because of the opportunity for bias in its methods of analysis.

How Does It Work?

The two primary tests used in polygraph examinations are the control question test (CQT) and the guilty knowledge test (GKT). The CQT is by far the most common and is likely to be the type of test most people will encounter if asked to take a polygraph exam. It compares and contrasts a subject’s physiological responses to various control and relevant questions and, using algorithmic software, returns a probability of deception. The GKT is similar in that it is based on changes in physiological states, but it tests a subject’s response to information likely to be known only to guilty individuals.

In both of these tests the final decision on whether the subject is judged as deceptive comes down to a combination of algorithmic analysis of the responses by the software and the opinions of the examiners. Although scoring of results by most polygraph software systems is now almost fully automatic, there is still a considerable spectrum of input by the examiner administering the test. So there is ample opportunity to introduce affective bias through physiological input as well as subject behavior.

The Ethics of Polygraph Countermeasures

Ethics is the philosophical study of what is considered to be right and wrong—not to be confused with the legal definitions of lawful and unlawful—within a specified population. While much has been written about the ethics of deception, i.e., when it is acceptable to lie, far less time has been devoted to the topic of the ethics of deception detection. What are the ethical limitations of those who try to detect deception? And what are the ethical responsibilities of those who work to resist that detection?

Recently, a colleague in the legal profession asked me about my opinion on the effectiveness of polygraph countermeasures. I replied that there were a number of methods that could be employed to introduce bias into a polygraph exam, essentially rendering the results inconclusive. Being a lawyer, he restated my statement in terms to his benefit: So you’re saying it is possible to actually beat a polygraph, right? Yes, I said, I certainly believe so. He then asked the inevitable. Is it possible to effectively coach prospective polygraph examinees?

This of course raised an interesting ethical question I had not considered before. As an uninitiated observer, I would have no way of knowing whether the potential subject had any guilt they might be trying to keep hidden from the examination. And I would not think it ethically acceptable to assist a child molester who is seeking to keep his actions hidden. On the other hand I would certainly want to help a falsely accused employee remain calm during a polygraph exam that might be given as part of an investigation into company theft. So, what to do?

I guess the answer, like all philosophers might say, depends.