Legal Risk in Selection: An Analysis of Processes and Tools

Purpose

This paper reviews a decade of employment litigation to illuminate the most legally dangerous selection devices and employment practices.

Design/Methodology/Approach

A sample (n = 312) of court cases drawn from 10 years of Bloomberg BNA case briefs was analyzed to determine which selection tools (e.g., biographical information blank, interview, cognitive ability test, and psychomotor test) and which selection processes (e.g., violations of the four-fifths rule, administrative inconsistencies, lack of documentation, failure to provide accommodations) are most at risk for litigation for unfair employment practices.

Findings

Results demonstrate that while some selection tools do attract legal scrutiny, dangerous hiring practices such as favoritism against protected classes and improper human resource documentation put employers at far greater risk of suit. When considering cases settled outside of court and those that continued to trial, the data reveal that employers lose employment discrimination cases at a rate nearing 90 % and suffer an average payout of over $1.5 million per case.

Implications

Just as legal challenges once drove the search for selection tools free of adverse impact, the current legal landscape demonstrates the necessity of fair and consistent selection processes. This paper provides evidence of common mistakes in implementing selection systems—mistakes that lead to costly legal battles.

Originality/Value

This paper reduces cumbersome legal records into useful evidence of trends in recent employment law cases. Selection system designers and organizations who implement them will benefit from avoiding the risky hiring practices presented in this paper.     

Religiosity and Fear of Death: A Theory-Oriented Review of the Empirical Literature

Do religious people fear death more or less than those who are nonreligious? According to two theories, religiosity and fear of death should be inversely correlated. A third theory suggests that moderately religious persons should be more fearful than those who are extremely religious or nonreligious. Yet a fourth theory predicts that religiosity and fear of death should be positively correlated. Eighty-four studies were located in which pertinent findings have been presented, several of which reached more than one conclusion based on different definitions of religiosity. Overall, 40 studies provided findings supporting the conclusion that religiosity and fear of death are inversely correlated, nine supported a curvilinear relationship, 27 supported a positive correlation, and 32 indicated that no significant relationship exists between religiosity and fear of death. Chi square analyses of several features of these conflicting studies suggest that there is probably a modest negative correlation between religiosity and fear of death among persons who are at least modestly religious. However, when nonreligious individuals are sampled alongside those who are both moderately and extremely religious, the overall relationship shifts to being curvilinear, and possibly even positive, depending on the aspect of religiosity being assessed. The implications of these conclusions for the four theories are discussed.     

The impact of cognitive control on children’s goal monitoring in a time-based prospective memory task

The present study investigated whether developmental changes in cognitive control may underlie improvements of time-based prospective memory. Five-, 7-, 9-, and 11-year-olds (N = 166) completed a driving simulation task (ongoing task) in which they had to refuel their vehicle at specific points in time (PM task). The availability of cognitive control resources was experimentally manipulated by imposing a secondary task that required divided attention. Children completed the driving simulation task both in a full-attention condition and a divided-attention condition where they had to carry out a secondary task. Results revealed that older children performed better than younger children on the ongoing task and PM task. Children performed worse on the ongoing and PM tasks in the divided-attention condition compared to the full-attention condition. With respect to time monitoring in the final interval prior to the PM target, divided attention interacted with age such that older children’s time monitoring was more negatively affected by the secondary task compared to younger children. Results are discussed in terms of developmental shifts from reactive to proactive monitoring strategies.     

Homophobia is the patient 1

This paper draws on psychoanalytic work with a heterosexual woman who struggles with the conscious and unconscious aspects of her homophobia. It reflects on the limitations of the classical psychoanalytic interpretations of phobia as a symptom in the light of contemporary philosophers such as Levinas, Foucault and Butler. It focuses particularly on the connection between anxiety and the relation to the Other.     

Languages of trauma; towards a phenomenological response

In this article, I explore the possibilities of a phenomenological perspective on trauma in psychoanalytic practice. I highlight the problem of interpretations that universalise experiences of trauma, provide explanations in terms of ‘causes’ and assume particular processes/stages of ‘recovery’ from it. The notion of trauma challenges dichotomies of ‘internal’ and ‘external’ worlds. Traumatic experiences always have a context – that of the immediate relational circumstances of the individual suffering from the trauma, including the wider social/relational context, and the person’s history. I argue for an attunement to the language and specificity of the meanings, verbal and non-verbal, conscious and unconscious, of the client’s suffering within the analytical relationship. This requires the therapist to avoid ‘ready-made’ interpretations from psychoanalytic theory and to be open to the poiesis of the speech, which emerges between therapist and client. My discussion of my reading of the Chilean documentary film, Nostalgia for the Light, which focuses on the traumatic experiences of those who survived Pinochet’s military regime (1973–1989), highlights how diverse responses to trauma are. The originality of the language of the film calls on us as therapists to discover new ways of listening and speaking to our clients’ suffering.     

