Video games also have potential legal advantages over IQ tests for companies. You could argue that “we only hire people good at video games to get people who fit our corporate culture of liking video games” but that argument doesn’t work as well for IQ tests.
IANAL but unless you work for a videogame company(or a close analogue like chess.com) , I think this is just false. If your job is cognitively demanding, having IQ tests (or things like IQ tests with a mildly plausible veneer) probably won’t get you in legal trouble[1], whereas I think employment lawyers would have a field day if you install culture fit questions with extreme disparate impact, especially when it’s hard to directly link the games to job performance.
The US Army has something like an IQ test. So does the US Postal Service. So does the NFL. I’ve also personally worked in a fairly large tech company (not one of the top ones, before I moved to the Bay Area) that had ~IQ tests as one of the entrance criteria. AFAIK there has never been any uproar about it.
I’m aware of Griggs v Duke; do you have more modern examples? Note that the Duke case was about a company that was unambiguously racist in the years leading up to the IQ test (ie they had explicit rules forbidding black people from working in some sections of the company), so it’s not surprising that judges will see their implementation of the IQ test the day after the Civil Rights Act was passed as an attempt to continue racist policies under a different name.
“I’ve never had issue before” is not a legal argument.
But it is a Bayesian argument for how likely you are to get in legal trouble. Big companies are famously risk-averse.
“The military, post office, and other government agencies get away with it under the doctrine of sovereign immunity”
Usually the government bureaucracy cares more than the private sector about being racist or perceived as racist, not less. It’s also easier for governments to create rules for their own employees than in the private sector, see eg US Army integration in 1948.
Also the NFL use IQ-test-like things for their football players, and the NFL is a) not a government agency, and b) extremely prominent, so unlikely to fly under the radar.
IANAL but unless you work for a videogame company(or a close analogue like chess.com) , I think this is just false. If your job is cognitively demanding, having IQ tests (or things like IQ tests with a mildly plausible veneer) probably won’t get you in legal trouble[1], whereas I think employment lawyers would have a field day if you install culture fit questions with extreme disparate impact, especially when it’s hard to directly link the games to job performance.
The US Army has something like an IQ test. So does the US Postal Service. So does the NFL. I’ve also personally worked in a fairly large tech company (not one of the top ones, before I moved to the Bay Area) that had ~IQ tests as one of the entrance criteria. AFAIK there has never been any uproar about it.
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I’m aware of Griggs v Duke; do you have more modern examples? Note that the Duke case was about a company that was unambiguously racist in the years leading up to the IQ test (ie they had explicit rules forbidding black people from working in some sections of the company), so it’s not surprising that judges will see their implementation of the IQ test the day after the Civil Rights Act was passed as an attempt to continue racist policies under a different name.
But it is a Bayesian argument for how likely you are to get in legal trouble. Big companies are famously risk-averse.
Usually the government bureaucracy cares more than the private sector about being racist or perceived as racist, not less. It’s also easier for governments to create rules for their own employees than in the private sector, see eg US Army integration in 1948.
Also the NFL use IQ-test-like things for their football players, and the NFL is a) not a government agency, and b) extremely prominent, so unlikely to fly under the radar.