Morality Report: Precrime Comes to the Office

The Atlantic: 

As an indicator of a job candidate’s virtues, the trio of a résumé, a cover letter, and an interview is rudimentary at best: Recruiters have been shown to spend about six seconds pondering the average résumé, and those who formed positive impressions from certain candidates’ résumés have been shown to go softer on them in interviews. A hire is the result of a series of imperfect judgments.

The rewards of selecting a good employee are obvious; the harms of hiring a bad one are less commonly discussed. In the U.S., dishonest retail employees steal more from their employers every year than shoplifters do, and Kevin Murphy, now a professor of psychology at Colorado State University, once estimated that nearly a third of all failed businesses could be blamed on employee deviance. A recent report from Cornerstone OnDemand, a company that sells software that helps employers recruit and retain workers, said that good employees are 54 percent more likely to quit when they start working closely with one who acts out.

Other work has shown how employees’ words can be reduced to numbers to serve the purposes of prediction. Paul Taylor, a professor of psychology at Lancaster University, was the lead author on a 2013 study that simulated a workplace with counterproductive employees. He and his fellow researchers offered certain subjects cash in exchange for smuggling corporate secrets to outside parties, and as all of the subjects went about their day as “coworkers,” the researchers monitored their communications.

Read the whole story: The Atlantic