The potentiation of grasp types during visual object categorization

The close integration between visual and motor processes suggests that some visuomotor transformations may proceed automatically and to an extent that permits observable effects on subsequent actions. A series of experiments investigated the effects of visual objects on motor responses during a categorisation task. In Experiment 1 participants responded according to an object's natural or manufactured category. The responses consisted in uni-manual precision or power grasps that could be compatible or incompatible with the viewed object. The data indicate that object grasp compatibility significantly affected participant response times and that this did not depend upon the object being viewed within the reaching space. The time course of this effect was investigated in Experiments 2–4b by using a go-nogo paradigm with responses cued by tones and go-nogo trials cued by object category. The compatibility effect was not present under advance response cueing and rapidly diminished following object extinction. A final experiment established that the compatibility effect did not depend on a within-hand response choice, but was at least as great with bi-manual responses where a full power grasp could be used. Distributional analyses suggest that the effect is not subject to rapid decay but increases linearly with RT whilst the object remains visible. The data are consistent with the view that components of the actions an object affords are integral to its representation.     

Selective and faithful imitation at 12 and 15 months

Research on imitation in infancy has primarily focused on what and when infants imitate. More recently, however, the question why infants imitate has received renewed attention, partly motivated by the finding that infants sometimes selectively imitate the actions of others and sometimes faithfully imitate, or overimitate, the actions of others. The present study evaluates the hypothesis that this varying imitative behavior is related to infants' social traits. To do so, we assessed faithful and selective imitation longitudinally at 12 and 15 months, and extraversion at 15 months. At both ages, selective imitation was dependent on the causal structure of the act. From 12 to 15 months, selective imitation decreased while faithful imitation increased. Furthermore, infants high in extraversion were more faithful imitators than infants low in extraversion. These results demonstrate that the onset of faithful imitation is earlier than previously thought, but later than the onset of selective imitation. The observed relation between extraversion and faithful imitation supports the hypothesis that faithful imitation is driven by the social motivations of the infant. We call this relation the King Louie Effect: like the orangutan King Louie in The Jungle Book, infants imitate faithfully due to a growing interest in the interpersonal nature of interactions. A video abstract of this article can be viewed at http://youtu.be/qlnIof1k-u8 .     

The effects of age,enactment, and cue-action relatedness on memory for intentions in the Virtual Week task

ABSTRACT

The current study investigated the influence of encoding modality and cue-action relatedness on prospective memory (PM) performance in young and older adults using a modified version of the Virtual Week task. Participants encoded regular and irregular intentions either verbally or by physically performing the action during encoding. For half of the intentions there was a close semantic relation between the retrieval cue and the intended action, while for the remaining intentions the cue and action were semantically unrelated. For irregular tasks, both age groups showed superior PM for related intentions compared to unrelated intentions in both encoding conditions. While older adults retrieved fewer irregular intentions than young adults after verbal encoding, there was no age difference following enactment. Possible mechanisms of enactment and relatedness effects are discussed in the context of current theories of event-based PM.     

Psychological Well-Being and the Metabolic Syndrome in African and Caucasian Women in South Africa

This study explored the association between comprehensive psychological well-being and the metabolic syndrome (MS), as well as whether women without MS markers differ significantly from women with MS (three or more markers) on specific facets of psychological well-being. African (N=102) and Caucasian (N=115) women completed self-report questionnaires on psychological well-being, and biological markers for MS were determined. Results indicated a significant association between comprehensive psychological well-being and the MS in Caucasian women, but not in the case of African women. Caucasian women without MS had higher levels of perceived support from friends and family, environmental mastery, purpose in life, sense of coherence, affect balance and positive relationships than those with MS. African women without MS had higher levels of positive relationships and an optimistic explanatory style, but lower levels of perceived support from family. Further research is indicated.     

The effects of distinctiveness,presentation time and delay on face recognition

Abstract

The distinctiveness of a face has been found to be an important factor in face recognition. We investigated the effect of the distinctiveness of a face upon subjects' speed and accuracy of recognition following different presentation times and retention intervals. It was found that (1) hits decreased with increasing delay; (2) false alarms increased and d primes decreased with a presentation time of 1 sec compared with 5 sec; (3) distinctive faces received more hits and higher d primes than non-distinctive faces; and (4) response latencies were shorter for distinctive targets than for distinctive distraction or non distinctive targets or distractors. These results were discussed in terms of the literature on the distinctiveness effect in face recognition.