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Title: Psychology and Industrial Efficiency

Author: Hugo Münsterberg

Release date: February 23, 2005 [eBook #15154]
Most recently updated: December 14, 2020

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PSYCHOLOGY
AND INDUSTRIAL EFFICIENCY ***

PSYCHOLOGY AND

INDUSTRIAL EFFICIENCY
BY

HUGO MÜNSTERBERG
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
The Riverside Press Cambridge
1913

TO
HAROLD F. McCORMICK

PREFATORY NOTE
This book corresponds to a German book, which I published a few months
ago, under the title Psychologie und Wirlschaftsleben: Ein Beitrag zur
angewandten Experimental-Psychologie (Leipzig: J.A. Barth). It is not a
translation, as some parts of the German volume have been abbreviated or
entirely omitted and other parts have been enlarged and supplemented. Yet
the essential substance of the two books is identical.

CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION

I. APPLIED PSYCHOLOGY

II. THE DEMANDS OF PRACTICAL LIFE

III. MEANS AND ENDS

I. THE BEST POSSIBLE MAN

IV. VOCATION AND FITNESS

V. SCIENTIFIC VOCATIONAL GUIDANCE

VI. SCIENTIFIC MANAGEMENT

VII. THE METHODS OF EXPERIMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY

VIII. EXPERIMENTS IN THE INTEREST OF ELECTRIC RAILWAY
SERVICE

IX. EXPERIMENTS IN THE INTEREST OF SHIP SERVICE

X. EXPERIMENTS IN THE INTEREST OF TELEPHONE SERVICE

XI. CONTRIBUTIONS FROM MEN OF AFFAIRS

XII. INDIVIDUALS AND GROUPS

II. THE BEST POSSIBLE WORK

XIII. LEARNING AND TRAINING

XIV. THE ADJUSTMENT OF TECHNICAL TO PSYCHICAL
CONDITIONS

XV. THE ECONOMY OF MOVEMENT

XVI. EXPERIMENTS ON THE PROBLEM OF MONOTONY

XVII. ATTENTION AND FATIGUE

XVIII. PHYSICAL AND SOCIAL INFLUENCES ON THE WORKING
POWER

III. THE BEST POSSIBLE EFFECT

XIX. THE SATISFACTION OF ECONOMIC DEMANDS

XX. EXPERIMENTS ON THE EFFECTS OF ADVERTISEMENTS

XXI. THE EFFECT OF DISPLAY

XXII. EXPERIMENTS WITH REFERENCE TO ILLEGAL
IMITATION

XXIII. BUYING AND SELLING

XXIV. THE FUTURE DEVELOPMENT OF ECONOMIC
PSYCHOLOGY

NOTES

INDEX

PSYCHOLOGY AND INDUSTRIAL
EFFICIENCY

INTRODUCTION

I
APPLIED PSYCHOLOGY

Our aim is to sketch the outlines of a new science which is to intermediate
between the modern laboratory psychology and the problems of economics:
the psychological experiment is systematically to be placed at the service of
commerce and industry. So far we have only scattered beginnings of the
new doctrine, only tentative efforts and disconnected attempts which have
started, sometimes in economic, and sometimes in psychological, quarters.
The time when an exact psychology of business life will be presented as a
closed and perfected system lies very far distant. But the earlier the
attention of wider circles is directed to its beginnings and to the importance
and bearings of its tasks, the quicker and the more sound will be the
development of this young science. What is most needed to-day at the
beginning of the new movement are clear, concrete illustrations which
demonstrate the possibilities of the new method. In the following pages,
accordingly, it will be my aim to analyze the results of experiments which
have actually been carried out, experiments belonging to many different
spheres of economic life. But these detached experiments ought always at
least to point to a connected whole; the single experiments will, therefore,
always need a general discussion of the principles as a background. In the
interest of such a wider perspective we may at first enter into some
preparatory questions of theory. They may serve as an introduction which is
to lead us to the actual economic life and the present achievements of
experimental psychology.
It is well known that the modern psychologists only slowly and very
reluctantly approached the apparently natural task of rendering useful
service to practical life. As long as the study of the mind was entirely
dependent upon philosophical or theological speculation, no help could be
expected from such endeavors to assist in the daily walks of life. But half a
century has passed since the study of consciousness was switched into the
tracks of exact scientific investigation. Five decades ago the psychologists
began to devote themselves to the most minute description of the mental

experiences and to explain the mental life in a way which was modeled
after the pattern of exact natural sciences. Their aim was no longer to
speculate about the soul, but to find the psychical elements and the constant
laws which control their connections. Psychology became experimental and
physiological. For more than thirty years the psychologists have also had
their workshops. Laboratories for experimental psychology have grown up
in all civilized countries, and the new method has been applied to one group
of mental traits after another. And yet we stand before the surprising fact
that all the manifold results of the new science have remained book
knowledge, detached from any practical interests. Only in the last ten years
do we find systematic efforts to apply the experimental results of
psychology to the needs of society.
It is clear that the reason for this late beginning is not an unwillingness of
the last century to make theoretical knowledge serviceable to the demands
of life. Every one knows, on the contrary, that the glorious advance of the
natural sciences became at the same time a triumphal march of technique.
Whatever was brought to light in the laboratories of the physicists and
chemists, of the physiologists and pathologists, was quickly transformed
into achievements of physical and chemical industry, of medicine and
hygiene, of agriculture and mining and transportation. No realm of the
external social life remained untouched. The scientists, on the other hand,
felt that the far-reaching practical effect which came from their discoveries
exerted a stimulating influence on the theoretical researches themselves.
The pure search for truth and knowledge was not lowered when the
electrical waves were harnessed for wireless telegraphy, or the Roentgen
rays were forced into the service of surgery. The knowledge of nature and
the mastery of nature have always belonged together.
The persistent hesitation of the psychologists to make similar practical use
of their experimental results has therefore come from different causes. The
students of mental life evidently had the feeling that quiet, undisturbed
research was needed for the new science of psychology in order that a
certain maturity might be reached before a contact with the turmoil of
practical life would be advisable. The sciences themselves cannot escape
injury if their results are forced into the rush of the day before the
fundamental ideas have been cleared up, the methods of investigation really
tried, and an ample supply of facts collected. But this very justified

reluctance becomes a real danger if it grows into an instinctive fear of
coming into contact at all with practical life. To be sure, in any single case
there may be a difference of opinion as to when the right time has come and
when the inner consolidation of a new science is sufficiently advanced for
the technical service, but it ought to be clear that it is not wise to wait until
the scientists have settled all the theoretical problems involved. True
progress in every scientific field means that the problems become
multiplied and that ever new questions keep coming to the surface. If the
psychologists were to refrain from practical application until the theoretical
results of their laboratories need no supplement, the time for applied
psychology would never come. Whoever looks without prejudice on the
development of modern psychology ought to acknowledge that the
hesitancy which was justified in the beginning would to-day be inexcusable
lack of initiative. For the sciences of the mind too, the time has come when
theory and practice must support each other. An exceedingly large mass of
facts has been gathered, the methods have become refined and
differentiated, and however much may still be under discussion, the ground
common to all is ample enough to build upon.
Another important reason for the slowness of practical progress was
probably this. When the psychologists began to work with the new
experimental methods, their most immediate concern was to get rid of mere
speculation and to take hold of actual facts. Hence they regarded the natural
sciences as their model, and, together with the experimental method which
distinguishes scientific work, the characteristic goal of the sciences was
accepted too. This scientific goal is always the attainment of general laws;
and so it happened that in the first decades after the foundation of
psychological laboratories the general laws of the mind absorbed the entire
attention and interest of the investigators. The result of such an attitude was,
that we learned to understand the working of the typical mind, but that all
the individual variations were almost neglected. When the various
individuals differed in their mental behavior, these differences appeared
almost as disturbances which the psychologists had to eliminate in order to
find the general laws which hold for every mind. The studies were
accordingly confined to the general averages of mental experience, while
the variations from such averages were hardly included in the scientific
account. In earlier centuries, to be sure, the interest of the psychological

observers had been given almost entirely to the rich manifoldness of human
characters and intelligences and talents. In the new period of experimental
work, this interest was taken as an indication of the unscientific fancies of
the earlier age, in which the curious and the anecdotal attracted the view.
The new science which was to seek the laws was to overcome such popular
curiosity. In this sign experimental psychology has conquered. The
fundamental laws of the ideas and of the attention, of the memory and of
the will, of the feeling and of the emotions, have been elaborated. Yet it
slowly became evident that such one-sidedness, however necessary it may
have been at the beginning, would make any practical application
impossible. In practical life we never have to do with what is common to all
human beings, even when we are to influence large masses; we have to deal
with personalities whose mental life is characterized by particular traits of
nationality, or race, or vocation, or sex, or age, or special interests, or other
features by which they differ from the average mind which the theoretical
psychologist may construct as a type. Still more frequently we have to act
with reference to smaller groups or to single individuals whose mental
physiognomy demands careful consideration. As long as experimental
psychology remained essentially a science of the mental laws, common to
all human beings, an adjustment to the practical demands of daily life could
hardly come in question. With such general laws we could never have
mastered the concrete situations of society, because we should have had to
leave out of view the fact that there are gifted and ungifted, intelligent and
stupid, sensitive and obtuse, quick and slow, energetic and weak
individuals.
But in recent years a complete change can be traced in our science.
Experiments which refer to these individual differences themselves have
been carried on by means of the psychological laboratory, at first reluctantly
and in tentative forms, but within the last ten years the movement has made
rapid progress. To-day we have a psychology of individual variations from
the point of view of the psychological laboratory.[1] This development of
schemes to compare the differences between the individuals by the methods
of experimental science was after all the most important advance toward the
practical application of psychology. The study of the individual differences
itself is not applied psychology, but it is the presupposition without which
applied psychology would have remained a phantom.

II
THE DEMANDS OF PRACTICAL LIFE

While in this way the progress of psychology itself and the development of
the psychology of individual differences favored the growth of applied
psychology, there arose at the same time an increasing demand in the midst
of practical life. Especially the teachers and the physicians, later the lawyers
as well, looked for help from exact psychology. The science of education
and instruction had always had some contact with the science of the mind,
as the pedagogues could never forget that the mental development of the
child has to stand in the centre of educational thought. For a long while
pedagogy was still leaning on a philosophical psychology, after that old-
fashioned study of the soul had been given up in psychological quarters. At
last, in the days of progressive experimental psychology, the time came
when the teachers under the pressure of their new needs began to inquire
how far the modern laboratory could aid them in the classroom. The
pedagogical psychology of memory, of attention, of will, and of intellect
was systematically worked up by men with practical school interests. We
may notice in the movement a slow but most important shifting. At first the
results of theoretical psychology were simply transplanted into the
pedagogical field. Experiments which were carried on in the interest of pure
theoretical science were made practical use of, but their application
remained a mere chance by-product. Only slowly did the pedagogical
problems themselves begin to determine the experimental investigation.
The methods of laboratory psychology were applied for the solving of those
problems which originated in the school experience, and only when this
point was reached could a truly experimental pedagogy be built on a
psychological foundation. We stand in the midst of this vigorous and
healthy movement, which has had a stimulating effect on theoretical
psychology itself.
We find a similar situation in the sphere of the physician. He could not pass
by the new science of the mind without instinctively feeling that his
medical diagnosis and therapy could be furthered in many directions by the

experimental method. Not only the psychiatrist and nerve specialist, but in a
certain sense every physician had made use of a certain amount of
psychology in his professional work. He had always had to make clear to
himself the mental experiences of the patient, to study his pain sensations
and his feelings of comfort, his fears and his hopes, his perceptions and his
volitions, and to a certain degree he had always tried to influence the mental
life of the patient, to work on him by suggestion and to help him by
stimulating his mind. But as far as a real description and explanation of
such mental experiences came in question, all remained a dilettantic semi-
psychology which worked with the most trivial conceptions of popular
thinking. The medical men recognized the disproportion between the
exactitude of their anatomical, physiological, and pathological observation
and the superficiality of their self-made psychology. Thus the desire arose
in their own medical circle to harmonize their psychological means of
diagnosis and therapy with the schemes of modern scientific psychology.
The physician who examines the sensations in a nervous disease, or the
intelligence in a mental disease, or heals by suggestion or hypnotism, tries
to apply the latest discoveries of the psychological laboratory. But here, too,
the same development as in pedagogy can be traced. The physicians at first
made use only of results which had been secured under entirely different
points of view, but later the experiments were subordinated to the special
medical problems. Then the physician was no longer obliged simply to use
what he happened to find among the results of the theoretical psychologist,
but carried on the experiments in the service of medical problems. The
independent status of experimental medical psychology could be secured
only by this development.
In somewhat narrower limits the same may be said as to the problems of
law. A kind of popular psychology was naturally involved whenever judges
or lawyers analyzed the experience on the witness stand or discussed the
motives of crime or the confessions of the criminal or the social conditions
of criminality. But when every day brought new discoveries in the
psychological laboratory, it seemed natural to make use of the new methods
and of the new results in the interest of the courtroom. The power of
observation in the witness, the exactitude of his memory, the character of
his illusions and imagination, his suggestibility and his feeling, appeared in
a new light in view of the experimental investigations, and the emotions and

volitions of the criminal were understood with a new insight. Here, too, the
last step was taken. Instead of being satisfied with experiments which the
psychologist had made for his own purposes, the students of legal
psychology adjusted experiments to the particular needs of the courtroom.
Investigations were carried on to determine, the fidelity of testimony or to
find methods for the detection of hidden thoughts and so on. Efforts toward
the application of psychology have accordingly grown up in the fields of
pedagogy, medicine, and jurisprudence, but as these studies naturally do not
remain independent of one another, they all together form the one unified
science of applied psychology.[2]
As soon as the independence of this new science was felt, it was natural that
new demands and new problems should continue to originate within its own
limits. There must be applied psychology wherever the investigation of
mental life can be made serviceable to the tasks of civilization. Criminal
law, education, medicine, certainly do not constitute the totality of civilized
life. It is therefore the duty of the practical psychologist systematically to
examine how far other purposes of modern society can be advanced by the
new methods of experimental psychology. There is, for instance, already,
far-reaching agreement that the problems of artistic creation, of scientific
observation, of social reform, and many similar endeavors must be
acknowledged as organic parts of applied psychology. Only one group of
purposes is so far surprisingly neglected in the realm of the psychological
laboratory: the purposes of the economic life, the purposes of commerce
and industry, of business and the market in the widest sense of the word.
The question how far applied psychology can be extended in this direction
is the topic of the following discussions.

