Philip J. Bersh

Philip J. Bersh received his doctorate in experimental psychology from Columbia University in 1949 and subsequently held teaching appointments at Columbia University, the University of Wisconsin, Utica College, Hamilton College and George Washington University before joining Temple University in Philadelphia in 1967, where he taught for 35 years. He also served as chief of the Intelligence and Electronic Warfare Branch at the Rome Air Development Center in Rome, N.Y., from 1954 to 1962 and as chief of the Combat Systems Division and deputy director for Human Performance Experimentation at the U.S. Army Behavioral Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C., from 1962 to 1967. His work during this military research period led to his contributions to polygraph validation studies.

Bersh's 1969 study "A Validation Study of Polygraph Examiner Judgements" was published in the Journal of Applied Psychology and became a landmark in the field. The study found better than 90% agreement between polygraph examiners' judgments of deception, based on both examinations and knowledge of details of the case, and unanimous judgments of guilt made by a panel of four Judge Advocate General attorneys. This study represented serious scientific investigation using the scientific method and has been cited as foundational work in deception detection research, with a great deal published since then. His work on field validity studies of the Control Question Test (CQT) helped establish empirical standards for evaluating polygraph accuracy in real-world criminal investigations.

At Temple University, Bersh was a student of Pavlovian-Operant interaction and his research with students assessed negative reinforcement and stimulus control in learned helplessness as a model. His research on human heart rate conditioning is considered to be "classic" and appears in many psychology textbooks. Bersh died on April 2, 2004 at age 82, teaching as a full-time faculty member just two weeks before his death and having been awarded a research grant shortly thereafter. Temple University's Psychology department honors his legacy through the competitive Bersh Award for student research.