Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Court OKs Barring High IQs for Cops

I have been discussing this on facebook with people from a few different fields. A couple of folks who actually hire people (a function I have successfully avoided for all the decades of my own working life) tell me that they routinely pass on candidates they feel would not be challenged by the position. One wrote, "It is true that I don't want to hire someone who is likely to jump ship after 6 months because they're too bored or are just looking for better pay. I want to hire someone who will feel challenged and satisfied with the job."

Specifically, another said that a summa cum laude graduate would be too bored to be effective in an entry level position, and was likely to leave the job soon after training was over, and that this was very expensive for the laboratory. These employers would probably never have any indication of the IQ of their candidates. They would have to infer that from the educational record, where available, or from the interview.

The court case here is not all that atypical as far as an employer declining to hire someone because they are overqualified. What it interesting about it is that the hiring policy is based on a score that is meant to represent cognitive ability (not achievement), and that the policy includes a ceiling as well as a floor.

Yes, I know...but the absurdity of discrimination that's de facto sanctioned drives me bananas --- especially because this country works so hard to ensure that the less intelligent do get "equal opportunities" (e.g. think of schools).


But IQ doesn't make you overqualified by itself. I have a high IQ but that doesn't mean I'm overqualified for driving a train (in fact, I'm underqualified).

It's amazing that our society appears to be content to say that 10,000 hours of practice are more important than ability/talent or that all children are gifted on the one hand --- yet that high IQ can preclude you from certain jobs. Which one is it? Obviously, it isn't both, so what's happening is that people want things a certain way, and reason and logic play no role in their decisions in this area.

This is why I keep my technical degrees (other than one) off my resume as well as my patents or other achievements.

HR departments see people as liabilities and not as assets. Thus they look for negatives in the person's record. Many a good firm has been ruined by this approach.

As someone who does hire, I look for the smartest person I can find with the best verbal reasoning skills.

When I was managing people, I had to make sure I was managing either smart or unsmart but very compliant people. When I got handed someone who seemed "average" to me, it always ended in disaster. I *think* they couldn't meet my expectations, but weren't used to having those troubles. The people who had disabilities often got really excited by how well things worked for them when they followed my instructions slavishly -- to the point where they started making improvements and teaching me stuff. I really kinda liked that.

Anyway; I'd say that I am constitutionally unsuited to managing, and maybe even working closely with people who are used to seeing themselves as skillful but who don't get it as easily as me. That may well apply to being a cop.

Soft-skills DO matter. And every advantage has a flip side, even if it's minor (I'm an anarchist, I don't much wanna be a cop.)

Since this is a public sector job, I hope that the defendants were able to provide statistics regarding the prevalence of high intelligence employees leaving the profession. Without that, I would probably find against them.

In the private sector, I think companies ought to be able to hire or not hire for whatever reason they like. If they are turning away great applicants for stupid reasons, let them suffer the consequences of their actions.

I had the opposite experience. I was once hired to an entry-level position where the hiring manager declared, "You will be bored with this job within three months. But it's a foot in the door." And she was right on both counts.

This seems like a pretty foolish decision on the part of the police department, though. Are patrols all they do? Don't they have detectives, tech specialists, and lab geeks? Wouldn't it make sense to grow some of those from within?

I don't know that it is reasonable to expect anything but foolish decision making when the organization excludes smart people on purpose...

Which pretty much sums up the problem in a lot of areas. People tend to hire people who are like them, especially (I believe) if they aren't terribly thoughtful about the advantages of hiring people who don't think like they do or feel threatened by people who are better at something.

lol
Exactly.