III
MEANS AND ENDS

Applied psychology is evidently to be classed with the technical sciences. It
may be considered as psychotechnics, since we must recognize any science
as technical if it teaches us to apply theoretical knowledge for the
furtherance of human purposes. Like all technical sciences, applied
psychology tells us what we ought to do if we want to reach certain ends;
but we ought to realize at the threshold where the limits of such a technical
science lie, as they are easily overlooked, with resulting confusion. We must
understand that every technical science says only: you must make use of
this means, if you wish to reach this or that particular end. But no technical
science can decide within its limits whether the end itself is really a
desirable one. The technical specialist knows how he ought to build a
bridge or how he ought to pierce a tunnel, presupposing that the bridge or
the tunnel is desired. But whether they are desirable or not is a question
which does not concern the technical scientist, but which must be
considered from economic or political or other points, of view. Everywhere
the engineer must know how to reach an end, and must leave it to others to
settle whether the end in itself is desirable. Often the end may be a matter of
course for every reasonable being. The extreme case is presented by the
applied science of medicine, where the physician subordinates all his
technique to the end of curing the patient. Yet if we are consistent we must
acknowledge that all his medical knowledge can prescribe to him only that
he proceed in a certain way if the long life of the patient is acknowledged as
a desirable end. The application of anatomy, physiology, and pathology may
just as well be used for the opposite end of killing a man. Whether it is wise
to work toward long life, or whether it is better to kill people, is again a
problem which lies outside the sphere of the applied sciences. Ethics or
social philosophy or religion have to solve these preliminary' questions. The
physician as such has only to deal with the means which lead toward that
goal.

We must make the same discrimination in the psychotechnical field. The
psychologist may point out the methods by which an involuntary confession
can be secured from a defendant, but whether it is justifiable to extort
involuntary confessions is a problem which does not concern the
psychologist. The lawyers or the legislators must decide as to the right or
wrong, the legality or illegality, of forcing a man to show his bidden ideas.
If such an end is desirable, the psychotechnical student can determine the
right means, and that is the limit of his office. We ought to keep in mind
that the same holds true for the application of psychology in economic life.
Economic psychotechnics may serve certain ends of commerce and
industry, but whether these ends are the best ones is not a care with which
the psychologist has to be burdened. For instance, the end may be the
selection of the most efficient laborers for particular industries. The
psychologist may develop methods in his laboratory by which this purpose
can be fulfilled. But if some mills prefer another goal,—for instance, to
have not the most efficient but the cheapest possible laborers,—entirely
different means for the selection are necessary. The psychologist is,
therefore, not entangled in the economic discussions of the day; it is not his
concern to decide whether the policy of the trusts or the policy of the trade-
unions or any other policy for the selection of laborers is the ideal one. He
is confined to the statement; if you wish this end, then you must proceed in
this way; but it is left to you to express your preference among the ends.
Applied psychology can, therefore, speak the language of an exact science
in its own field, independent of economic opinions and debatable partisan
interests. This is necessary limitation, but in this limitation lies the strength
of the new science. The psychologist may show how a special commodity
can be advertised; but whether from a social point of view it is desirable to
reinforce the sale of these goods is no problem for psychotechnics. If a
sociologist insists that it would be better if not so many useless goods were
bought, and that the aim ought rather to be to protect the buyer than to help
the seller, the psychologist would not object. His interest would only be to
find the right psychological means to lead to this other social end. He is
partisan neither of the salesman nor of the customer, neither of the capitalist
nor of the laborer, he is neither Socialist nor anti-Socialist, neither high-
tariff man nor free-trader. Here, too, of course, there are certain goals which
are acknowledged on all sides, and which therefore hardly need any
discussion, just as in the case of the physician, where the prolongation of

life is practically acknowledged as a desirable end by every one. But
everywhere where the aim is not perfectly a matter of course, the
psychotechnical specialist fulfills his task only when he is satisfied with
demonstrating that certain psychical means serve a certain end, and that
they ought to be applied as soon as that end is accepted.
The whole system of psychotechnical knowledge might be subdivided
under either of the two aspects. Either we might start from the various
mental processes and ask for what end each mental factor can be practically
useful and important, or we can begin with studying what significant ends
are acknowledged in our society and then we can seek the various
psychological facts which are needed as means for the realization of these
ends. The first way offers many conveniences. There we should begin with
the mental states of attention, memory, feeling, and so on, and should study
how the psychological knowledge of every one of these mental states can
render service in many different practical fields. The attention, for instance,
is important in the classroom when the teacher tries to secure the attention
of the pupils, but the judge expects the same attention from the jurymen in
the courtroom, the artist seeks to stir up the attention of the spectator, the
advertiser demands the attention of the newspaper readers. Whoever studies
the characteristics of the mental process of attention may then be able to
indicate how in every one of these unlike cases the attention can be
stimulated and retained. Nevertheless the opposite way which starts from
the tasks to be fulfilled seems more helpful and more fundamentally
significant. The question, then, is what mental processes become important
for the tasks of education, what for the purposes of the courtroom, what for
the hospital, what for the church, what for politics, and so on.
As this whole essay is to be devoted exclusively to the economic problems,
we are obliged to choose the second way; that is, to arrange applied
psychology with reference to its chief ends and not with reference to the
various means. But the same question comes up in the further subdivision
of the material. In the field of economic psychology, too, we might ask how
far the study of attention, or of perception, or of feeling, or of will, or of
memory, and so on, can be useful for the purposes of the business man. Or
here, too, we might begin with the consideration of the various ends and
purposes. The ends of commerce are different from those of industry, those
of publishing different from those of transportation, those of agriculture

different from those of mining; or, in the field of commerce, the purposes of
the retailer are different from those of the wholesale merchant. There can be
no limit to such subdivisions; each particular industry has its own aims, and
in the same industry a large variety of tasks are united. We should
accordingly be led to an ample classification of special economic ends with
pigeonholes for every possible kind of business and of labor. The
psychologist would have to find for every one of these ends the right mental
means. This would be the ideal system of economic psychology.
But we are still endlessly far from such a perfect system. Modern
educational psychology and medical psychology have reached a stage at
which an effort for such a complete system might be realized, but economic
psychology is still at too early a stage of development. It would be entirely
artificial to-day to aim at such ideal completeness. If we were to construct
such a complete system of questions, we should have no answers. In the
present stage nothing can be seriously proposed but the selection of a few
central purposes which occur in every department of business life, and a
study of the means to reach these special ends by the discussion of some
typical cases which may clearly illustrate the methods involved.
From this point of view we select three chief purposes of business life,
purposes which are important in commerce and industry and every
economic endeavor. We ask how we can find the men whose mental
qualities make them best fitted for the work which they have to do;
secondly, under what psychological conditions we can secure the greatest
and most satisfactory output of work from every man; and finally, how we
can produce most completely the influences on human minds which are
desired in the interest of business. In other words, we ask how to find the
best possible man, how to produce the best possible work, and how to
secure the best possible effects.

PART I
THE BEST POSSIBLE MAN

IV
VOCATION AND FITNESS

Instead of lingering over theoretical discussions, we will move straight on
toward our first practical problem. The economic task, with reference to
which we want to demonstrate the new psychotechnic method, is the
selection of those personalities which by their mental qualities are
especially fit for a particular kind of economic work. This problem is
especially useful to show what the new method can do and what it cannot
do. Whether the method is sufficiently developed to secure full results to-
day, or whether they will come to-morrow, is unimportant. It is clear that
the success of to-morrow is to be hoped for, only if understanding and
interest in the problem is already alive to-day.
When we inquire into the qualities of men, we use the word here in its
widest meaning. It covers, on the one side, the mental dispositions which
may still be quite undeveloped and which may unfold only under the
influence of special conditions in the surroundings; but, on the other side, it
covers the habitual traits of the personality, the features of the individual
temperament and character, of the intelligence and of the ability, of the
collected knowledge and of the acquired experience. All variations of will
and feeling, of perception and thought, of attention and emotion, of memory
and imagination, are included here. From a purely psychological standpoint,
quite incomparable contents and functions and dispositions of the
personality are thus thrown together, but in practical life we are accustomed
to proceed after this fashion: if a man applies for a position, he is
considered with regard to the totality of his qualities, and at first nobody
cares whether the particular feature is inherited or acquired, whether it is an
individual chance variation or whether it is common to a larger group,
perhaps to all members of a certain nationality or race. We simply start from
the clear fact that the personalities which enter into the world of affairs
present an unlimited manifoldness of talents and abilities and functions of
the mind. From this manifoldness, it necessarily follows that some are
more, some less, fit for the particular economic task. In view of the far-

reaching division of labor in our modern economic life, it is impossible to
avoid the question how we can select the fit personalities and reject the
unfit ones.
How has modern society prepared itself to settle this social demand? In case
that certain knowledge is indispensable for the work or that technical
abilities must have been acquired, the vocation is surrounded by
examinations. This is true of the lower as well as of the higher activities.
The direct examination is everywhere supplemented by testimonials
covering the previous achievements, by certificates referring to the previous
education, and in frequent cases by the endeavor to gain a personal
impression from the applicant. But if we take all this together, the total
result remains a social machinery by which perhaps the elimination of the
entirely unfit can be secured. But no one could speak of a really satisfactory
adaptation of the manifold personalities to the economic vocational tasks.
All those examinations and tests and certificates refer essentially to what
can be learned from without, and not to the true qualities of the mind and
the deeper traits. The so-called impressions, too, are determined by the most
secondary and external factors. Society relies instinctively on the hope that
the natural wishes and interests will push every one to the place for which
his dispositions, talents, and psychophysical gifts prepare him.
In reality this confidence is entirely unfounded. A threefold difficulty exists.
In the first place, young people know very little about themselves and their
abilities. When the day comes on which they discover their real strong
points and their weaknesses, it is often too late. They have usually been
drawn into the current of a particular vocation, and have given too much
energy to the preparation for a specific achievement to change the whole
life-plan once more. The entire scheme of education gives to the individual
little chance to find himself. A mere interest for one or another subject in
school is influenced by many accidental circumstances, by the personality
of the teacher or the methods of instruction, by suggestions of the
surroundings and by home traditions, and accordingly even such a
preference gives rather a slight final indication of the individual mental
qualities. Moreover, such mere inclinations and interests cannot determine
the true psychological fitness for a vocation. To choose a crude illustration,
a boy may think with passion of the vocation of a sailor, and yet may be
entirely unfit for it, because his mind lacks the ability to discriminate red

and green. He himself may never have discovered that he is color-blind, but
when he is ready to turn to the sailor's calling, the examination of his color-
sensitiveness which is demanded may have shown the disturbing mental
deficiency. Similar defects may exist in a boy's attention or memory,
judgment or feeling, thought or imagination, suggestibility or emotion, and
they may remain just as undiscovered as the defect of color-blindness,
which is characteristic of four per cent of the male population. All such
deficiencies may be dangerous in particular callings. But while the vocation
of the ship officer is fortunately protected nowadays by such a special
psychological examination, most other vocations are unguarded against the
entrance of the mentally unfit individuals.
As the boys and girls grow up without recognizing their psychical
weaknesses, the exceptional strength of one or another mental function too
often remains unnoticed by them as well. They may find out when they are
favored with a special talent for art or music or scholarship, but they hardly
ever know that their attention, or their memory, or their will, or their
intellectual apprehension, or their sensory perceptions, are unusually
developed in a particular direction; yet such an exceptional mental
disposition might be the cause of special success in certain vocations. But
we may abstract from the extremes of abnormal deficiency and abnormal
overdevelopment in particular functions. Between them we find the broad
region of the average minds with their numberless variations, and these
variations are usually quite unknown to their possessors. It is often
surprising to see how the most manifest differences of psychical
organization remain unnoticed by the individuals themselves. Men with a
pronounced visual type of memory and men with a marked acoustical type
may live together without the slightest idea that their contents of
consciousness are fundamentally different from each other. Neither the
children nor their parents nor their teachers burden themselves with the
careful analysis of such actual mental qualities when the choice of a
vocation is before them. They know that a boy who is completely
unmusical must not become a musician, and that the child who cannot draw
at all must not become a painter, just as on physical grounds a boy with
very weak muscles is not fit to become a blacksmith. But as soon as the
subtler differentiation is needed, the judgment of all concerned seems
helpless and the physical characteristics remain disregarded.

