Suppose I were a psychologist charged with helping a city identify the best candidates to lead their fellow firefighters into burning buildings and save lives. It isn’t practical to observe every applicant for weeks on the job, so I might try to design some kind of real-life setting analogous to leading a team of firefighters, in which we could gauge people’s performance relatively objectively. So suppose I set up a “field day,” in which colleagues and I rate all of the candidates for promotion as they perform in a series of demanding tasks that require physical ability, mental flexibility, and leadership skills. I could put them onto teams and watch them play, say, basketball and football, so colleagues and I could observe not only how they move and how well they respond in a physically demanding situation, but most importantly, who shows leadership on the court or the field and commands the respect of the other players. It wouldn’t be a perfect proxy for firefighting skill and leadership, but it wouldn’t be a bad one, either.
Used as the sole criterion, however, this field day measure would clearly be imperfect. A firefighter could play a great game of basketball, for example, but have poor organizational skills or a tendency to procrastinate in writing up reports. This method is also vulnerable to a legitimate fairness argument: Black players make up 75 percent of the NBA and 65 percent of players in the NFL but less than 13 percent of the U.S. population. That means they’re excelling over whites at about a 5:1 ratio in these sports. My test would make it likely that 65 to 75 percent of all promotions in fire departments go to African-Americans. In a diverse city like New Haven, where the percentage of African-Americans in the fire department is roughly three times the percentage of blacks in the general U.S. population, there is a high likelihood that no white people would be chosen if there were 15 openings for a promotion.
Fifteen turns out to be an important number, because in 2003, the city of New Haven had 15 openings for promotion in its fire department. They made the cut based solely on the results of a multiple-choice exam and an oral exam, giving more weight to the multiple-choice part of the exam despite the fact that other fire departments recorded substantial disparities between blacks and whites on the multiple-choice exam but not on the oral exam. (The few fire departments that still use a combination of oral and written exams tend to place about twice as much emphasis on the oral rather than the written exam, because they have not witnessed racial disparities in leadership among qualified firefighters, suggesting that the oral exam is less biased.)
