Scared of flying? Well, you may want to get over that as soon as you can unless you want to get pulled aside for suspected terrorism and be subjected to a thorough background check and possible cavity search. It appears as though researchers are attempting to develop a system that will detect the “fear pheromone” secreted by humans who are scared. (Link to article below)

I suppose I can see the applications, however, it seems that this might cause more trouble than it’s worth. For instance, I beleive you will get a lot more false positives than other systems. Even if they can cancel out the effects of odors or any other pheromones, it just seems implausible that a system such as this would work in the real world.

Here are some examples…

  • People afraid of flying (false positive)
  • People afraid of *insert anything you might be scared of in your lifetime* (false positive)
  • Terrorists who believe they are doing what needs to be done and are not scared because they believe they are going to a better place (not detected)
  • Terrorists who train to not be afraid (not detected)
  • People afraid of dogs or any other animal…”Excuse me, can you step aside because you just flinched at my drug dog.” (false positive)
  • People afraid of missing a flight (false positive)
  • People afraid of being pulled aside for suspected terrorism *due to profiling, etc* (false positive)
  • List goes on and on and on…

Is this really worth the headache? How would they be able to account for these factors?

Of course, if they are able to get this to be somewhat accurate (which I believe to be doubtful without some other major breakthrough), immagine the possibilies for this such as a lie detector based on pheromones. This really would have some major functionality in sociology or any other field of human study. No more frontin! You scared, you scared…

Link to article @ Slashdot

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