A further reason for the lack of adaptation, and surely a most important one,
lies in the fact that the individual usually knows only the most external
conditions of the vocations from which he chooses. The most essential
requisite for a truly perfect adaptation, namely, a real analysis of the
vocational demands with reference to the desirable personal qualities, is so
far not in existence. The young people generally see some superficial traits
of the careers which seem to stand open, and, besides, perhaps they notice
the great rewards of the most successful. The inner labor, the inner values,
and the inner difficulties and frictions are too often unknown to those who
decide for a vocation, and they are unable to correlate those essential factors
of the life-calling with all that nature by inheritance, and society by
surroundings and training, have planted and developed in their minds.
In addition to this ignorance as to one's own mental disposition and to the
lack of understanding of the true mental requirements of the various social
tasks comes finally the abundance of trivial chances which become decisive
in the choice of a vocation. Vocation and marriage are the two most
consequential decisions in life. In the selection of a husband or a wife, too,
the decision is very frequently made dependent upon the most superficial
and trivial motives. Yet the social philosopher may content himself with the
belief that even in the fugitive love desire a deeper instinct of nature is
expressed, which may at least serve the biological tasks of married life. In
the choice of a vocation, even such a belief in a biological instinct is
impossible. The choice of a vocation, determined by fugitive whims and
chance fancies, by mere imitation, by a hope for quick earnings, by
irresponsible recommendation, or by mere laziness, has no internal reason
or excuse. Illusory ideas as to the prospects of a career, moreover, often
falsify the whole vista; and if we consider all this, we can hardly be
surprised that our total result is in many respects hardly better than if
everything were left entirely to accident. Even on the height of a mental
training to the end of adolescence, we see how the college graduates are too
often led by accidental motives to the decision whether they shall become
lawyers or physicians or business men, but this superficiality of choice of
course appears much more strongly where the lifework is to be built upon
the basis of a mere elementary or high school education.
The final result corresponds exactly to these conditions. Everywhere, in all
countries and in all vocations, but especially in the economic careers, we

hear the complaint that there is lack of really good men. Everywhere places
are waiting for the right man, while at the same time we find everywhere an
oversupply of mediocre aspirants. This, however, does not in the least imply
that there really are not enough personalities who might be perfectly fit
even for the highest demands of the vocations; it means only that as a
matter of course the result in the filling of positions cannot be satisfactory,
if the placing of the individuals is carried on without serious regard for the
personal mental qualities. The complaint that there is lack of fit human
material would probably never entirely disappear, as with a better
adjustment of the material, the demands would steadily increase; but it
could at least be predicted with high probability that this lack of really fit
material would not be felt so keenly everywhere if the really decisive factor
for the adjustment of personality and vocation, namely, the dispositions of
the mind, were not so carelessly ignored.
Society, to be sure, has a convenient means of correction. The individual
tries, and when he is doing his work too badly, he loses his job, he is pushed
out from the career which be has chosen, with the great probability that he
will be crushed by the wheels of social life. It is a rare occurrence for the
man who is a failure in his chosen vocation, and who has been thrown out
of it, to happen to come into the career in which he can make a success.
Social statistics show with an appalling clearness what a burden and what a
danger to the social body is growing from the masses of those who do not
succeed and who by their lack of success become discouraged and
embittered. The social psychologist cannot resist the conviction that every
single one could have found a place in which he could have achieved
something of value for the commonwealth. The laborer, who in spite of his
best efforts shows himself useless and clumsy before one machine, might
perhaps have done satisfactory work in the next mill where the machines
demand another type of mental reaction. His psychical rhythm and his inner
functions would be able to adjust themselves to the requirements of the one
kind of labor and not to those of the other. Truly the whole social body has
had to pay a heavy penalty for not making even the faintest effort to settle
systematically the fundamental problem of vocational choice, the problem
of the psychical adaptation of the individuality. An improvement would lie
equally in the interest of those who seek positions and those who have
positions to offer. The employers can hope that in all departments better

work will be done as soon as better adapted individuals can be obtained;
and, on the other hand, those who are anxious to make their working
energies effective may expect that the careful selection of individual mental
characters for the various tasks of the world will insure not only greater
success and gain, but above all greater joy in the work, deeper satisfaction,
and more harmonious unfolding of the personality.

V
SCIENTIFIC VOCATIONAL GUIDANCE

Observations of this kind, which refer to the borderland region between
psychology and social politics, are valid for all modern nations. Yet it is
hardly a chance that the first efforts toward a systematic overcoming of
some of these difficulties have been made with us in America. The barriers
between the classes lie lower; here the choice of a vocation is less
determined by tradition; and it belongs to the creed of political democracy
that just as everybody can be called to the highest elective offices, so
everybody ought to be fit for any vocation in any sphere of life. The
wandering from calling to calling is more frequent in America than
anywhere else. To be sure, this has the advantage that a failure in one
vocation does not bring with it such a serious injury as in Europe, but it
contributes much to the greater danger that any one may jump recklessly
and without preparation into any vocational stream.
It is fresh in every one's mind how during the last decade the economic
conscience of the whole American nation became aroused. Up to the end of
the last century the people had lived with the secure feeling of possessing a
country with inexhaustible treasures. The last few years brought the
reaction, and it became increasingly clear how irresponsible the national
attitude had been, how the richness of the forests and the mines and the
rivers had been recklessly squandered without any thought of the future.
Conservation of the national possessions suddenly became the battle-cry,
and this turned the eye also to that limitless waste of human material, a
waste going on everywhere in the world, but nowhere more widely than in
the United States. The feeling grew that no waste of valuable possessions is
so reckless as that which results from the distributing of living force by
chance methods instead of examining carefully how work and workmen can
fit one another. While this was the emotional background, two significant
social movements originated in our midst. The two movements were
entirely independent of each other, but from two different starting-points
they worked in one respect toward the same goal. They are social and

economic movements, neither of which at first had anything directly to do
with psychological questions; but both led to a point where the
psychological turn of the problem seemed unavoidable. Here begins the
obligation of the psychologist, and the possibility of fulfilling this
obligation will be the topic of our discussion concerning the selection of the
best man.
These two American movements which we have in mind are the effort to
furnish to pupils leaving the school guidance in their choice of a vocation,
and the nowadays still better known movement toward scientific
management in commerce and industry. The movement toward vocational
guidance is externally still rather modest and confined to very narrow
circles, but it is rapidly spreading and is not without significant
achievements. It started in Boston. There the late Mr. Parsons once called a
meeting of all the boys of his neighborhood who were to leave the
elementary schools at the end of the year. He wanted to consider with them
whether they had reasonable plans for their future. At the well-attended
meeting it became clear that the boys knew little concerning what they had
to expect in practical life, and Parsons was able to give them, especially in
individual discussions, much helpful information. They knew too little of
the characteristic features of the vocations to which they wanted to devote
themselves, and they had given hardly any attention to the question whether
they had the necessary qualifications for the special work. From this germ
grew a little office which was opened in 1908, in which all Boston boys and
girls at the time when they left school were to receive individual
suggestions with reference to the most reasonable and best adjusted
selection of a calling. There is hardly any doubt that the remarkable success
of this modest beginning was dependent upon the admirable personality of
the late organizer, who recognized the individual features with unusual tact
and acumen. But he himself had no doubt that such a merely impressionistic
method could not satisfy the demands. He saw that a threefold advance
would become necessary. First, it was essential to analyze the objective
relations of the many hundred kinds of accessible vocations. Their
economic, hygienic, technical, and social elements ought to be examined so
that every boy and girl could receive reliable information as to the demands
of the vocation and as to the prospects and opportunities in it. Secondly, it
would become essential to interest the schools in all these complex

questions of vocational choice, so that, by observation of individual
tendencies and abilities of the pupils, the teachers might furnish preparatory
material for the work of the institute for vocational guidance. Thirdly,—and
this is for us the most important point,—he saw that the methods had to be
elaborated in such a way that the personal traits and dispositions might be
discovered with much greater exactitude and with much richer detail than
was possible through what a mere call on the vocational counselor could
unveil.[3]
It is well known how this Boston bureau has stimulated a number of
American cities to come forward with similar beginnings. The pedagogical
circles have been especially aroused by the movement, municipal and
philanthropic boards have at least approached this group of problems, two
important conferences for vocational guidance have met in New York, and
at various places the question has been discussed whether or not a
vocational counselor might be attached to the schools in a position similar
to that of the school physician. The chief progress has been made in the
direction of collecting reliable data with reference to the economic and
hygienic conditions of the various vocations, the demand and supply and
the scale of wages. In short, everything connected with the externalities of
the vocations has been carefully analyzed, and sufficient reliable material
has been gained, at least regarding certain local conditions. In the place of
individual advice, we have thus to a certain degree obtained general
economic investigations from which each can gather what he needs. It
seems that sometimes the danger of letting such offices degenerate into
mere agencies for employment has not been avoided, but that is one of the
perils of the first development. The mother institute in Boston, too, under its
new direction emphasizes more the economic and hygienic side, and has set
its centre of gravity in a systematic effort to propagate understanding of the
problems of vocational guidance and to train professional vocational
counselors in systematic courses, who are then to carry the interest over the
land.[4]
The real psychological analysis with which the movement began has,
therefore, been somewhat pushed aside for a while, and the officers of those
institutes declare frankly that they want to return to the mental problem
only after professional psychologists have sufficiently worked out the
specific methods for its mastery. Most counselors seem to feel instinctively

that the core of the whole matter lies in the psychological examination, but
they all agree that for this they must wait until the psychological
laboratories can furnish them with really reliable means and schemes.
Certainly it is very important, for instance, that boys with weak lungs be
kept away from such industrial vocations as have been shown by the
statistics to be dangerous for the lungs, or that the onrush to vocations be
stopped where the statistics allow it to be foreseen that there will soon be an
oversupply of workers. But, after all, it remains much more decisive for the
welfare of the community, and for the future life happiness of those who
leave the school, that every one turn to those forms of work to which his
psychological traits are adjusted, or at least that he be kept away from those
in which his mental qualities and dispositions would make a truly
successful advance improbable.
The problem accordingly has been handed over from the vocational
counselors to the experimental psychologists, and it is certainly in the spirit
of the modern tendency toward applied psychology that the psychological
laboratories undertake the investigation and withdraw it from the dilettantic
discussion of amateur psychologists or the mere impressionism of the
school-teachers. Even those early beginnings indicate clearly that the goal
can be reached only through exact, scientific, experimental research, and
that the mere naïve methods—for instance, the filling-out of questionnaires
which may be quite useful in the first approach—cannot be sufficient for a
real, persistent furtherance of economic life and of the masses who seek
their vocations. In order to gain an analysis of the individual, Parsons made
every applicant answer in writing a long series of questions which referred
to his habits and his emotions, his inclinations and his expectations, his
traits and his experiences. The psychologist, however, can hardly be in
doubt that just the mental qualities which ought to be most important for the
vocational counselor can scarcely be found out by such methods. We have
emphasized before that the ordinary individual knows very little of his own
mental functions: on the whole, he knows them as little as he knows the
muscles which be uses when he talks or walks. Among his questions
Parsons included such ones as: "Are your manners quiet, noisy, boisterous,
deferential, or self-assertive? Are you thoughtful of the comfort of others?
Do you smile naturally and easily, or is your face ordinarily expressionless?
Are you frank, kindly, cordial, respectful, courteous in word and actions?

Do you look people frankly in the eye? Are your inflections natural,
courteous, modest, musical, or aggressive, conceited, pessimistic, repellent?
What are your powers of attention, observation, memory, reason,
imagination, inventiveness, thoughtfulness, receptiveness, quickness,
analytical power, constructiveness, breadth, grasp? Can you manage people
well? Do you know a fine picture when you see it? Is your will weak,
yielding, vacillating, or firm, strong, stubborn? Do you like to be with
people and do they like to be with you?"—and so on. It is clear that the
replies to questions of this kind can be of psychological value only when
the questioner knows beforehand the mind of the youth, and can
accordingly judge with what degree of understanding, sincerity, and ability
the circular blanks have been filled out. But as the questions are put for the
very purpose of revealing the personality, the entire effort tends to move in
a circle.
To break this circle, it indeed becomes necessary to emancipate one's self
from the method of ordinary self-observation and to replace it by objective
experiment in the psychological laboratory. Experimentation in such a
laboratory stands in no contrast to the method of introspection. A contrast
does exist between self-observation and observation on children or patients
or primitive peoples or animals. In their case the psychologist observes his
material from without. But in the case of the typical laboratory experiment,
everything is ultimately based on self-observation; only we have to do with
the self-observation under exact conditions which the experimenter is able
to control and to vary at will. Even Parsons sometimes turned to little
experimental inquiries in which he simplified some well-known methods of
the laboratory in order to secure with the most elementary means a certain
objective foundation for his mental analysis. For instance, he sometimes
examined the memory by reading to the boys graded sentences containing
from ten to fifty words and having them repeat what they remembered, or
he measured with a watch the rapidity of reading and writing, or he
determined the sensitiveness for the discrimination of differences by asking
them to make a point with a pencil in the centres of circles of various sizes.
But if such experimental schemes, even of the simplest form, are in
question, it seems a matter of course that the plan ought to be prescribed by
real scientists who specialize in the psychological field. The psychologist,
for instance, surely cannot agree to a method which measures the memory

by such a method of having spoken sentences repeated and the quality of
the memory faculty naïvely graded according to the results. He knows too
well that there are many different kinds of memory, and would always
determine first which type of memory functions is to be examined if
memory achievements are needed for a particular calling.
But even with a more exact method of experimenting, such a procedure
would not be sufficient to solve the true problem. A second step would still
be necessary: namely, the adaptation of the experimental result to the
special psychological requirements of the economic activity; and this again
presupposes an independent psychological analysis. Most of the previous
efforts have suffered from the carelessness with which this second step was
ignored, and the special mental requirements were treated as a matter of
course upon which any layman could judge. In reality they need the most
careful psychological analysis, and only if this is carried out with the means
of scientific psychology, can a study of the abilities of the individual
become serviceable to the demands of the market. Such a psychological
disentangling of the requirements of the callings, in the interest of guidance,
is attempted in the material which the various vocational institutes have
prepared, but it seldom goes beyond commonplaces. We read there, for
instance,[5] for the confectioner: "Boys in this industry must be clean, quick,
and strong. The most important qualities desired are neatness and
adaptability to routine"; or, for the future baker, the boy "ought to know
how to conduct himself and to meet the public"; or for the future
architectural designer, "he must have creative ability, artistic feeling, and
power to sketch"; or for the dressmaker, she "should have good eyesight
and good sense of color, and an ability to use her hands readily; she should
be able to apply herself steadily and be fairly quick in her movements;
neatness of person is also essential"; or for the stenographer, she must be
"possessed of intelligence, good judgment, and common sense; must have
good eyesight, good hearing, and a good memory; must have quick
perception, and be able to concentrate her attention completely on any
matter in hand." It is evident that all this is extremely far from any
psychological analysis in the terms of science. All taken together, we may,
therefore, say that in the movement for vocational guidance practically
nothing has been done to make modern experimental psychology
serviceable to the new task. But on the one side, it has shown that this work

of the experimental psychologist is the next step necessary. On the other
side, it has become evident that in the vocation bureaus appropriate social
agencies are existing which are ready to take up the results of such work,
and to apply them for the good of the American youth and of commerce and
industry, as soon as the experimental psychologist has developed the
significant methods.

