The Moment of Truth gameshow and its problems

The Moment of Truth is an American gameshow that hands out a maximum cash prize of $500 000. What must a contestant do to get that half a million? He must answer 21 increasingly personal and embarrassing questions truthfully. Prior to the show, the contestant is hooked up to a polygraph, or what might be better known as a lie detector, and asked over 50 questions. During the show, the contestant is asked 21 of those same questions without being hooked to a polygraph. If the contestant answers honestly, according to the polygraph results, he moves on to the next question.

I only watched a single episode of this gameshow, and already I have a bone of contention with it. The questions they ask are like this:

Have you ever looked at pornography on the Internet while at work?
Do you blame your mother for your birth defect?
Do you think you are the smartest in your family?
Will you leave your husband for your ex-boyfriend?
Do you think you are a good person?

Already, you start to see the problem. Polygraphs are inaccurate - but that is the least of the gameshow's problem.

What if I sometimes think that I am the smartest person in my family, and sometimes I don't? What if I happened to think I was really smart while I was hooked up to polygraph, but develop second thoughts once the cameras are rolling? Opinions change all the time, and if there isn't a universally correct answer, it is almost impossible to be honest. Honesty entails saying things which adhere to an actual state of affairs. But if there is no actual state of affairs, there cannot be honesty.

What makes things worse is that questions like the last two tend to make people revise their self-opinions. When asked if I think I'm a good person, I might try to convince myself that I am, because I want to be a good person. If I am successful at convincing myself, I might speak the truth after all and move on to the next question. If I'm not successful at convincing myself, then I'd be lying to myself. But where does the line lie between self-deception and self-internalised beliefs? I can't see how any sort of lie detector can detect that difference.

So, two main problems with this stupid and life-damaging gameshow: opinions change and people lie to themselves. This woman's marriage actually fell apart because she revealed that she cheated on her husband. People with skeletons in their closets shouldn't even join this show. Greedy idiots.

Also, this is why I think lie detectors aren't infallible. If you're a really good liar, you'd be able to fool a lie detector too.

Notice that the gameshow producers already notice the temporal nature of truth. The moment of truth - this brings on a whole slew of unanswerable questions like how long a moment is. If we go by the medieval definition where a moment is a 1.5 minutes, any indecisive, fickle-minded person can tell you the sort of changes in his head that occur within such a short space of time.