Chasing the Title VII Holy Grail: The Pitfalls of Guaranteeing Adverse Impact Elimination

Purpose

Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 provided industrial/organizational (I/O) psychologists with a unique role as professional test developers and consultants involved in assisting organizations in establishing the job-relatedness/validity defense to charges of discrimination, specifically charges based on an adverse or disparate impact theory. However, these activities have transmogrified into the fairly common occurrence of public municipalities and organizations demanding the reduction or absence of adverse impact as part of the scope of work or contracts and for practitioners and consultants to guarantee adverse impact reduction or elimination a priori. Plaintiffs and their experts also routinely argue that the observed adverse impact could have been allayed or eliminated if the defendant had only just used alternative testing methods. This then begs the following question: “Are there well established techniques and procedures that can reduce, minimize, or eliminate adverse impact in a predictable, generalizable, and replicable fashion in the same manner that we might guarantee validity?” The present paper seeks to answer this question.

Approach and Findings

With the preceding as a backdrop, the present paper identifies and discusses four overlooked critical attributes of adverse impact that collectively and in conjunction work against and obviate adverse impact reduction and elimination guarantees.

Conclusions and Implications

We conclude that the search for guaranteed adverse impact reduction or elimination is a “Holy Grail” and that we should avoid predictions and guarantees regarding adverse impact elimination in specific situations, including those based on the inclusion of “alternative” selection devices. However, in the context of civil rights legislation, and the intersection of I/O psychologists with said legislation, what we can guarantee as a science and profession are sound and valid tests and assessment devices that can be defended accordingly should the use of said tests and devices be challenged.     

Parenting and the dysregulation profile predict executive functioning in children with acquired brain injury

Background: Children with acquired brain injury (ABI) present with high rates of psychological disorders commonly accompanied by deficits in hot and cold executive functions (EFs). Impairments in EFs have been reported to precede mental health problems. Moreover, children who are vulnerable to developing mental health problems in adulthood frequently present with a dysregulation profile in childhood, characterized by impairments in cognitive, behavioral and emotional regulation. Objective: To identify profiles of behaviors associated with impairment in hot and cold EFs and compare injury factors, environmental stressors and dysregulation profile between them. Methods: A latent profile analysis was conducted with 77 children with ABI aged between 6 and 12. Injury factors, child IQ, environmental stressors and the dysregulation profile were compared between these behavioral profiles. Logistic regressions were conducted to predict profile membership. Results: Two profiles were identified: Profile M, with mild deficits (1–2 SD above the mean) in working memory and social skills, and profile C, presenting clinically significant deficits (2–3 SD above the mean) in shift, initiate, working memory, planning and social skills and mild deficits in inhibit, emotional control and task monitor. Proximal environmental stressors (dysfunctional parenting practices, parental stress, parent’s executive dysfunction, anxiety-trait, and depressive symptoms) and dysregulation symptoms predicted profile membership, whereas injury factors, child IQ and distal environmental stressors did not. Conclusion: Following ABI, children with profile C are at risk of mental health problems and present with more proximal stressors. The dysregulation profile may be useful as a proxy for risk for later mental health problems in children with ABI.     

Adam Smith: Self-Command,Practical Reason and Deontological Insights

In this paper, I argue that, in his Theory of Moral Sentiments, Adam Smith conflates two different meanings of ‘self-command’, which is particularly puzzling because of the central role of this virtue in his theory. The first is the matrix of rational action, the one described in Part III of the TMS and learned in ‘the great school of self-command’. The second is the particular moral virtue of self-command. Distinguishing between these two meanings allows us, on the one hand, to solve some apparent paradoxes of the text; and, on the other, to identify various features of both the practical reason and deontological ethical traditions that are present in Smith's sentimentalism, enriching his phenomenological account of moral actions.     

La prevención de la delincuencia: la importancia del diseño ambiental

Resumen

Se analiza la importancia de la prevención mecánica ambiental de la delincuencia, para lo cual se ofrece una visión teórica previa tanto de las explicaciones del hecho delictivo como de sus posibles soluciones. A continuación, se plantea la prevención mediante el Diseño Ambiental, destacándose como puntos principales la visión Sociobiológica, los aspectos espaciales de la conducta desviada, la noción de «espacio defendible», la geografía del delito, los mapas cognitivos y la conducta criminal, el diseño ambiental de las cárceles, y un posible modelo integrativo.     

Elaboración de un modelo empírico sobre la realización de actividades delictivas en la mujer mediante la técnica del Rep-Test

RESUMEN

El objetivo de nuestra investigación era encontrar un modelo explicativo de la conducta delictiva de la mujer de carácter psicosocial (habida cuenta de la falta de la operatividad de las teorías encontradas), y que no fuera específico como tal de la delincuencia femenina. Para ello se emplea la técnica de la rejilla, pero sin las connotaciones de Kelly sobre la misma, puesto que el motivo de este trabajo no era estudiar la complejidad cognitiva. Se hipotetizó que encontrar este modelo era posible, pero no se formularon hipótesis dado el carácter correlational del estudio. A la vista de los resultados obtenidos, se constata que era necesaria la creación de dos modelos diferentes, según que las acciones cometidas por los sujetos sean de satisfacción individual, o de que sean de satisfacción grupal. Dichos modelos ponen de manifiesto que no es posible establecer distinciones entre sujetos delincuentes y no delincuentes.     

Quest for optimum human population per nation

The world is being saturated with population to a point where its life‐support systems may be in danger of losing their ability to maintain environmental stability. Thus, there is an urgent need for scientists and decision makers to develop working models in which information about the population, resource exhaustion, and pollution of each nation is contained. The criteria for determining optimum human population are reviewed, and a bionomic model that incorporates the complex web of economic and political systems within an ecological framework is presented to solve the problem of how large a population each nation should have.     

Do Expectations Have Time Span?

If it is possible to think that human life is temporal as a whole, and we can make sense of Wittgenstein’s claim that the psychological phenomena called ‘dispositions’ do not have genuine temporal duration on the basis of a distinction between dispositions and other mental processes, we need a compelling account of how time applies to these dispositions. I undertake this here by examining the concept of expectation, a disposition with a clear nexus to time by the temporal point at which the expectation is satisfied. However, it seems that we cannot always identify the beginning of an expectation, and in a few cases, its end. If so, the reduction of expectations to neural events or accompanying feelings which spread over time in the usual way seems a hard enterprise, because these processes, much as other physical processes, have a definite and largely measurable time span. Only at a higher level, that is, as part of human life, expectation can be said to be temporal.     

Book Reviews

Abstract

Wilson, D.G. & Rosenfeld, R. (1990). Managing organizations: text, readings and cases. London: McGraw Hill Book Company. Pp. 494. ISBN 0-07-707232-4. £16.95 (paperback).

Argyle, M. (1991). Cooperation: The basis of sociability. London: Routledge. Pp. 234. ISBN 0-41503-546-5. £10.99 (paperback).

Rasmussen, J., Brehmer, B., & LePlat, J. (Eds.). (1991). Distributed decision making: Cognitive models for cooperative work. Chichester: Wiley & Sons. Pp. 416. ISBN 0-471-92828-3. £49.95.