VI
SCIENTIFIC MANAGEMENT

Before we discuss some cases of such experimental investigations, we may
glance at that other American movement, the well-known systematic effort
toward scientific management which has often been interpreted in an
expansive literature.[6] Enthusiastic followers have declared it to be the
greatest advance in industry since the introduction of the mill system and of
machinery. Opponents have hastily denounced it as a mistake, and have
insisted that it proved a failure in the factories in which it has been
introduced. A sober examination of the facts soon demonstrates that the
truth lies in the middle. Those followers of Frederick W. Taylor who have
made almost a religion out of his ideas have certainly often exaggerated the
practical applicability of the new theories, and their actual reforms in the
mills have not seldom shown that the system is still too topheavy; that is,
there are too many higher employees necessary in order to keep the works
running on principles of scientific management. On the other hand, the
opposition which comes from certain quarters,—for instance, from some
trade-unions,—may be disregarded, as it is not directed against the claim
that the efficiency can be heightened, but only against some social features
of the scheme, such as the resulting temporary reduction of the number of
workmen. But nobody can deny that this revolutionary movement has
introduced most valuable suggestions which the industrial world cannot
afford to ignore, and that as soon as exaggerations are avoided and
experience has created a broader foundation, the principles of the new
theory will prove of lasting value. We shall have to discuss, at a later point,
various special features of the system, especially the highly interesting
motion study. Here we have to deal only with those tendencies of the
movement and with those interests which point toward our present problem,
the mental analysis of the individual employees in order to avoid misfits.
The approach to this problem, indeed, seems unavoidable for the students of
scientific management, as its goal is an organization of economic work by

which the waste of energy will be avoided and the greatest increase in the
efficiency of the industrial enterprise will be reached. The recognition that
this can never be effected by a mere excessive driving of the workingmen
belongs to its very presuppositions. The illusory means of prolongation of
the working-time and similar devices by which the situation of the
individual deteriorates would be out of the question; on the contrary, the
heightening of the individual's joy in the work and of the personal
satisfaction in one's total life development belongs among the most
important, indirect agencies of the new scheme. This end is reached by
many characteristic changes in the division of labor; also by a new division
between supervisors and workers, by transformations of the work itself and
of the tools and vehicles. But as a by-product of these efforts the demand
necessarily arose for means by which the fit individuals could be found for
special kinds of labor. The more scientific management introduced changes,
by which the individual achievement often had to become rather
complicated and difficult, the more it became necessary to study the skill
and the endurance and the intelligence of the individual laborers in order to
entrust these new difficult tasks only to the most appropriate men in the
factories and mills. The problem of individual selection accordingly forced
itself on the new efficiency engineers, and they naturally recognized that the
really essential traits and dispositions were the mental ones. In the most
progressive books of the new movement, this need of emphasizing the
selection of workers with reference to their mental equipment comes to
clear expression.
Yet this is very far from a real application of scientific psychology to the
problem at hand. Wherever the question of the selection of the fit men after
psychological principles is mentioned in the literature of this movement, the
language becomes vague, and the same men, who use the newest scientific
knowledge whenever physics or mathematics or physiology or chemistry
are involved, make hardly any attempts to introduce the results of science
when psychology is in question. The clearest insight into the general
situation may be found in the most recent books by Emerson. He says
frankly: "It is psychology, not soil or climate, that enables man to raise five
times as many potatoes per acre as the average in his own state";[7] or: "In
selecting human assistants such superficialities as education, as physical
strength, even antecedent morality, are not as important as the inner

attitudes, proclivities, character, which after all determine the man or
woman."[8] He also fully recognizes the necessity of securing as early as
possible the psychological essentials. He says: "The type for the great
newspaper is set up by linotype operators. Apprenticeship is rigorously
limited. Some operators can never get beyond the 2500-em class, others
with no more personal effort can set 5000 ems. Do the employers test out
applicants for apprenticeship so as to be sure to secure boys who will
develop into the 5000-em class? They do not: they select applicants for any
near reason except the fundamental important one of innate fitness."[9] But
all this points only to the existence of the problem, and in reality gives not
even a hint for its solution. The theorists of scientific management seem to
think that the most subtle methods are indispensable for physical
measurements, but for psychological inquiry nothing but a kind of intuition
is necessary. Emerson tells how, for instance, "The competent specialist
who has supplemented natural gifts and good judgment by analysis and
synthesis can perceive attitudes and proclivities even in the very young,
much more readily in those semi-matured, and can with almost infallible
certainty point out, not only what work can be undertaken with fair hope of
success, but also what slight modification or addition and diminution will
more than double the personal power."[10] The true psychological specialists
surely ought to decline this flattering confidence. Far from the "almost
infallible certainty," they can hardly expect even a moderate amount of
success in such directions so long as specific methods have not been
elaborated, and so long as no way has been shown to make experimental
measurements by which such mere guesswork can be replaced by scientific
investigation.
The only modest effort to try a step in this direction toward the
psychological laboratory is recorded by Taylor,[11] who tells of Mr. S.E.
Thompson's work in a bicycle ball factory, where a hundred and twenty
girls were inspecting the balls. They had to place a row of small polished
steel balls on the back of the left hand and while they were rolled over and
over in the crease between two of the fingers placed together, they were
minutely examined in a strong light and the defective balls were picked out
with the aid of a magnet held in the right hand. The work required the
closest attention and concentration. The girls were working ten and a half
hours a day. Mr. Thompson soon recognized that the quality most needed,

beside endurance and industry, was a quick power of perception
accompanied by quick responsive action. He knew that the psychological
laboratory has developed methods for a very exact measurement of the time
needed to react on an impression with the quickest possible movement; it is
called the reaction time, and is usually measured in thousandths of a
second. He therefore considered it advisable to measure the reaction-time of
the girls, and to eliminate from service all those who showed a relatively
long time between the stimulus and reaction. This involved laying off many
of the most intelligent, hardest-working, and most trustworthy girls. Yet the
effect was the possibility of shortening the hours and of reducing more and
more the number of workers, with the final outcome that thirty-five girls did
the work formerly done by a hundred and twenty, and that the accuracy of
the work at the higher speed was two thirds greater than at the former slow
speed. This allowed almost a doubling of the wages of the girls in spite of
their shorter working-day, and at the same time a considerable reduction in
the cost of the work for the factory. This excursion of an efficiency engineer
into the psychological laboratory remained, however; an entirely
exceptional case. Moreover, such a reaction-time measurement did not
demand any special development of new methods or any particular mental
analysis, and this exception thus confirms the rule that the followers of
scientific management principles have recognized the need of psychological
inquiries, but have not done anything worth mentioning to apply the results
of really scientific psychology. Hence the situation is the same as in the
field of vocational guidance. In both cases a vague longing for
psychological analysis and psychological measurement, but in both cases so
far everything has remained on the level of helpless psychological
dilettantism. It stands in striking contrast with the scientific seriousness
with which the economic questions are taken up in the field of vocational
guidance and the physical questions in the field of scientific management. It
is, therefore, evidently the duty of the experimental psychologists
themselves to examine the ground from the point of view of the
psychological laboratory.

VII
THE METHODS OF EXPERIMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY

We now see clearly the psychotechnical problem. We have to analyze
definite economic tasks with reference to the mental qualities which are
necessary or desirable for them, and we have to find methods by which
these mental qualities can be tested. We must, indeed, insist on it that the
interests of commerce and industry can be helped only when both sides, the
vocational demands and the personal function, are examined with equal
scientific thoroughness. One aspect alone is unsatisfactory. It would of
course be possible to confine the examination to the individual mental
traits, and then theoretically to determine for which economic tasks the
presence of these qualities would be useful and for which tasks their
absence or their deficiency would be fatal. Common sense may be sufficient
to lead us a few steps in that direction. For instance, if we find by
psychological examination that an individual is color-blind for red and
green sensations, we may at once conclude, without any real psychological
analysis of the vocations, that he would be unfit for the railroad service or
the naval service, in which red and green signals are of importance. We may
also decide at once that such a boy would be useless for all artistic work in
which the nuances of colors are of consequence, or as a laborer in certain
departments of a dyeing establishment, and that such a color-blind girl
would not do at a dressmaker's or in a millinery store. But if we come to the
question whether such a color-blind individual may enter into the business
of gardening, in spite of the inability to distinguish the strawberries in the
bed or the red flowers among the green leaves, the first necessity, after all,
would be to find out how far the particular demands of this vocation make
the ability to discriminate color a prerequisite, and how far psychical
substitutions such as a recognition of the forms and of differences in the
light intensity, may be sufficient for the practical task. Moreover, where not
merely such mental defects, but more subtly shaded variations within
normal limits are involved, it would be superficial, if only the mental states
were examined and not at the same time the mental requirements of the

vocations themselves. The vocation should rather remain the starting-point.
We must at first find out what demands on the mental system are made by it
and we must grade these demands in order to recognize the more or less
important ones, and, especially for the important ones, we must then seek
exact standards with experimental methods.
Such an experimental investigation may proceed according to either of two
different principles. One way is to take the mental process which is
demanded by the industrial work as an undivided whole. In this case we
have to construct experimental conditions under which this total activity
can be performed in a gradual, measurable way. The psychical part of the
vocational work thus becomes schematized, and is simply rendered
experimentally on a reduced scale. The other way is to resolve the mental
process into its components and to test every single elementary function in
its isolated form. In this latter case the examination has the advantage of
having at its disposal all the familiar methods of experimental psychology,
while in the first case for every special vocational situation perfectly new
experimental tests must be devised.
Whether the one or the other method is to be preferred must depend upon
the nature of the particular commercial or industrial calling, and
accordingly presupposes a careful analysis of the special economical
processes. It is, indeed, easy to recognize that in certain industrial activities
a series of psychical functions is in question which all lie side by side and
which do not fuse into one united total process, however much they may
influence one another. But for many industrial tasks just this unity is the
essential condition. The testing of the mental elements would be in such
cases as insufficient as if we were to test a machine with reference to its
parts only and not with reference to its total united performance. Even in
this latter case this unified function does not represent the total personality:
it is always merely a segment of the whole mental life. We may examine
with psychological methods, for instance, the fitness of an employee for a
technical vocation and may test the particular complex unified combination
of attention, imagination and intelligence, will and memory, which is
essential for that special kind of labor. We may be able to reconstruct the
conditions so completely that we would feel justified in predicting whether
the individual can fulfill that technical task or not; and yet we may
disregard entirely the question whether that man is honest or dishonest,

whether he is pacific or quarrelsome; in short, whether his mental
disposition makes him a desirable member of that industrial concern under
other aspects.
We best recognize the significance of these various methods by selecting a
few concrete cases as illustrations and analyzing them in detail. But a word
of warning may be given beforehand so as to avoid misunderstandings.
These examples do not stand here as reports of completed investigations,
the results of which ought to be accepted as conclusive parts of the new
psychotechnical science; they are not presented as if the results were to be
recommended like a well-tested machine for practical purposes. Such really
completed investigations do not as yet exist in this field. All that can be
offered is modest pioneer work, and just these inquiries into the mental
qualities and their relations to the industrial vocations have attracted my
attention only very recently, and therefore certainly still demand long
continuations of the experiments in every direction. But we may hope for
satisfactory results the earlier, the more coöperators are entering the field,
and the more such researches are started in other places and in other
institutions. I therefore offer these early reports at the first stage of my
research merely as stimulations, so as to demonstrate the possibilities.
As an illustration of the method of examining the mental process as a
whole, I propose to discuss the case of the motormen in the electric
railways. As an illustration of the other type, namely, of analyzing the
activity and testing the elementary functions, I shall discuss the case of the
employees in the telephone service. I select these two functions, as both
play a practically important rôle in the technique of modern economic life
and as in both occupations very large numbers of individuals are engaged in
the work.

VIII
EXPERIMENTS IN THE INTEREST OF ELECTRIC
RAILWAY SERVICE

The problem of securing fit motormen for the electric railways was brought
to my attention from without. The accidents which occurred through the
fault, or at least not without the fault, of the motormen in street railway
transportation have always aroused disquietude and even indignation in the
public, and the street railway companies suffered much from the many
payments of indemnity imposed by the court as they amounted to thirteen
per cent of the gross earnings of some companies. Last winter the American
Association for Labor Legislation called a meeting of vocational specialists
to discuss the problem of these accidents under various aspects. The street
railways of various cities were represented, and economic, physiological,
and psychological specialists took part in the general discussion. Much
attention was given, of course, to the questions of fatigue and to the
statistical results as to the number of accidents and their relation to the
various hours of the day and to the time of labor. But there was a strong
tendency to recognize as still more important than the mere fatigue, the
whole mental constitution of the motormen. The ability to keep attention
constant, to resist distraction by chance happenings on the street and
especially the always needed ability to foresee the possible movements of
the pedestrians and vehicles were acknowledged as extremely different
from man to man. The companies claimed that there are motormen who
practically never have an accident, because they feel beforehand even what
the confused pedestrian and the unskilled chauffeur will do, while others
relatively often experience accidents of all kinds because they do not
foresee how matters will develop. They can hardly be blamed, as they were
not careless, and yet the accidents did result from their personal qualities;
they simply lacked the gift of instinctive foresight. All this turned the
attention more and more to the possibilities of psychological analysis, and
the Association suggested that I undertake an inquiry into this interesting
problem with the means of the psychological laboratory. I felt the practical

importance of the problem, considering that there are electric railway
companies in this country which have up to fifty thousand accident
indemnity cases a year. It therefore seemed to me decidedly worth while to
undertake a laboratory investigation.
It would have been quite possible to treat the functions of the motormen
according to the method which resolves the complex achievement into its
various elements and tests every function independently. For instance, the
stopping of the car as soon as the danger of an accident threatens is
evidently effective only if the movement controlling the lever is carried out
with sufficient rapidity. We should accordingly be justified in examining the
quickness with which the individual reacts on optical stimuli. If a playing
child suddenly runs across the track of the electric railway, a difference of a
tenth of a second in the reaction-time may decide his fate. But I may say at
once that I did not find characteristic differences in the rapidity of reaction
of those motormen whom the company had found reliable and those who
have frequent accidents. It seems that the slow individuals do not remain in
the service at all. As a matter of course certain other indispensable single
functions, like sharpness of vision are examined before the entrance into the
service and so they cannot stand as characteristic conditions of good or bad
service among the actual employees.
For this reason, in the case of the motormen I abstracted from the study of
single elementary functions and turned my attention to that mental process
which after some careful observations seemed to me the really central one
for the problem of accidents. I found this to be a particular complicated act
of attention by which the manifoldness of objects, the pedestrians, the
carriages, and the automobiles, are continuously observed with reference to
their rapidity and direction in the quickly changing panorama of the street.
Moving figures come from the right and from the left toward and across the
track, and are embedded in a stream of men and vehicles which moves
parallel to the track. In the face of such manifoldness there are men whose
impulses are almost inhibited and who instinctively desire to wait for the
movement of the nearest objects; they would evidently be unfit for the
service, as they would drive the electric car far too slowly. There are others
who, even with the car at high speed, can adjust themselves for a time to the
complex moving situation, but whose attention soon lapses, and while they
are fixating a rather distant carriage, may overlook a pedestrian who

carelessly crosses the track immediately in front of their car. In short, we
have a great variety of mental types of this characteristic unified activity,
which may be understood as a particular combination of attention and
imagination.
My effort was to transplant this activity of the motormen into laboratory
processes. And here I may include a remark on the methodology of
psychological industrial experiments. One might naturally think that the
experience of a special industrial undertaking would be best reproduced for
the experiment by repeating the external conditions in a kind of miniature
form. That would mean that we ought to test the motormen of the electric
railway by experiments with small toy models of electric cars placed on the
laboratory table. But this would be decidedly inappropriate. A reduced copy
of an external apparatus may arouse ideas, feelings, and volitions which
have little in common with the processes of actual life. The presupposition
would be that the man to be tested for any industrial achievement would
have to think himself into the miniature situation, and especially uneducated
persons are often very unsuccessful in such efforts. This can be clearly seen
from the experiences before naval courts, where it is usual to demonstrate
collisions of ships by small ship models on the table in the courtroom.
Experience has frequently shown that helmsmen, who have found their
course a life long among real vessels in the harbor and on the sea, become
entirely confused when they are to demonstrate by the models the relative
positions of the ships. Even in the naval war schools where the officers play
at war with small model ships, a certain inner readjustment is always
necessary for them to bring the miniature ships on the large table into the
tactical game. On the water, for instance, the navy officer sees the far-
distant ships very much smaller than those near by, while on the naval game
table all the ships look equally large. On the whole, I feel inclined to say
from my experience so far that experiments with small models of the actual
industrial mechanism are hardly appropriate for investigations in the field
of economic psychology. The essential point for the psychological
experiment is not the external similarity of the apparatus, but exclusively
the inner similarity of the mental attitude. The more the external mechanism
with which or on which the action is carried out becomes schematized, the
more the action itself will appear in its true character.

