Saturday, December 6, 2008

While

"While acknowledging that business owners have a right to protect themselves from counterproductive and criminally inclined employees, integrity test critics question whether these paper-and-pencil confessionals are fair to the vast majority of honest job applicants. One persistent criticism focuses attention on he actual test items; they are flawed, it is argued, because they are based on unproven assumptions. A passing score cannot be achieved unless the applicant demonstrates a punitive and authoritarian attitude; leniency is unacceptable, even though there is no hard evidence linking a charitable disposition to dishonesty. Admissions items- equally unsupported- also give rise to some devilish catch-22s and logical conundrums: If Applicant A honestly reports his past misbehaviors, he is penalized with a lower test score. Applicant B, on the other hand, can withhold equally damaging information about his past and obtain a higher score- thus being rewarded for lying. As far as the integrity test is concerned, the applicant who tries to turn his life around and plot a course on the straight-and narrow is deemed less trustworthy than the applicant who continues to lie. This kind of twisted logic should be reason enough to cast doubts on the predictive capabilities of attitudes/admissions items, but there's more: these items consistently fail to take into account the strong role that situational variables play in determining behavior. The trait-heavy nature of most integrity tests is indefensible against what many see as fundamentally a security or 'environment management problem.'
Whether or not integrity test items are based on an ill-conceived theory of honestly is still hotly debated by opposing camps of psychologists and professional researchers. Other groups (like civil libertarians) are more concerned with privacy issues raised by the tests...There is a strong possibility that many of the applicants did not want to hurt their chances for employment by maligning the test, so they stuck with a socially desirable response. (Interestingly, this kind of 'self-protecting' instinct may have helped them more than they realized: additional studies have shown that those who object more to integrity tests are more likely to receive lower scores)."

This is what Charles said.