Avenue Magazine

Who: Gregg McMartin

Age: 60

Experience: He’s a certified forensic polygraph examiner and owner of National Polygraph Service Inc., a private polygraph business in Airdrie; he served 25 years with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, investigating major crimes, and was in charge of the RCMP’s Calgary Polygraph Unit; he used to teach polygraphy at the Canadian Police College in Ottawa; he has lectured about detecting written and verbal deception across North America; he considers himself a very honest man.

 - “Lying has been going on since man came out of a cave. We learn to lie at a very young age. We lie to avoid pain, to avoid being in trouble and to receive rewards.”

- “If what is spoken has intent to mislead, it is a lie.” 

- “One of the most common lies we all make is when we avoid answering questions. We avoid the truth by saying something else. There are also lies of omission. By not saying something, that can be a lie, too.”

- “A polygraph is simply a recording instrument. It records the involuntary nervous system. A cardio cuff goes on your right arm and records the rise and fall of blood pressure. There are also tubes that record the activity in your chest cavity, your respiration, and silver spoons for your fingers that measure minute changes within your sweat glands. When a person knowingly tells a lie, the body will react to that lie and start the ‘flight or fight’ syndrome. The polygraph records that physiological activity.”

- “A polygraph isn’t 100-percent accurate. Anything made by humans isn’t, because we aren’t perfect. But it is rated 94 to 96-percent accurate.”

- “I’ve tested politicians, doctors, lawyers, the police, athletes and everyone else in between — just about every profession you can think of.”

- “The majority of people who take a polygraph test are truthful. That’s why they are taking one.”

- “People who are practising deception often keep it short, direct and to the point. When you tell the truth, you never have to remember it. But you have to remember a lie, so the longer it goes, the more complex it is, the easier it is to get tripped up.”

- “It’s difficult to lie. Lying produces stress and it’s very hard to keep that going. It’s a relief to most people to say what the truth is.”

- “Body language can produce red flags, but it doesn’t tell you if a person is lying or not. For body language to be meaningful you have to get a sense of a person’s normal behaviour beforehand. Just because you ask a question and a person shifts or looks away, doesn’t mean they’re lying.”

- “That thing that people say about putting a tack in their shoe when they come to do a polygraph test to throw the results? It doesn’t work, and the examiner can usually see stuff like that right away.”

- “The famous lie that always comes to mind is Bill Clinton’s ‘I did not have sexual relations with that woman.’ As soon as I heard that on TV, I started laughing. It was not a lie, but it was a lie of omission and a form of denial.”

- “A lie is a lie. It’s a non-truth. The only good lie is telling your kids that there’s a Santa Claus."