In the method of my experiments with the motormen, accordingly, I had to
satisfy only two demands. The method of examination promised to be
valuable if, first, it showed good results with reliable motormen and bad
results with unreliable ones; and secondly, if it vividly aroused in all the
motormen the feeling that the mental function which they were going
through during the experiment had the greatest possible similarity with their
experience on the front platform of the electric car. These are the true tests
of a desirable experimental method, while it is not necessary that the
apparatus be similar to the electric car or that the external activities in the
experiment be identical with their performance in the service. After several
unsatisfactory efforts, in which I worked with too complicated instruments,
I finally settled on the following arrangement of the experiment which
seems to me to satisfy those two demands.
The street is represented by a card 9 half-inches broad and 26 half-inches
long. Two heavy lines half an inch apart go lengthwise through the centre of
the card, and accordingly a space of 4 half-inches remains on either side.
The whole card is divided into small half-inch squares which we consider
as the unit. Thus there is in any cross-section 1 unit between the two central
lines and 4 units on either side. Lengthwise there are 26 units. The 26
squares which lie between the two heavy central lines are marked with the
printed letters of the alphabet from A to Z. These two heavy central lines are
to represent an electric railway track on a street. On either side the 4 rows
of squares are filled in an irregular way with black and red figures of the
three first digits. The digit 1 always represents a pedestrian who moves just
one step, and that means from one unit into the next; the digit 2 a horse,
which moves twice as fast, that is, which moves 2 units; and the digit 3 an
automobile which moves three times as fast, that is, 3 units. Moreover, the
black digits stand for men, horses, and automobiles which move parallel to
the track and cannot cross the track, and are therefore to be disregarded in
looking out for dangers. The red digits, on the other hand, are the dangerous
ones. They move from either side toward the track. The idea is that the man
to be experimented on is to find as quickly as possible those points on the
track which are threatened by the red figures, that is, those letters in the 26
track units at which the red figures would land, if they make the steps which
their number indicates. A red digit 3 which is 4 steps from the track is to be
disregarded, because it would not reach the track. A red digit 3 which is

only 1 or 2 steps from the track is also to be disregarded, because it would
cross beyond the track, if it took 3 steps. But a red 3 which is 3 units from
the track, a red 2 which is 2 units from the track, and a red 1 which is 1 unit
from the track would land on the track itself; and the aim is quickly to find
these points. The task is difficult, as the many black figures divert the
attention, and as the red figures too near or too far are easily confused with
those which are just at the dangerous distance.
As soon as this principle for the experiment was recognized as satisfactory,
it was necessary to find a technical device by which a movement over this
artificial track could be produced in such a way that the rapidity could be
controlled by the subject of the experiment and at the same time measured.
Again we had to try various forms of apparatus. Finally we found the
following form most satisfactory. Twelve such cards, each provided with a
handle, lie one above another under a glass plate through which the upper
card can be seen. If this highest card is withdrawn; the second is exposed,
and from below springs press the remaining cards against the glass plate.
The glass plate with the 12 cards below lies in a black wooden box and is
completely covered by a belt 8 inches broad, made of heavy black velvet.
This velvet belt moves over two cylinders at the front and the rear ends of
the apparatus. In the centre of the belt is a window 4-1/2 inches wide and 2-
1/2 inches high. If the front cylinder is turned by a metal crank, the velvet
belt passes over the glass plate and the little window opening moves over
the card with its track and figures. The whole breadth of the card, with its
central track and its 4 units on either side, is visible through it over an area
of 5 units in the length direction. If the man to be experimented on turns the
crank with his right hand, the window slips over the whole length of the
card, one part of the card after another becomes visible, and then he simply
has to call the letters of those units in the track at which the red figures on
either side would land, if they took the number of steps indicated by the
digit. At the moment the window has reached Z on the card, the
experimenter withdraws that card and the next becomes visible, as a second
window in the belt appears at the lower end when the first disappears at the
upper end. In this way the subject can turn his crank uninterruptedly until
he has gone through the 12 cards. The experimenter notes down the
numbers of the cards and the letters which the subject calls. Besides this,
the number of seconds required for the whole experiment, from the

beginning of the first card to the end of the twelfth, is measured with a
stopwatch. This time is, of course, dependent upon the rapidity with which
the crank is turned. The result of the experiment is accordingly expressed
by three figures, the number of seconds, the number of omissions, that is, of
places at which red figures would land on the track which were not noticed
by the subject; and, thirdly, the number of incorrect places where letters
were called in spite of the fact, that no danger existed. In using the results,
we may disregard this third figure and give our attention to the speed and
the number of omissions.
The necessary condition for carrying out the experiments with this
apparatus is a careful, quiet, practical explanation of the device. The
experiment must not under any circumstances be started until the subject
completely understands what he has to do and for what he has to look out.
For this purpose I at first always show the man one card outside of the
apparatus and explain to him the differences between the black and the red
figures, and the counting of the steps, and show to him in a number of cases
how some red figures do not reach the track, how others go beyond the
track, and how some just land in danger on the track. As soon as he has
completely understood the principle, we turn to the apparatus and he moves
the window slowly over a test card, and tries to find the dangerous spots,
and I turn his attention to every case in which he has omitted one or has
given an incorrect letter. We repeat this slowly until he completely masters
the rules of the game. Only then is he allowed to start the experiment. I
have never found a man with whom this preparation takes more than a few
minutes.
After developing this method in the psychological laboratory, I turned to the
study of men actually in the service of a great electric railway company
which supported my endeavors in the most cordial spirit. In accordance
with my request, the company furnished me with a number of the best
motormen in its service, men who for twenty years and more had performed
their duties practically without accidents, and, on the other hand, with a
large number of motormen who had only just escaped dismissal and whose
record was characterized by many more or less important collisions or other
accidents. Finally, we had men whose activity as motormen was neither
especially good nor especially bad.

The test of the method lies first in the fact that the tried motormen agreed
that they really pass through the experiment with the feeling which they
have on their car. The necessity of looking out in both directions, right and
left, for possible obstacles, of distinguishing those which move toward the
track from the many which move along the track, the quick discrimination
among the various rates of rapidity, the steady forward movement of the
observation point, the constant temptation to give attention to those which
are still too far away or to those which are so near that they will cross the
track before the approach of the car, in short, the whole complex situation
with its demands on attention, imagination, and quick adjustment, soon
brings them into an attitude which they themselves feel as identical with
that in practical life. On the other hand, the results show a far-reaching
correspondence between efficiency in the experiment and efficiency in the
actual service. With a relatively small number of experiments this
correspondence cannot be expected to be complete, the more as a large
number of secondary features must enter which interfere with an exact
correlation between experiment and standing in the railway company. We
must consider, for instance, that those men whom the company naturally
selects as models are men who have had twenty to thirty years of service
without accidents, but consequently they are rather old men, who no longer
have the elasticity of youth and are naturally less able to think themselves
into an artificial situation like that of such an experiment, and who have
been for a long time removed from contact with book work. It is therefore
not surprising, but only to be expected, that such older, model men, while
doing fair work in the test, are yet not seldom far surpassed by bright,
quick, young motormen who are twenty years younger, even though they
are not yet ideal motormen. Moreover, the standing in the company often
depends upon features which have nothing to do with the mental make-up
of the man, while the experiment has to be confined to these mental
conditions which favor accidents. It is quite possible that a man may happen
to experience a slight collision, even though no conditions for the accident
were lying in his mental make-up. But we may go still further. The
experiment refers to those sides of his mind which make him able to foresee
the danger points, and that is decidedly the most essential factor and the one
from which most can be hoped for the safety of the public. But this does not
exclude the possibility that some other mental traits may become causes of
accidents. The man may be too daring and may like to run risks, or he may

still need discipline, or he may not be sufficiently acquainted with the local
conditions. Any such secondary factors may cause some slight accidents
with the man who shows rather fair results in the experimental test of his
foresight. Finally, we must not forget that some men enter into such tests
under a certain nervous tension and therefore may not show so well at the
very first test as their mental equipment should allow. Hence it is decidedly
desirable not to rely on the first test, but to repeat it. If those various
interferences are taken into account, the correspondence between efficiency
and the results of the tests is fairly satisfactory. It justified me in proposing
that the experiments be continued and in regarding it as quite possible that
later tests on the basis of this principle may be introduced at the
employment of motormen.
A difficulty is presented by the valuation of the numerical results. The mere
number of omissions alone cannot be decisive, as it is clear that no
intelligent man would make any omissions if he should give an unlimited
amount of time to it; for instance, if he were to spend fifteen minutes on
those 12 cards. But this is the same thing as to say that a motorman would
not run over any one if he were to drive his car one mile in an hour. The
practical problem is to combine the greatest possible speed with the
smallest number of oversights and both factors must therefore be
considered. The subject who makes relatively many mistakes but uses a
very short time must be acknowledged to be as good as the man who makes
fewer mistakes but takes a longer time. In the results which I have gathered
in experiments with motormen, no one has gone through those 12 cards in a
shorter time than 140 seconds, while the longest time was 427 seconds. On
the other hand, no one of the motormen made less than 4 omissions, while
the worst ones made 28 omissions. I abstract from one extreme case with 36
omissions. On the whole, we may say that the time fluctuates between 180
and 420, the mistakes between 4 and 28. The aim is to find a formula which
gives full value to both factors and makes the material directly comparable
in the form of one numerical value instead of the two. If we were simply to
add the number of seconds and the number of omissions, the omissions
would count far too little, inasmuch as 10 additional omissions would then
mean no more than 10 additional seconds. On the other hand, if we were to
multiply the two figures the omissions would mean by far too much, as the
transition from 4 mistakes to 8 mistakes would then be as great a change as

the transition from 200 to 400 seconds, that is, from the one extreme of time
to the other. Evidently we balance both factors if we multiply the number of
omissions by 10 and add them to the number of seconds. The variations
between 4 and 28 omissions are 24 steps, which multiplied by 10
correspond to the 240 steps which lie between 180 and 420 seconds. On
that basis any additional 50 seconds would be equal to 5 additional
omissions. If of two men one takes 100 seconds less than his neighbor, he is
equal to him in his ability to satisfy the demands of the service, if he makes
10 mistakes more.
On the basis of this calculation I find that the old, well-trained motormen
come to a result of about 450, and I should consider that an average
standard. This would mean that a man who uses 400 seconds would not be
allowed to make more than 5 omissions, in 350 seconds not more than 10,
in 300 not more than 15, in 250 not more than 20, under the condition that
these are the results of the first set of experiments. Where there are more
than 20 omissions made, mere quickness ought not to be allowed as a
substitute. The man who takes 150 seconds and makes 30 mistakes would
come up to the same standard level of 450. Yet his characteristics would
probably not serve the interests of the service. He would speed up his car
and would make better time than any one else, but would be liable to
accidents. I should consider 20 mistakes with a time not longer than 250 as
the permissible maximum. Among the younger motormen whom I
examined, the best result was 290, in which 270 seconds were used and
only 2 omissions made. Results below 350 may be considered as very good.
One man, for instance, carried out the experiment in 237 seconds with 11
mistakes, which gives the result 347. From 350 to 450 may be counted as
fair, 450 to 550 as mediocre, and over 550 as very poor. In the case of old
men, who may be expected to adjust themselves less easily to artificial
experiments, the limits may be shifted. If the experiments are made
repeatedly, the valuation of the results must be changed accordingly. The
training of the men in literary and mathematical work or in experimentation
may be considered, as our experiments have shown that highly educated
young people with long training in experimental observations can pass
through the test much more quickly than any one of the motormen could.
Among the most advanced graduate students who do research work in my
Harvard laboratory there was no one whose result was more than 275,

while, as I said, among all the motormen there was no one whose result was
less than 290. The best result reached was by a student who passed through
the test in 223 seconds with only 1 mistake, the total therefore being 233.
Next came a student who did it in 215 seconds with 3 mistakes, total, 245;
then in 228 seconds with 2 omissions, total, 248, and so on.
I recapitulate: With men on the educational level and at the age that comes
in question for their first appointment in the service of an electric railway
company, the test proposed ought to be applied according to this scheme. If
they make more than 20 mistakes, they ought to be excluded; if they make
less than 20 mistakes, the number of omissions is to be multiplied by 10 and
added to the number of seconds. If the sum is less than 350, their mental
fitness for the avoidance of accidents is very high, between 350 and 450
fair, and more than 550 not acceptable under any conditions. I submit this,
however, with the emphasis on my previous statement that the investigation
is still in its first stage, and that it will need a long coöperation between
science and industry in order to determine the desirable modifications and
special conditions which may become necessary in making the employment
of men partly dependent upon such psychological tests. There can be no
doubt that the experiments could be improved in many directions. But even
in this first, not adequately tested, form, an experimental investigation of
this kind which demands from each individual hardly 10 minutes would be
sufficient to exclude perhaps one fourth of those who are nowadays
accepted into the service as motormen. This 25 per cent of the applicants do
not deserve any blame. In many other occupations they might render
excellent service; they are neither careless nor reckless, and they do not act
against instructions, but their psychical mechanism makes them unfit for
that particular combination of attention and imagination which ought to be
demanded for the special task of the motorman. If the many thousands of
injury and the many hundreds of death cases could be reduced by such a
test at least to a half, then the conditions of transportation would have been
improved more than by any alterations in the technical apparatus, which
usually are the only objects of interest in the discussion of specialists. The
whole world of industry will have to learn the great lesson, that of the three
great factors, material, machine, and man, the man is not the least, but the
most important.

