I have to admit I’m both fascinated and repulsed by the upcoming Fox show “The Moment of Truth,” which asks participants awkward personal questions while they are hooked up to a lie detector:

After ordering the pilot, Mr. Darnell made some changes. He increased the prize money and made the questions “more aggressive.”

“There’s no, ‘Is your favorite color blue?’” he said. “Some people are freaked out by that. They get to question three and they’re like, ‘What the hell is going on?’”

He also added a button where the contestant’s friends and family sit that they can use once during the game to “rescue” the player from a difficult question. Except, Mr. Darnell said, the friends and family never seem to use the button for its intended purpose. When one contestant was asked if she would be more attracted to her husband if he lost 20 pounds—which is considered a relatively easy query—her husband lunged for the button.

“What ends up happening is they use it to help themselves because they don’t want to hear something revealed about themselves,” Mr. Darnell said. “Or they don’t use it [because they really want to hear the answer].”

But as even TV Week points out, the evidence supporting the accuracy of polygraphs is dubious (see also here). The problem is that the show will likely increase perceptions that polygraphs are reliable, further increasing their use and perceptions of their validity in criminal trials. We already saw this happen with the so-called “CSI effect” in which jurors expect definitive scientific evidence from crime scenes and may be more skeptical about cases in which that evidence is lacking. Let’s hope it doesn’t happen again.

(On the other hand, it would be fantastic if someone could go on the show, beat the lie detector, and take Fox’s money. That example alone would do more to kill the polygraph than any article pointing out the lack of scientific evidence.)