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Originally Posted by ped
Y
Maybe so, but the department thinks it measures something they don't want. Critical thinking? I saw in another article they also screen out people who have (too much?) compassion. So they want dispassionate and average intellect police officers, apparently.
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Yeesh. No comment, but I can't say I'm surprised.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Hotrodz
Lol it is not politics at all...it is psychology and it is backed up by research. It is not about ruling out smart people as IQ is not everything you want people that will not get burned out, know how to think independently but follow orders. Being a patrol cop takes unique person and in most cities and counties in America agencies spend a ton of money vetting potential candidates befor they go to an Academy for formal training and after that the person is put through rigorous field training with the agency of hire. It is about a 9 to 12 month process so you don't want to spend a lot of money on a person that will quit or wash out because they want to be Chief or question everything before they finish training.
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Well... it depends on what one means by "intelligence" or "boredom". Both constructs are poorly defined in the classic literature.
In any case, there is evidence that IQ test scores tend to be positively correlated with detail oriented processing, so one might argue they are defining police work on the basis of tedium-tolerance or something... which could be construed as a form of boredom-resistance. But detail oriented reasoning vs. looking for "broad stroke" sensory-perceptual events is going to vary incredibly from situation to situation, so I'm just going to assume they have some tests and aren't sure what many of them might actually measure.
That's how it is in most organizations, frankly.
Anyway, it's most likely some other personality or reasoning test that may or may not predict anything related to IQ, intelligence as a concept, etc.
Actually, most of the most widely used, commercially available psychological inventories and skills tests are based on archaic theoretical views (meaning, either generally considered to be incorrect, very contained in meaningfulness, or incredibly culturally biased based on contemporary theory and research in the relevant phenomena to be assessed) and are frequently unreliable and/or invalid. And that's assuming someone can even score and interpret it.
All I want to know is if law enforcement officer-applicants are given the old "F scale" personality test... a high scoring law-enforcement officer would be worrisome...
What's wrong with questioning things? If that's the concern, they might consider administering the Need For Closure test... although it also isn't the greatest psychometric instrument out there for measuring the relevant constructs, which boil down to something like: prefers straightforward, "black & white" answers over ambiguous ones that may beg further questions to be mulled over.
There's some newer, pretty good measures out there for assessing varying degrees of ambiguity tolerance and the variety of ways you can respond to the ambiguous. Long studied concept (ambiguity tolerance vs. intolerance) and its much more complex than it sounds.