IX
EXPERIMENTS IN THE INTEREST OF SHIP SERVICE

Where the avoidance of accidents is in question, the test of a special
experimental method can seldom be made dependent upon a comparison
with practical results, as we do not want to wait until the candidate has
brought human life into danger. The ordinary way of reaching the goal must
therefore be an indirect one in such cases. For the study of motormen the
conditions are exceptionally favorable, as hundreds of thousands of
accidents occur every year, but another practical example may be chosen
from a field where it is, indeed, impossible to correlate the results with
actual misfortunes, because the dangerous situations occur seldom; and
nevertheless on account of their importance they demand most serious
study. I refer to the ship service, where the officer on the bridge may bring
thousands into danger by one single slip of his mind. I turn to this as a
further concrete illustration in order to characterize at once the lengths to
which such vocational studies may advance.
One of the largest ship companies had approached me—long before the
disaster of the Titanic occurred—with the question whether it would not be
possible to find psychological methods for the elimination of such ship
officers as would not be able to face an unexpected suddenly occurring
complication. The director of the company wrote to me that in his
experience the real danger for the great ships lies in the mental dispositions
of the officers. They all know exactly what is to be done in every situation,
but there are too many who do not react in the appropriate way when an
unexpected combination of factors suddenly confronts them, such as the
quick approach of a ship in the fog. He claimed that two different types
ought to be excluded. There are ship officers who know the requirements
excellently, but who are almost paralyzed when the dangerous conditions
suddenly threaten. Their ability for action is inhibited. In one moment they
want to act under the stimulus of one impression, but before the impulse is
realized, some other perhaps rather indifferent impression forces itself on
their minds and suggests the counteraction, and in this way they vacillate

and remain inactive until it is too late to give the right order or to press the
right button. The other type feels only the necessity for rapid action, and
under the pressure of greatest haste, without clear thought, they jump to the
first decision which rushes to their minds. Without carefully considering the
conditions really given, they explode in an action which they would never
have chosen in a state of quiet deliberation. They react on any accidental
circumstance, just as at a fire men sometimes carry out and save the most
useless parts of their belongings. Of course, beside these two types, there is
the third type, the desirable one, the men who in the unexpected situation
quickly review the totality of the factors in their relative importance and
with almost instinctive certainty immediately come to the same decision to
which they would have arrived after quiet thought. The director of the
company insisted that it would be of highest importance for the ship service
to discriminate these three types of human beings, and to make sure that
there stand on the bridge of the ship only men who do not belong to those
two dangerous classes. He turned to me with this request, as he had heard of
the work toward economic psychology in the Harvard laboratory.
As the problem interested me, I carried on a long series of experiments in
order to construct artificial conditions under which the mental process of
decision in a complicated situation, especially the rapidity, correctness, and
constancy of the decision, could be made measurable. I started from the
conviction that this complex act of decision must stand in definite relation
to a number of simpler mental functions. If, for instance, it stood in a clear
definite relation to the process of association, or discrimination, or
suggestibility, or perception, or memory, and so on, it would be rather easy
to foresee the behavior of the individual in the act of decision, as every one
of those other simple mental functions could be tested by routine methods
of the psychological laboratory. This consideration led me to propose
ramified investigations concerning the psychology of decision in its relation
to the elementary mental processes. These studies by students of the
laboratory are not yet completed. But I soon saw that they would be unfit
for the solution of my practical problem, as we recognized that these
relations between the complex act of decision and the elementary functions
of the individual seem to have different form with different types of men.
[12]
If I was to approach the solution of the practical problem, accordingly, I

had to reproduce in an experimental form the act of decision under complex
conditions.
It seemed necessary to create a situation in which a number of
quantitatively measurable factors were combined without any one of them
forcing itself to consciousness as the most important. The subject to be
experimented on then has to decide as quickly as possible which of the
factors is the relatively strongest one. As usual, here, too, I began with
rather complicated material and only slowly did I simplify the apparatus
until it finally took an entirely inconspicuous form. But this is surely the
most desirable outcome for testing methods which are to be applied to large
numbers of persons. Complicated instruments, for the handling of which
special training is needed, are never so useful for practical purposes as the
simple schemes which can be easily applied. The form of which I finally
made use is the following. I work with 24 cards of the size of playing-cards.
On the upper half of every one of these cards we have 4 rows of 12 capital
letters, namely, A, E, O, and U in irregular repetition. On 4 cards, one of
these vowels appears 21 times and each of the three others 9 times; on 8
cards, one appears 18 times and every one of the three others 10 times; on 8
cards, one appears 15 times and each of the others 11 times; and finally, on
4 cards one vowel appears 16 times, each of the three others 8 times, and
besides them 8 different consonants are mixed in. The person to be tested
has to distribute these 24 cards as quickly as possible in 4 piles, in such a
way that in the first pile are placed all cards in which the letter A is most
frequent, in the second those in which the letter E predominates, and so on.
As a matter of course the result must never be secured by counting the
letters. Any attempt to act against this prescription and secretly to begin
counting would moreover delay the decision so long that the final result
would be an unsatisfactory achievement anyhow. It would accordingly
bring no advantage to the candidate.
We measure with a stopwatch in fifths of a second the time for the whole
process from the subject's looking at the first card to his laying down of the
last card, and, secondly, we record the number and the character of his
mistakes, if cards are put into wrong piles. I have made the experiment with
very many persons, and results show that those various mental traits which
have been observed in the practical ship service come clearly to light under
the conditions of this experiment. Some of the persons lose their heads

entirely, and for many of them it is a painful activity for which they require
a long time. Even if the number of mistakes is not considerable, they
themselves have the feeling that they are not coming to a satisfactory
decision, because their attention is pulled hither and thither so that they feel
an inner mental paralysis. Some chance letters stand out and appear to them
to be predominant, but in the next moment the attention is captured by some
other letters which bring the suggestion that they are in the majority and
that they present the most important factor. The outcome is that inner state
of indecision which can become so fatal in practical life. Other subjects
distribute the cards in piles at a relatively high speed, and they do it with the
subjective feeling that they have indeed recognized at the first glance the
predominant group of letters. The exact measurement of the results,
however, shows that they commit many errors which would have been
improbable after quiet consideration. Any small group of letters which
catches their eye makes on them, under the pressure of their haste, such a
strong impression that all the other letters are inhibited for the moment and
the wrong decision is quickly made. Finally, we find a group of persons
who carry out the experiment rather quickly and at the same time with few
mistakes. It is characteristic of them to pass through it with the feeling that
it is an agreeable and stimulating mental activity. In all cases the subjects
feel themselves under the unified impression which results from all those 48
letters of the card together; and this is the reason why the qualitative
manifoldness of a practical life situation can be compared with these
intermingled, quantitatively determined groups of letters.
If I consider the general results of these experiments only with reference to
the time-measurement, I should say that a person who completes the
distribution of the cards in less than 80 seconds is quick in his decisions;
from 80 to 150, moderately quick; from 150 to 250, slow and deliberate and
rather too deliberate for situations which demand quick action; over 250
seconds, he would belong among those wavering persons who hesitate too
long in a life situation which demands decision. The time which is needed
for the mere distribution of the cards themselves plays a very small rôle
compared with the time of the whole process, and can be neglected. In order
to determine this, I asked all the subjects before they made the real
experiment to distribute 24 other cards in 4 piles, on each of which one of
the four letters, A, E, O, and U was printed only once. Hence no comparison

of various factors was involved in this form of distribution. The average
time for this ordinary sorting was about 20 seconds. Only rather quick
individuals carried it out in less than 18 and only very slow ones needed
more than 25 seconds. This maximum variation of 10 seconds is evidently
insignificant, as the variations in the experiment amount to more than 200
seconds. But it is very characteristic that the results of the two experiments
do not move parallel. Some persons, who are able to sort the cards on which
only one of the 4 letters is printed very quickly, are rather slow when they
sort the cards with the 48 letters for which the essential factor is the act of
comparison. In the first case the training in card-playing also seems to have
a certain influence, but in the second case, our real experiment on decision,
this influence does not seem to exist.
We have emphasized from the start that it is no less important to give
consideration to the number of mistakes. A mere rapidity of distribution
with many mistakes characterizes, as we saw, a mental system which is just
as unfit for practical purposes as one which acts with too great slowness.
But it would not have been sufficient simply to ask how many cards were
put into wrong piles. The special arrangement of the cards with four
different types of combinations was introduced for the purpose of
discriminating among mistakes of unequal seriousness. When one letter
appeared 21 times and the three others only 9 times, it was surely much
easier to make the decision than when the predominant letter appeared only
15 times and the other three each 11 times. The easier the right decision, the
graver the mistake. Of course the valuation of these mistakes must be rather
arbitrary. We decided to value as 4 every mistake in these cards on which
the predominant letter appears 21 times; as 3, a mistake in the 18 letter
cards; as 2, a mistake in the 16 letter cards; and as 1, a mistake in the most
difficult ones, the 15 letter cards. If the mistakes are calculated on this basis
and are added together, a sum below 5 may indicate a very safe and
perfectly reliable ability for decision; 5 to 12, satisfactory; 12 to 20,
uncertain; and over 20, very poor. In order to take account of both factors,
time and mistakes, we multiply the sum of the calculated mistakes by the
number of seconds. If the product of these two figures is less than 400, it
may be taken as a sign of perfect reliability in making very quick, correct
decisions, in complex life situations; 400 to 1000 indicates the limits
between which the ability for such decisions may be considered as normal

and very satisfactory; 1000 to 2000, not good but still adequate; 2000 to
3000, unreliable, and over 3000, practically absent. It is clear that the real
proof of the value of this method cannot be offered. This is just the reason
why we selected this illustration as an example of the particular difficulty.
Wrong decisions, that is, cases in which the man on the bridge waits too
long before he makes his decision and thus causes a collision of ships by his
delay, or in which he rushes blindly to a decision which he himself would
have condemned after quiet deliberation, are rare. It would be impossible to
group such men together for the purpose of the experiment and to compare
their results with those of model captains, the more as experience has
shown that an officer may have a stainless record for many years and yet
may finally make a wrong decision which shows his faulty disposition. The
test of the method must therefore be a somewhat indirect one. My aim was
to compare the results of the experiments with the experiences of the
various individuals which they themselves reported concerning their
decisions in unexpected complicated situations, and moreover with the
judgments of their friends whom I asked to describe what they would
expect from the subjects under such conditions. The personal differences in
these respects are extremely great, and are also evident in the midst of small
groups of persons who may have great similarity in their education and
training and in many other aspects of their lives.
Among the most advanced students of my research laboratory, for instance,
all of whom have rather similar schooling and practically the same training
in experimental work, the product of mistakes and seconds varied between
348 and 13,335. That smallest value occurred in a case in which the time
was 116 seconds and the sum of the mistakes only 3, inasmuch as 3 cards of
the most difficult group where the predominating letter occurred only 15
times were put in the wrong piles. The shortest time among my laboratory
students was 58 seconds, but with this individual the sum of the mistakes,
calculated on the basis of the valuation agreed upon, was 13. The largest
figure mentioned resulted in a case in which the student needed 381
seconds and yet made mistakes the sum of which amounted to 35. It is
characteristic that the person with the smallest product felt a distinct joy in
the experiment, while the one with the largest passed through painful
minutes which put him to real organic discomfort. If we arrange the men
simply in the order of these products, of course we cannot recognize the

various groups, as those who are quick but make mistakes and those who
make few mistakes but act slowly may be represented by the same products.
The coincidence of the results with the self-characterization is frequently
quite surprising. Every one has at some time come into unexpected,
suddenly arising situations and many have received in such moments a very
vivid impression of their own mental reaction. They know quite well that
they could not come to a decision quickly enough, or that they rushed
hastily to a wrong decision, or that in just such instants a feeling of repose
and security came over them and that with sure instinct they turned in the
direction which they would have chosen after mature thought. The results of
the experiments in sorting the cards confirmed this self-observation in such
frequent cases that it may indeed be hoped that a more extended test of this
method will prove its practical usefulness. It is clear that the field is a wide
one, as these different types of mental dispositions must be of consequence
not only in the ship service, but also to a certain degree in the railroad
service and in many other industrial tasks.
We have emphasized from the start that as a matter of course such a tested
function, while it is taken in its complex unity, is nevertheless not the only
psychophysical disposition of significance. This is as true for the ship
officer as it was for the motorman of the electric car. If we were to study all
the mental dispositions necessary or desirable for the ship officer, we
should find many other qualities which are accessible to the psychological
investigation. The captain of the ship, for instance, is expected to recognize
the direction of a vessel passing in the fog by the signals of the foghorn. But
so far no one has given any attention to the psychological conditions of
localization of sound, which were for a long while a much-studied problem
of our psychological laboratories. We know how this localization is
dependent upon the comparison of the two ears and what particular
mistakes occur from the different sensibility of the two ears. Yet there are
to-day men on the bridges of the ships who hear much better with one ear
than with the other, but who still naïvely believe that, as they hear
everything very distinctly with one ear, this normal ear is also sufficient for
recognizing the direction of the sound. It is the same mistake which we
frequently see among laborers whose vision has become defective in one of
their eyes, or one of whose eyes is temporarily bandaged. They are
convinced that the one good eye is sufficient for their industrial task,

because they are able to recognize everything clearly and distinctly. They
do not know that both the eyes together are necessary in order to produce
that psychological combination by which the visual impression is projected
into the right distance, and that in the factory they are always in danger of
underestimating the distance of a wheel or some other part of the machine
and of letting the hand slip between the wheels or knives. The results of
experimental psychology will have to be introduced systematically into the
study of the fitness of the personality from the lowest to the highest
technical activity and from the simplest sensory function to the most
complex mental achievement.

