Philip Ash

Philip Ash, Ph.D., was an industrial-organizational psychologist affiliated with the University of Illinois at Chicago Circle (now the University of Illinois Chicago). He published about eighty papers, monographs, etc. throughout his career and was recognized as a Fellow of the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology. His work spanned diverse areas of applied psychology, including employee selection, testing, and credibility assessment.

In the field of polygraph research, Ash made significant contributions to understanding examiner reliability and diagnostic consistency. His 1973 study with F. L. Hunter examined "The accuracy and consistency of polygraph examiners' diagnoses", published in the Journal of Police Science and Administration. This field validity study assessed inter-rater reliability among polygraph examiners and examined how consistently different examiners reached the same diagnostic conclusions when reviewing the same polygraph charts. The Hunter and Ash (1973) study provided data concerning two or more independent judges evaluating the same data, making it a frequently cited work in discussions of polygraph reliability. Ash also authored "Survey of Attitudes on the Polygraph" in the journal Polygraph that same year.

Ash's polygraph research earned recognition within the credibility assessment community, with his work alongside Hunter becoming a standard reference in evaluating the consistency of polygraph diagnoses across examiners. His broader expertise in industrial psychology and psychometrics brought methodological rigor to questions about the reliability of polygraph techniques in field applications, particularly concerning the accuracy of examiner judgments in real-world criminal and pre-employment settings.