I took a polygraph about 30 years ago a Ft. Meade during a background check for NSA. Honestly it took like 45 minutes, guy was totally pleasant and he treated it seriously, but it seemed mechanical, strictly scripted, and more like a box checking exercise.
However, I also had an interview with a psychologist which was very intense and manipulative, but effective, in eliciting true information about how much I was drinking at the time (too much, quite frankly). It was only years later that I realized that was the information they really wanted and all the other embarrassing sex questions were just to set me up.
The sex questions are often the setup. You fill out a ton of background material with one or two sex questions, then the poly has hours of it. People use the word “ambush” and I think it’s useful when they’re trying to build a baseline profile.
However, I also had an interview with a psychologist which was very intense and manipulative, but effective, in eliciting true information about how much I was drinking at the time (too much, quite frankly). It was only years later that I realized that was the information they really wanted and all the other embarrassing sex questions were just to set me up.