Evidence Based Practice Integration into Polygraph Practice: A suggested paradigm

Abstract The philosophy of evidence-based practice advocates professionals to rely on scientific evidence. Although the idea seems obvious, misuse of the philosophy raised controversy, which created confusion and misunderstanding of the concept. Yet, since it was introduced in the nineties to the medical community and despite the controversy, it gained more and more disciples and was embraced by nonmedical practitioners, including the polygraph profession. In the last decades, the polygraph community has gradually abandoned the intuitive-based polygraph practice that relies on less scientifically rooted subjective procedures and advanced toward evidence-based polygraph practice. This paper describes the evidence-based practice in general and details the practical aspects of evidence-based polygraph practice in particular, along with discussing the limitations of the current scientific research. It questions the current bone-tone trend to implement an extreme Evidence-Based approach into the polygraph practice, suggesting the practitioner to avoid a rigid “one size fit all” standardized protocols which are advocated as a must on the way to earn scientific recognition, whereas, in fact, it is the unfortunate outcome of lack of differential research data. As in the medical field, in-where the Evidence-Based practice managed to incorporate the clinical experience of experts with the hard research evidence and has not disregarded their valuable knowledge and experience, the present article calls for adopting this integrative approach in the polygraph field too and adjust the protocols to the specific circumstances of the case and the examinee in a “tailor-made” mode, which is based on existing data and flexible thinking wherever there is no data to rely on, as was suggested under the concept of “Adaptive-Polygraphy” (Ginton, 2013).