Reddit reviews Detecting Lies and Deceit: Pitfalls and Opportunities

52% to me says "known not to work in any shape or form". A test that 100% always gives you the wrong result from a choice of two is a test that 100% always gives you the correct result just by flipping it over. 52% is, as near as makes no difference, meaningless - a coin-toss. If the result from the test is unrelated to what it's meant to test (or if you need bad science to claim otherwise) that test simply doesn't work.

And for anything that measures stress, it should be obvious that it's a bad indicator of lying.

There are many ways to cause an autonomic stress response. One is to make someone feel accused. Control questions like "what is your name?" are unlikely to make someone feel accused, but when someone knows s/he is being investigated because of being under suspicion, any question relevant to that could feel like an accusation - irrespective of guilt or innocence.

So the results of these tests will depend on personality and circumstances - e.g. has the person been repeatedly accused of things recently, or is the person already near or past his/her limits (e.g. due to unemployment).

And at least one "personality" trait makes it easy to beat a lie detector test. Sociopaths don't feel guilt, and don't get the related stress response. To make a sociopath fail a lie detector test, you basically need to do things that would make anyone fail the same test irrespective of guilt - keep them disoriented, take away any sense of control they have, make aggressive threats and accusations, etc.

It is possible to detect lying, but it's far from easy. Experienced police are no better at it than everyone else despite what they believe, and people in general believe they are good at spotting liars, but are actually dreadful. The only exceptions are specially trained. It requires paying attention to a lot of non-verbals at once - particularly "micro-gestures" which most people don't consciously spot at all. And the key thing isn't to determine if someone is stressed, but if someone is self-monitoring - taking fractionally too long to answer.

Source - various studies as described and summarized in this book. Warning - I haven't read the second edition and it's a long while since I read the first - I've tried to avoid going into detail because of the chance of getting those details wrong.

BTW - outside the first few pages, that book is pretty boring. The reason - other than the quick up-front summary of conclusions, the science - methods and results of studies - is always going to be boring.

And that's the problem. People love easy justifications for jumping to conclusions. Reality isn't anywhere near so easy or fun.