X
EXPERIMENTS IN THE INTEREST OF TELEPHONE
SERVICE

Our plan was to illustrate the possibility of applying psychological
experiments to the selection of fit applicants also in cases in which not one
characteristic mental function stands out, but in which a large number of
relatively independent mental activities are in play. I choose as an
illustration of such cases the work of the employees at the telephone
switchboard. A study of the psychological factors in this work is strongly
suggested by the practical interests of the telephone companies, and may be
looked on here exclusively from this point of view. The user of the
telephone is little inclined to consider how many actions have to be carried
out in the central office before the connection is made and finally broken
again. From the moment when the speaker takes off the receiver to the
cutting off of the connection, fourteen separate psychophysical processes
are necessary in the typical case, and even then it is presupposed that the
telephone girl understood the exchange and number correctly. It is a
common experience of the companies that these demands cannot be
satisfactorily fulfilled when a telephone girl has to handle more than 225
calls in an hour. The official statistics show that this figure is exceeded in
not infrequent cases,[13] in extreme cases the number may even rise beyond
300. Moreover, in short periods of reinforced demands it may happen that
for a few minutes even the rapidity of 10 calls in a minute is reached.
Normally the burden is divided among the employees in such a way that
about 150 calls fall to each one in an hour, and that this figure is passed
considerably only in one morning and one evening hour. A skillful
distribution of pauses and ample arrangements for rest, usually together
with very excellent hygienic conditions, make it possible for the fit persons
to be able to carry on this work without over-fatigue from 8 to 9 hours a
day. On the other hand, it is only natural that such rapid and yet subtle
activity under such high tension, where especially the quick localization of
the correct hole is a difficult and yet indispensable part, can be carried out

only by a relatively small number of human nervous systems. The inability
to keep attention at such a high point for a long while, or to perform such
rapid movements, or to retain the numbers correctly, does not lead to fatal
accidents like those in the case of the unfit motormen, but it does lead to
fatigue and finally to a nervous breakdown of the employees and to
confusion in the service. The result is that the company is continually
obliged to dismiss a considerable proportion of those who have entered the
service and who have spent some months in going through the training
school of the company. As one single company, the Bell Telephone
Company, employs 16,000 operators, the problem is an expansive one, and
it has bearing on the health of the employees as well as on the patience of
the subscribers. But above all it refers to the economic interests of the
company, inasmuch as every girl who satisfies the entrance conditions of
hearing and sight, of school education and general personal appearance,
receives some salary throughout the months of training in the telephone
school. Since during the first half-year, in which the employee still works
entirely under supervision, more than a third of those who had originally
entered leave, partly on account of unfitness, and inability, partly on
account of over-fatigue or similar reasons, the economic disadvantage to the
company is evidently a very great one. The candidates are paid for months
of mere training, and they themselves waste their energy and time with
practice in a kind of labor which cannot be serviceable to them in any other
economic activity. Under these circumstances it is not surprising that one
city system approached me with the question whether it would not interest
me from a scientific point of view to examine how far the mental fitness of
the employees could be determined beforehand through experimental
means.
After carefully observing the service in the central office for a while, I came
to the conviction that it would not be appropriate here to reproduce the
activity at the switchboard in the experiment, but that it would be more
desirable to resolve that whole function into its elements and to undertake
the experimental test of a whole series of elementary mental dispositions.
Every one of these mental acts can then be examined according to well-
known laboratory methods without giving to the experiments any direct
relation to the characteristic telephone operation as such. I carried on the
first series of experiments with about thirty young women who a short time

before had entered into the telephone training school, where they are
admitted only at the age between seventeen and twenty-three years. I
examined them with reference to eight different psychophysical functions.
In saying this, I abstract from all those measurements and tests which had
somewhat anthropometric character, such as the measurement of the length
of the fingers, the rapidity of breathing, the rapidity of pulse, the acuity of
vision and of hearing, the distinctness of the pronunciation, and so on. A
part of the psychological tests were carried on in individual examinations,
but the greater part with the whole class together.
These common tests referred to memory, attention, intelligence, exactitude,
and rapidity. I may characterize the experiments in a few words. The
memory examination consisted of reading to the whole class at first two
numbers of 4 digits, then two of 5 digits, then two of 6 digits, and so on up
to figures of 12 digits, and demanding that they be written down as soon as
a signal was given. The experiments on attention, which in this case of the
telephone operators seemed to me especially significant, made use of a
method the principle of which has frequently been applied in the
experimental psychology of individual differences and which I adjusted to
our special needs. The requirement is to cross out a particular letter in a
connected text. Every one of the thirty women in the classroom received the
same first page of a newspaper of that morning. I emphasize that it was a
new paper, as the newness of the content was to secure the desired
distraction of the attention. As soon as the signal was given, each one of the
girls had to cross out with a pencil every "a" in the text for six minutes.
After a certain time, a bell signal was given and each then had to begin a
new column. In this way we could find out, first, how many letters were
correctly crossed out in those six minutes, secondly, how many letters were
overlooked, and, thirdly, how the recognition and the oversight were
distributed in the various parts of the text. In every one of these three
directions strong individual differences were indeed noticeable. Some
persons crossed out many, but also overlooked many, others overlooked
hardly any of the "a's," but proceeded very slowly so that the total number
of the crossed-out letters was small. Moreover, it was found that some at
first do poor work, but soon reach a point at which their attention remains
on a high level; others begin with a relatively high achievement, but after a
short time their attention flags, and the number of crossed-out letters

becomes smaller or the number of unnoticed, overlooked letters increases.
Fluctuations of attention, deficiencies, and strong points can be discovered
in much detail.
The third test which was tried with the whole class referred to the
intelligence of the individuals. Discussion of the question how to test
intelligence in general would quickly lead us into as yet unsettled
controversies. It is a chapter of the psychology of tests which, especially in
the service of pedagogy but to a certain degree also in the service of
medicine, has been more carefully elaborated than any other. Often it has
been contested whether we have any right to speak of one general central
intelligence factor, and whether this apparently unified activity ought not to
be resolved into a series of mere elementary processes. The newer
pedagogical investigations, however, speak in favor of the view that besides
all special processes, or rather, above all of them, an ability must be
recognized which cannot be divided any further, and by which the
individual adjusts his knowledge, his experiences, and his dispositions to
the changing purposes of life. The grading of the pupils in a class usually
expresses this differentiation of the intelligence; and while the differences
of industry or of mere memory and similar secondary features may
sometimes interfere, it remains after all not difficult for an observant
teacher to grade the pupils of his class, whom he knows well, according to
their general intelligence. The psychological experiments carried on in the
schoolroom have demonstrated that this ability can be tested by the
measurement of some very simple mental activities. The best method would
be the one which would allow the experimenter, on the basis of a single
experiment, to grade the individuals in the same order in which they appear
in the record of the teacher. Among the various proposed schemes for this
purpose the figures suggest that the most reliable one is the following
method, the results of which show the highest agreement between the rank
order based on the experiments and the rank order of the teachers.[14] The
experiment consists in reading to the pupils a long series of pairs of words
of which the two members of the pair always logically belong together.
Later, one word of each pair will be read to them and they have to write
down the word which belonged with it in the pair. This is not a simple
experiment on memory. The tests have shown that if instead of logically
connected words simply disconnected chance words are offered and

reproduced, no one can keep such a long series of pairs in mind, while with
the words which have related meaning, the most intelligent pupils can
master the whole series. The very favorable results which this method had
yielded in the classroom made me decide to try it in this case too. I chose
for an experiment 24 pairs of words from the sphere of experience of the
girls to be tested. Two further class experiments belonged rather to the
periphery of psychology. The exactitude of space-perception was measured
by demanding that each divide first the long and then the short edge of a
folio sheet into two equal halves by a pencil mark. And finally, to measure
the rapidity of movement, it was demanded that every one make with a
pencil on the paper zigzag movements of a particular size during the ten
seconds from one signal to another.
After these class experiments I turned to individual tests. First, every girl
had to sort a pack of 48 cards into 4 piles as quickly as possible. The time
was measured in fifths of a second. The following experiment which
referred to the accuracy of movement impulses demanded that every one try
to reach with the point of a pencil 3 different points on the table in the
rhythm of metronome beats. On each of these three places a sheet of paper
was fixed with a fine cross in the middle. The pencil should hit the crossing
point, and the marks on the paper indicated how far the movement had
fallen short of the goal. One of these movements demanded the full
extension of the arm and the other two had to be made with half-bent arm. I
introduced this last test because the hitting of the right holes in the
switchboard of the telephone office is of great importance. The last
individual experiment was an association test. I called six words like
"book," "house," "rain," and had them speak the first word which came to
their minds. The time was measured in fifths of a second only, as subtler
experiments, for which hundredths of a second would have to be
considered, were not needed.
In studying the results so far as the memory experiments were concerned,
we found that it would be useless to consider the figures with more than 10
digits. We took the results only of those with 8,9, and 10 digits. There were
54 possibilities of mistakes. The smallest number of actual mistakes was 2,
the largest, 29. In the experiment on attention made with the crossing-out of
letters, we found that the smallest number of correctly marked letters was
107, the largest number in the six minutes, 272; the smallest number of

overlooked letters was 2, the largest, 135; but this last case of abnormal
carelessness stood quite isolated. On the whole, the number of overlooked
letters fluctuated between 5 and 60. If both results, those of the crossed-out
and those of the overlooked letters, are brought into relation, we find that
the best results were a case of 236 letters marked, with only 2 overlooked,
and one of 257 marked, with 4 overlooked. The very interesting details as to
the various types of attention which we see in the distribution of mistakes
over the six minutes were not taken into our final table. The word
experiments by which we tested the intelligence showed that no one was
able to reproduce more than 22 of the 24 words. The smallest number of
words remembered was 7. The mistakes in the perception of distances
fluctuated between 1 and 14 millimeters; the time for the sorting of the 48
cards, between, 35 and 58 seconds; the association-time for the 6 associated
words taken together was between 9 and 21 seconds. The pointing
experiments could not be made use of in this first series, as it was found
that quite a number of participants were unable to perform the act with the
rapidity demanded.
Several ways were open to make mathematical use of these results. I
preferred the simplest way. I calculated the grade of the girls for each of
these achievements. The same candidate who stood in the 7th place in the
memory experiment was in the 15th place with reference to the number of
letters marked, in the 3rd place with reference to the letters overlooked, in
the 21st place with reference to the number of word pairs which she had
grasped, in the 11th place with reference to the exactitude of space-
perception, in the 16th place with reference to the association-time, and in
the 6th place with reference to the time of sorting. As soon as we had all
these independent grades, we calculated the average and in this way
ultimately gained a common order of grading. It is evident that this kind of
calculation contains accidental factors, especially as a consequence of the
fact that we give equal value to every one of these results. It might be better,
for instance, to attribute a higher value to the attention experiment or to the
intelligence experiment. This could be done by multiplying the results of
some of these grades by 2 or by 3, which would bring the high or low grade
of a girl for a particular function to stronger influence in the final result. But
in this first trial I contented myself with the simplest uniform scheme in

order to exclude all arbitrariness, and therefore considered the mere average
of all the grades as the expression of the experimental result.
With this average rank list, we compared the practical results of the
telephone company after three months had passed. These three months had
been sufficient to secure at least a certain discrimination between the best,
the average, and the unfit. The result of this comparison was on the whole
satisfactory. First, the skeptical telephone company had mixed with the
class a number of women who had been in the service for a long while and
had even been selected as teachers in the telephone school. I did not know,
in figuring out the results, which of the participants in the experiments these
particularly gifted outsiders were. If the psychological experiments had
brought the result that these individuals who stood so high in the estimation
of the telephone company ranked low in the laboratory experiment, it would
have reflected strongly on the reliability of the laboratory method. The
results showed, on the contrary, that these women who had proved most
able in practical service stood at the top of our list. Correspondingly, those
who stood the lowest in our psychological rank list had in the mean time
been found unfit in practical service and had either left the company of their
own accord or else had been eliminated. The agreement, to be sure, was not
a perfect one. One of the list of women stood rather low in the
psychological list, while the office reported that so far she had done fair
work in the service, and two others to whom the psychological laboratory
gave a good testimonial were considered by the telephone office as only
fair.
But it is evident that certain disagreements would have occurred even with
a more ideal method, as on the one side no final achievement in practical
service can be given after only three months, and because on the other side
a large number of secondary factors may enter which entirely overshadow
the mere question of psychophysical fitness. Poor health, for instance, may
hinder even the most fit individual from doing satisfactory work, and
extreme industry and energetic will may for a while lead even the unfit to
fair achievement, which, to be sure, is likely to be coupled with a dangerous
exhaustion. The slight disagreements between the psychological results and
the practical valuation, therefore, do not in the least speak against the
significance of such a method. On the other hand, I emphasize that this first
series meant only the beginning of the investigation, and it can hardly be

