Some tests measure abilities:

• Can you type 200 words a minute?

• Can you run 1.5 miles in 12 minutes?

• Are you comfortable using Excel?

Clearly, employers need the results of ability tests to make good hiring and promotion decisions.

More controversial is the use of another type of test, one that asks whether you are what you say you are. These are called authenticity tests:

• You say you don’t use illegal drugs, but are you really drug-free?

• You say you are honest, but are you really honest?

In his 1993 book Testing Testing: Social Consequences of the Examined Life, anthropologist F. Allan Hanson explores this form of testing. He begins with history from the period before the scientific method, when authenticity tests took the form of torture and witch burning.

He then moves forward to modern forms of testing for truth—the polygraph, honesty test, and urinalysis drug test. Hanson is concerned with the “metamessage,” the message that is an inevitable byproduct of authenticity testing. He writes:

[T]he metamessage of distrust conveyed by the demand that employees take authenticity tests is unmistakable, and it often erodes loyalty and morale. Essentially they are being told, regardless of your record of service, reliability, and safety, you are suspected of theft, dishonesty, or drug use, and that suspicion will be suspended only by your passing this test, and even if you pass, you will be trusted only until the next test. This engenders hostility against the company and may even spur some workers to take steps to confound or subvert the tests purely as a way to maintain a sense of autonomy and dignity in the face of a system that is aimed at systematically humiliating them…. Much more commonly, the metamessage … destroys employee motivation to take pride in one’s work and perform at a high level and engenders a passiveaggressive response marked by smoldering resentment and diminished productivity.

Hanson goes on to mention the problem of false positives, where innocent people are wrongly judged guilty. Which ethical theory would attach significance to the points Hanson makes?

Next, Hanson links his argument to a basic privacy concern:

To the claim that only those with something to hide need fear … authenticity tests, the proper response is that there is a little crook in all of us…. [Social interaction consists largely of a series of dramaturgical performances in which people don many masks in an effort to present themselves artfully—concealing certain elements of the self while highlighting and tinting others. The aim is to exercise some control over social situations by influencing others’ perception of the self and thereby of the situation….

[A]uthenticity testing erodes this distinctive feature of social life. Whether test results are positive or negative is, at this level, irrelevant. The point is that testing opens the self to scrutiny and investigation in ways that the self is powerless to control.

So far as the areas of knowledge covered by the tests are concerned, this transforms the person from autonomous subject to passive object.

What similarities to Alan Westin’s description of the functions of privacy do you detect here?

Some may claim that the fact that test results can be kept confidential changes the picture, but Hanson argues the reverse. For him, confidentiality is not a safeguard of privacy, but “yet another ingenious and highly effective technique for exercising power and discipline over the individual”:

Although it is advertised as a protective measure for test takers, confidentiality completes the domination of test givers over test takers. It assures that each individual confronts the organizations that mandate testing utterly alone and therefore in the weakest possible state. Here disciplinary power has achieved the remarkable feat of perfecting the domination of people by dividing them and dealing with them singly, all the while convincing them that the arrangement is for their own good.

Do you agree with Hanson’s analysis?