Revisiting the question: Should older politicians, and other leaders, undergo cognitive testing?

Nik­ki Haley calls for cog­ni­tive test for old­er politi­cians (The Hill):

For­mer U.S. Ambas­sador to the Unit­ed Nations Nik­ki Haley sug­gest­ed in an inter­view on Thurs­day that lead­ers in the gov­ern­ment who are of an advanced age should under­go a “cog­ni­tive test.”

The Chris­t­ian Broad­cast­ing Net­work’s David Brody ques­tioned Haley about her thoughts on the men­tal health of 78-year-old Pres­i­dent Biden, the old­est man to hold the office, ask­ing if she had any concerns.

“Well what I’ll tell you is, rather than mak­ing this about a per­son, we seri­ous­ly need to have a con­ver­sa­tion that if you’re gonna have any­one above a cer­tain age in a posi­tion of pow­er — whether it’s the House, whether it’s the Sen­ate, whether it’s vice pres­i­dent, whether it’s pres­i­dent — you should have some sort of cog­ni­tive test,” Haley said … The advanced ages of both Biden and for­mer Pres­i­dent Trump, 75, was brought up fre­quent­ly dur­ing the 2020 pres­i­den­tial elections.

Dur­ing the sole vice pres­i­den­tial debate, USA Today Wash­ing­ton Bureau chief Susan Page asked both then-Sen. Kamala Har­ris (D‑Calif.) and for­mer Vice Pres­i­dent Mike Pence if they had spo­ken with their run­ning mates about any con­tin­gency plans should they become unable to serve, not­ing that they would both be serv­ing along­side the old­est U.S. pres­i­dents in his­to­ry, regard­less of who won.

Both vice pres­i­den­tial can­di­dates skirt­ed direct­ly answer­ing the ques­tion at the time.

News in Context:

• Debate: Should heads of state and can­di­dates to high office pass a cognitive/ men­tal fit­ness test?

Pro: “Def­i­nite­ly. We rou­tine­ly screen appli­cants for a wide range of jobs. Apply for the police, you will be test­ed. Join the mil­i­tary, you will be eval­u­at­ed. Should we not know if a can­di­date for the high­est posi­tion in the coun­try has a seri­ous emo­tion­al, intel­lec­tu­al or psy­cho­log­i­cal impairment?”

Con: “I dis­agree because these tests are very bad at pre­dict­ing how good some­one would be in lead­ing a coun­try. It doesn’t require the abil­i­ty to store a lot of infor­ma­tion in your work­ing mem­o­ry. Being a good leader requires only one essen­tial thing: hav­ing the right priorities.”

It depends: “Who makes the test? What cog­ni­tive met­rics do we use? The bias­es in that design could lead to sig­nif­i­cant unex­pect­ed or even inten­tion­al­ly skewed results.”

• With 25% of US physi­cians aged 65+, hos­pi­tals test old­er doc­tors on men­tal and phys­i­cal acuity
• On the val­ue and the lim­its of cog­ni­tive screen­ing, as seen in Pres­i­dent Trump’s examination