Personnel testing and public policy.

Abstract

Summarizes the major features of the Supreme Court ruling in Griggs vs Duke Power Company, the guidelines of the Equal Opportunity Employment Commission and of the Office of Federal Contract Compliance, and the revised Equal Employment Opportunity Act of 1972. The convergence of thinking present in the 4 documents is interpreted as the formulation of public policies that are increasingly explicit about the use of psychological tests in personnel work. Although the form and content of public policy has been shaped by forces and issues outside professional psychology, the implications for the latter are direct and immediate. Numerous professional and technical issues, as well as larger social and cultural issues, are yet to be resolved. The complexities of the latter pose serious difficulties for the psychologist in resolving the former. (37 ref.)

Psychological Assessments in Legal Contexts: Are Courts Keeping “Junk Science” Out of the Courtroom?

“…These cases highlight the challenges of creating unbiased assessment instruments. Even psychometrically strong tools can lead to systematic disparate group outcomes depending on legally protected characteristics such as race and gender (Bersoff, 1981;Fincher, 1973). These problems are echoed in the current controversy about racial bias in machine learning and algorithmic approaches for predicting risk and recidivism (e.g., Berk, 2012;Skeem & Lowenkamp, 2016).…”

Pilot Personality Testing and the Emperor's New Clothes

“…The recent resurgence of personality testing (Dolgin and Gibb, 1989;Helmreich, 1984) as a method of predicting a pilot's performance, therefore, carries with it the potential to repeat some of the more serious mistakes of the past, as well as to ignore some valuable lessons from the history of the behavioral sciences (Fincher, 1973).…”

“…The Griggs v. Duke Power case (Fincher, 1973), as well as other similar disputes, were well documented in the management, legal, and behavioral science literature. The emphasis then was to ensure that hiring and promotion tests did not contain cultural or racial biases that would exclude segments of the population based on factors unrelated to job performance.…”

Ethical uncertainties and "technical" validities.

“…Psychologists could seize upon the injustice of the charge that their tests lacked validity by producing impressive data. In righteous indignation they could make a claim, recently well articulated (Fincher, 1973), that "both the Supreme Court and federal agencies have seized on the legal simplicities of predictive validity without full recognition that they are imposing a standard Many prominent psychologists have commented on the issues and trends in testing. They have proposed ways psychology might best cope with the issues.…”