Griggs v. Duke Power: the IQ-tests-are-illegal myth
Rob Bensinger (then communications lead at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute) had circulated a draft of what would become Eliezer Yudkowsky’s book Inadequate Equilibria , on why civilizations get stuck in clearly-worse-than-possible patterns. One stock example in that genre: US employers are said to use expensive college credentials as proxies for general intelligence because the 1971 Supreme Court case Griggs v. Duke Power Co.
made administering IQ tests legally risky. Alyssa, a careful reader of legal sources, points out that the popular version of this story misreads the case — the holding covered diplomas just as much as tests — though the resulting belief may still be doing the work the story attributes to it.
Re this part of the draft: “Yes, but in this world it’s illegal for employers to use explicit intelligence tests… Anyway: the natural next thing that happens is that employers start to demand that prospective employees show a certificate saying that they’ve been inside the tower.”
This appears to be a common myth. The Supreme Court case that’s usually cited here, Griggs v. Duke Power Co.
, actually held that any test which had significant differences between races, and which wasn’t demonstrated to have a substantial relationship to job performance, was illegal discrimination. This explicitly included diplomas. In fact, the company in question used a system where either a high school diploma or an IQ test was needed; both parts were declared illegal. This is a direct quote from the case: “The touchstone is business necessity. If an employment practice which operates to exclude Negroes cannot be shown to be related to job performance, the practice is prohibited. On the record before us, neither the high school completion requirement nor the general intelligence test is shown to bear a demonstrable relationship to successful performance of the jobs for which it was used. Both were adopted, as the Court of Appeals noted, without meaningful study of their relationship to job-performance ability. Rather, a vice president of the Company testified, the requirements were instituted on the Company’s judgment that they generally would improve the overall quality of the work force.
The evidence, however, shows that employees who have not completed high school or taken the tests have continued to perform satisfactorily and make progress in departments for which the high school and test criteria [401 U.S. 424, 432] are now used. The promotion record of present employees who would not be able to meet the new criteria thus suggests the possibility that the requirements may not be needed even for the limited purpose of preserving the avowed policy of advancement within the Company. In the context of this case, it is unnecessary to reach the question whether testing requirements that take into account capability for the next succeeding position or related future promotion might be utilized upon a showing that such long-range requirements fulfill a genuine business need. In the present case the Company has made no such showing.
The Court of Appeals held that the Company had adopted the diploma and test requirements without any ‘intention to discriminate against Negro employees.’ 420 F.2d, at 1232. We do not suggest that either the District Court or the Court of Appeals erred in examining the employer’s intent; but good intent or absence of discriminatory intent does not redeem employment procedures or testing mechanisms that operate as ‘built-in headwinds’ for minority groups and are unrelated to measuring job capability.
The Company’s lack of discriminatory intent is suggested by special efforts to help the undereducated employees through Company financing of two-thirds the cost of tuition for high school training. But Congress directed the thrust of the Act to the consequences of employment practices, not simply the motivation. More than that, Congress has placed on the employer the burden of showing that any given requirement must have a manifest relationship to the employment in question. [401 U.S. 424, 433] The facts of this case demonstrate the inadequacy of broad and general testing devices as well as the infirmity of using diplomas or degrees as fixed measures of capability. History is filled with examples of men and women who rendered highly effective performance without the conventional badges of accomplishment in terms of certificates, diplomas, or degrees. Diplomas and tests are useful servants, but Congress has mandated the commonsense proposition that they are not to become masters of reality.” ( Griggs v. Duke Power Co.
) However, the idea that IQ tests are illegal looks like it is such a common myth that it might have really influenced employers to drop them. This type of misinformation is unfortunately ubiquitous; eg., almost any popular discussion of economics will make use of the broken window fallacy.