Americans enjoy a good crime. Many movies are centered around the audience’s interest in how to commit the perfect crime and get away with it.
But now some are saying that people who enjoy that type of entertainment are themselves endowed with a criminal bent. That kind of thinking was harmless when it was limited to the pages of psychology journals, but the idea now has made its way to the door of big business. More and more employers are suspicious of those employees who enjoy seeing the bad guys win.
Always eager to get rid of internal stealing, business has become a market for psychologists with exams to determine the honesty of a prospective employee. The theory in general is that those who associate with the dishonest are dishonest, or, guilt by association. Although experts concede there is no one question that could possibly determine a person’s leanings, they agree that a battery of questions in a test can.
Personnel directors are especially grateful for the tests. No longer do they have to rely on how a person represents him or herself to determine what kind of person they really are. Whether it really works or not, it at least takes away the subjective responsibility of determining whether a person is good or bad merely on the basis of several hours of interviewing. And some employers say the test actually has decreased the amount of loss due to employee theft in their companies.
Business cannot shoulder the entire blame for the flourishing of the honesty test. In fact, dishonest workers are to blame. According to the American Management Association, 20 percent of the businesses that fail, do so because of employee crime.
Another fuel for the blaze of honesty tests is the restriction of polygraph testing in many states. The polygraph, or lie detector, was a mainstay for businesses trying to determine the honesty of their employees. But with the restrictions, the honesty test has become a popular alternative.
The firms that market the tests have marked enormous jumps in sales last year. The Stanton Corp. in Chicago, for instance, says sales rose 34 percent to 703,681.AnotherChicagofirm,LondonHouseManagementConsultants,Inc.,saystheirsalesrose32percentinthefirstsixmonthsof1981to703,681.AnotherChicagofirm,LondonHouseManagementConsultants,Inc.,saystheirsalesrose32percentinthefirstsixmonthsof1981to4.2 million.
The honest test has some advantages over the conventional polygraph according to the firms selling the exams. One of the best pluses is that they are cheaper. The test costs anywhere from 6to6to14, whereas the polygraph might cost 55to55to75. Another advantage lies in the fact that to take a polygraph, an applicant often has to travel to some distant office. The honesty tests can be administered right in the interviewing room, taking only about an hour of the applicant’s time.
Some of the questions which might be asked on an exam cover such subjects as off-track betting, homicide, alcohol, and drugs. It might ask if you’ve ever filed a false insurance claim. The trick to the test is that it is hard for an applicant to be consistently deceptive when he is asked questions in a variety of areas.
Some of the questions are designed to determine how honest the applicant is answering the other questions. One such question is: Have you ever gotten really angry at someone for being unfair to you? Since it is most unlikely that anyone could answer this negatively, those who do respond negatively are flagged as possibly having lied on the other questions on the test. Of course, there is more than one question that this assumption is based on.
It is unlikely that there will be a decline in the use of tests in the near future. It could become the standard. The truth is, the tests would probably have been used from the beginning of time if they had been available. But only because of advances in the field of psychology has business gotten into the testing business.