![[G]overnments and other large shellers-out of cash … continue to experiment with technologies that try to catch people out [if they’re lying].
The latest is voice risk analysis (VRA), which, among others, Harrow Council in London is testing as a way of identifying fraudulent claims for social-security benefits. This week the council said that in the ten months from May 2007, when the system was installed, it had saved £420,000 ($828,000). …
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The cash saving suggests it works…. However, the way it works is not necessarily obvious. If anything, a detector seems to act more like a placebo in medicine—inducing an effect in the mind of the recipient just by being there. Of the nearly 1,500 claimants who had taken part in the Harrow trial, nearly a third changed their mind about needing benefit when they were told they were being subject to VRA. The benefit that they decided not to claim made up the lion’s share of the council’s saving.
Mitchell Sommers, a psychologist at Washington University in St Louis, Missouri, with an interest in speech perception, says the findings confirm what other studies have shown about VRA: that it is not particularly good at detecting liars, but that it does act as an excellent deterrent. “These things do not work any better than chance,” he says.
from here via this
the Stumblng Tumblr thinks they should just re-introduce the rack, an example of which from here you see above; it’d reduce claims too, one way or the other
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[G]overnments and other large shellers-out of cash … continue to experiment with technologies that try to catch people out [if they’re lying].
The latest is voice risk analysis (VRA), which, among others, Harrow Council in London is testing as a way of identifying fraudulent claims for social-security benefits. This week the council said that in the ten months from May 2007, when the system was installed, it had saved £420,000 ($828,000). …
…
The cash saving suggests it works…. However, the way it works is not necessarily obvious. If anything, a detector seems to act more like a placebo in medicine—inducing an effect in the mind of the recipient just by being there. Of the nearly 1,500 claimants who had taken part in the Harrow trial, nearly a third changed their mind about needing benefit when they were told they were being subject to VRA. The benefit that they decided not to claim made up the lion’s share of the council’s saving.
Mitchell Sommers, a psychologist at Washington University in St Louis, Missouri, with an interest in speech perception, says the findings confirm what other studies have shown about VRA: that it is not particularly good at detecting liars, but that it does act as an excellent deterrent. “These things do not work any better than chance,” he says.
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