Marble Industries Hired Virtually All of Its Employees from Union

question 20

Essay

Marble Industries hired virtually all of its employees from Union High School, which was overwhelmingly white in its racial makeup. Accordingly, there were virtually no nonwhite employees employed by Marble Industries. The work these employees performed was work that any reasonably capable high school graduate could do. When organizations representing nonwhites questioned the policy, the personnel director indicated that Union High School graduates were hired because they had worked successfully for the company and because the president of the company had graduated from that school. There was no evidence that there was any plan or intention to discriminate against nonwhites. Discuss the possibility that this policy may violate Title VII of the Civil Rights Act.

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Definitions:

Generalization Test Stimuli

Stimuli that are not exactly the same as the conditioned stimulus but are similar enough to elicit the conditioned response, used to test the breadth of stimulus generalization.

Behavioral Contrast

The phenomenon in which the rate of response varies according to a change in reinforcement conditions, usually in operant conditioning.

Transposition

Köhler’s idea that animals learn relationships between stimuli and that they respond to different stimuli based on the same relationship as the original training stimuli.

Occasion Setting

The ability of one stimulus to enhance the response to another stimulus.