expected that at such a first approach the best and most suitable methods
would at once be hit upon. A continuation of the work will surely lead to
much better combinations of test experiments and to better adjusted
schemes. But it would be most desirable that such studies be undertaken at
various places according to various schemes in order to come nearer to the
solution of a problem which is economically important to the whole public
and to many thousands of employees. As soon as methods are really
perfected it would seem not at all impossible that by a short experiment of a
few minutes thousands of applicants might be saved long months of study
and training which are completely wasted. For us here the detailed analysis
of this particular case did not mean a suggestion to use to-day in the
telephone offices of the country the special scheme which we applied, but it
stood only as a clear, simple illustration of a method by which not the
specific work itself is tested, but by which the industrial work of the
individual is resolved into a long series of parallel functions each one of
which is tested independently. The experimental aid which the laboratory
has to supply in such cases is not a newly invented device, such as we
needed in the case of the motormen, but simply the methods well known as
so-called mental tests.
The experiments with such tests by which single mental functions are
measured approximately in short quick examinations, has been much
discussed in psychological circles. For a long while the thorough scholars
remained very reluctant to accept such an apparently superficial scheme,
when these tests were proposed especially for the pedagogical interests of
the schoolroom. It was a time in which the scientific efforts were
completely devoted to the general problems of the human mind and in
which individual differences were very little considered. Moreover, the
questions of applied psychology still seemed so far distant that the true
scholar instinctively took his standards from the methods of purely
theoretical research. Seen from such a point of view, it could not be denied
that the tests were not sufficient to give us a complete scientific analysis of
the personality in its subtler structure. The theorists knew too well that if the
reactions, or associations, or memories, or tendencies of attention, or
emotions of a subject were measured really with that scientific
thoroughness which is the ideal of research, long months of experiments
would be needed, and little could be hoped for from tests to be performed in

half an hour. But this somewhat haughty reserve which was quite justified
twenty years ago has become obsolete and would be meaningless to-day.
On the one side the methods themselves have been multiplied; for each
mental act like memory, attention, and so on, dozens of well-studied tests
are at our disposal, which are adjusted to the finest ramifications of the
functions.[15] On the other side the interest in individual differences and in
applied psychology has steadily grown, and through it an understanding for
the real meaning of the tests has been gained. Their value, indeed, lies
exclusively in their relation to the practical problems. Where theoretical
questions are to be answered and scientific studies concerning the laws and
variations of the mind are to be undertaken, the long series of laboratory
experiments carried on with patience and devotion are indispensable and
can never be replaced by the short-cut methods of the tests. But where
practical tasks of pedagogy or jurisprudence or medicine, or especially of
commerce and industry, are before us, the method of tests ought to be
sovereign. It can be adapted to the special situations and can succeed
perfectly, if the task is to discover the outlines of the mental individuality
for particular practical work.
The only real difficulty of the method lies in the ease with which it can be
used. A device which presupposes complicated instruments deters the
layman and will be used only by those who are well trained. Moreover, the
amateur would not think of constructing and adapting such apparatus
himself. But when nothing is necessary but to use words or numbers or
syllables or pictures, or, as in those experiments which we just described,
newspapers and so on, any one feels justified in applying the scheme or in
replacing it by a new apparently better one according to his caprice. The
manifoldness of the proposed tests for special functions, is therefore
enormous to-day. What is needed now is surely much more that order be
brought into this chaos of propositions, and that definite norms and
standards be secured for certain chief examinations, than that the number of
variations simply be increased.
The chief danger, moreover, lies in the fact that those who are not
accustomed to psychological laboratory research are easily misled. They
fancy that such an experiment can be carried out in a mere mechanical way
without careful study of all the conditions and accompanying
circumstances. Thereby a certain crudeness of procedure may enter which is

not at all suggested by the test method itself. The psychological layman too
seldom recognizes how many other psychical functions may play a rôle in
the result of the experiment beside the one which is interesting him at that
moment. The well-schooled laboratory worker almost automatically gives
consideration to all such secondary circumstances. While his experiments
may refer to the process of memory, he will yet at the same time carefully
consider the particular situation as to the emotional setting of the subject, as
to his attention, as to his preceding experience, as to his intelligence, as to
his physiological condition, and many other factors which may have
indirect influence even on the simplest memory test. Hence the real
performance of the experiments ought to be undertaken only by those who
are thoroughly familiar and well trained in psychological research. And they
alone, moreover, can decide what particular form such an experiment ought
to take in a given practical situation. It must be left to them, for instance, to
judge in which cases the mental function of economic importance ought to
be tested after being resolved into its components and in which it ought to
be examined in its characteristic unity.

XI
CONTRIBUTIONS FROM MEN OF AFFAIRS

While the psychologists have to perform the actual labor, the
representatives of practical life are much better able to indicate the points at
which the psychological levers ought to be applied. In the past year I have
sought contact with several hundred large concerns in America which
belong to many different industrial realms. My time did not allow me
personal observation in so many cases, but everywhere I begged for
information from the leading men. I asked in individual letters for the
particular psychological qualities which from the standpoint of the
management seemed essential for the various kinds of labor in their
establishments. I always inquired to what extent consideration was given to
such psychological points of view at the appointment of applicants, and
asked for material concerning the question how far individuals who proved
to be unfit for one kind of labor showed fitness at other kinds of work. The
replies which I received from all sides varied from a few meaningless lines
to long documents, which in some cases were composed of detailed reports
from all the department chiefs of a particular concern. The common
fundamental turn was decidedly a feeling of strong interest in the
formulation of the question, which was practically new to all of them.
Whether the answer came from paper mills or machine shops, from meat-
packing houses or from breweries, from electrical or chemical mills, from
railroad or mining companies, from department stores or from publishing
houses, everywhere it was acknowledged that they had given hardly any
conscious attention to the real psychological dispositions of their
employees. They had of course noticed whether their men were industrious
or lazy, honest or dishonest, skillful or clumsy, peaceful or quarrelsome
people, but I had emphasized from the start in all my letters that such points
of view were not before my mind. The mental qualities for which I asked
were the psychological functions of attention, memory, ideas, imagination,
feeling, volition, suggestibility, ability to learn, ability to discriminate,
judgment, space-sense, time-sense, and so on. It would lead too far here to

discuss why these two groups of characteristics indeed belong to two
different aspects of mental life, and why only the latter is strictly
psychological. The way in which the management is accustomed to look on
their men is the practical way of ordinary life, in which we try to understand
our neighbor by entering into the meaning of his mental functions and by
seeking to grasp what his aim is. But such an interpretation of the other
man's mind is not a psychological analysis. It gives us the purposes of his
inner life, but does not show us its structure and its component parts. We
can abstract from interpreting and appreciating in order to describe the
elements of the mind which in themselves have no meaning and no value,
but which are the only important factors, if we are to determine
psychologically what we may expect from the individual.
While the replies to my letters showed that hardly any attention had so far
been given to such problems of objective psychology in the industrial
concerns, it became evident that the managers felt distinctly that here a
problem was touched which must be of highest importance for economic
success. From many different sides willingness was shown to study the
problem of employment under the psychological aspect. As my material
came mostly from very large establishments in which labor of very many
different kinds is carried on side by side, of course I frequently received the
assurance that whenever an industrious energetic man is unsuccessful in one
kind of work, a trial is made with him in another department, and that by
such shifting the right place can often be found for him. Young people, to
whom, in spite of long trial and the best will, it seems impossible to supply
certain automatic machines, become excellent workers at much more
difficult labor in the same establishment. Women who are apparently
careless and inattentive when they have to distribute their attention over a
number of operations do high-class work when they are engaged in a single
activity; and in other cases the opposite is reported.
I may mention a few concrete chance illustrations. In a pencil factory the
women in one department have to grasp with one movement a dozen
pencils, no more and no less. Some learn this at once without effort, and
they earn high wages; others never can learn it in spite of repeated trials. If
those who fail in this department are transferred, for instance, to the
department where the gold-leaf is most carefully to be applied to the pencils
before stamping, very often they show great fitness in spite of the extreme

exactitude needed for this work. To show how often activities which appear
extremely similar may demand different individuals, if the work is based on
different psychical functions, I may refer to a report from one of the largest
establishments in the country. In the accounting department a large number
of girls are occupied with looking over hundreds of thousands of slips from
which the weekly pay-list is compiled. Each slip contains six figures and
small groups of twenty slips have to be looked through to see whether those
six figures on each correspond. With moistened forefinger they turn up the
slips one by one in much the same manner that a bank clerk counts money.
A good sorter will turn up the slips so rapidly that a bystander is unable to
read a single figure, and yet she will not overlook an error in thousands of
slips. After the slips are sorted, the operation of obtaining the totals on each
order number is performed with the aid of an adding machine. The machine
operator rolls up the slips of the pile with the thumb of her left hand and
transfers the amount to the proper keys of the machine. It has been found
that the most rapid and accurate girls at sorting are not seldom useless on
the machines. They press the wrong, keys and make errors in copying the
total from the machine indicators to the file-card. On the other hand, some
of the best machine operators are very slow and inaccurate at the sorting
table. Girls have been found very poor at the work at which they were first
set, and very successful and efficient as soon as they had been transferred
from the one to the other.
Examples of this kind might be heaped up without end. But while the very
large establishments demonstrate by such reports only that they can find
somewhere a fit place for every able workingman if they take enough
trouble to seek for it, after all the essential element of the reports remains,
that successful achievement depends upon personal mental traits which
cannot be acquired by mere good will and training. In view of this fact it is
much more important that by far the majority of establishments have not
such a great manifoldness of activities under one roof. The workingman
who is a failure in the work which he undertook would usually have no
opportunity to show his strong sides in the same factory, or at least to be
protected against the consequences of his weak points. If his achievement is
deficient in quality or quantity, he generally loses his place and makes a
new trial in another factory under the same accidental conditions, without
any deeper insight into his particular psychical traits and their relation to

special industrial activities. But even in the large concerns, in which many
kinds of labor are needed side by side, it is not the rule but a rare exception
when the individual is systematically shifted to the psychologically correct
place. A whole combination of conditions is necessary for that. If his mental
unfitness makes him unsuccessful in one place, the position for which he is
fit must happen to be vacant. Moreover, he himself must like that other kind
of work, and above all the foreman must recognize his particular fitness. In
a few model factories in which the apprentice system is developed in the
spirit of advanced sociological ideas, for instance, in the Lynn factory of the
General Electric Company, such systematic efforts are being carried on and
show fair results. But the regulation plan seems to be a haphazard lack of
plan, and even the best endeavors probably fall short of what may be
attained by the introduction of scientific psychological methods. So far in
most factories the laborer who is not doing well simply loses his position,
and by such an unfortunate experience he is not mentally enriched but
impoverished, as he has lost much of his self-confidence and of his joy in
labor.
If this limitless waste of human material, this pitiable crushing of joy in the
day's work, and this crippling of the economic output is at last to be
reduced, indeed nothing is more needed than a careful scrutiny of the
various psychophysical functions involved in the work. A mere
classification of the industrial occupations according to the classes of
manufactured objects would be of no value for this need, as often a small
industrial concern may embrace occupations which, are based on many
different psychophysical functions. A harvester consists of two hundred and
fifty different parts, and almost every one of these parts demands a long
series of manufacturing, processes. Thousands of different kinds of labor
are thus combined in one factory and each process demands for the best
work particular psychophysical traits, even though many of them can be
carried out by quite unskilled laborers. In a large manufacturing
establishment the manager assured me only recently that more than half a
million different acts have to be performed in order to complete the goods
of that factory. On the other hand, it evidently is proper to form larger
groups in which processes are brought together which are similar with
reference to the mental activity needed, while they may be dissimilar from
the standpoint of industrial technique.

This analysis of the special processes can be furthered best by the
coöperation of the experienced men of industry. Many of the replies which I
received contained quite elaborated contributions to such a study of various
industrial processes from a psychological point of view. They sometimes
covered the ground from the simplest activity to the subtlest and most
difficult economic tasks, and this, not only with reference to the functions
of the laborer, but also even with reference to the function of the industrial
manager. The outsider can see these psychological requirements of the
particular occupation only in crude outlines. The subtler nuances of
differences between tasks can be gained only by an intimate knowledge of
the industry. Again I may give an illustration. In the case of a well-known
typesetting machine, thousand of which are in daily use, I had the
impression that the rapidity of the performance was dependent upon the
quickness of the finger reaction. The managers, on the other hand, have
found that the most essential condition for speed in the whole work is the
ability to retain a large number of words in memory before they are set. The
man who presses the keys rather slowly advances more rapidly than another
who moves his fingers quickly, but must make many pauses in order to find
his place in the manuscript and to provide himself with new words.
The factors which are to be brought into correlation are, accordingly, first,
the actual experiences of the managers, secondly, the observations of skilled
psychologists in the industrial concerns, thirdly, psychological and
experimental investigations with successful and unsuccessful laborers, and,
fourthly, experimental studies of the normal variability. If such a
programme is to be realized in detail, it will be necessary to discriminate
carefully, between those mental traits of the personality which must be
accredited to a lasting inherited disposition and such as have been
developed under the influences of the surroundings, by education and
training, by bad or good stimuli from the community. While those acquired
traits may have become relatively lasting dispositions, their transformation
is, after all, possible, and the limits in which changes may be expected will
have to be found out by exact studies. Individual psychological rhythm,
attention and emotion, memory and will energy, disposition to fatigue and
to restoration, imagination, suggestibility and initiative, and many other
features will have to be examined in their relation to the special economic
aims.

Too much emphasis cannot be laid on another function as well, the
experimental testing of which has only recently been started. I refer to the
difference in the individual ability of men to profit from training. If we test
an individual at a certain point in his life with regard to a variable ability,
our result must be dependent upon three factors, the original disposition for
the performance, the original disposition for the advance by training, and
the training itself actually passed through up to that moment. A small
amount of antecedent training for the particular task together with a high
ability to profit from repetition may be a better reason for the appointment
of a man than a long training with small ability to profit from schooling, in
spite of the fact that his actual achievement at this time may be in the first
case smaller than in the second. He will do less at first, but he promises to
outrank the other man after a period of further training. Special experiments
must be carried on and have been actually started to determine this
plasticity of the psychophysical apparatus as an independent inborn trait of
the individual.[16]
This invasion of psychology into the field of economic activities is still so
little advanced that the thought of a real distribution of the wage-earners
among the various commercial and industrial positions on the basis of
psychological tests would lead far beyond the present possibilities.
Moreover, many factors would interfere with its being carried out
consistently, even if a much higher stage of experimental research were
reached. The thousands of social and local reasons which influence the
choice of a vocation to-day would to a certain degree remain in force also in
a period of better psychological analysis. Moreover, the personal
inclinations and interests naturally would and ought to remain the
mainspring of economic action. This inclination, which gives so much of
the joy in labor, is by no means necessarily coincident with those
psychophysical dispositions which insure the most successful work.
Political economists have found this out repeatedly from their statistical
inquiries. Very careful studies of the textile industry in Germany carried out
in recent years[17] yielded the result that the intelligent, highly trained
textile laborer often dislikes his work the more, the more he shows ability
for it, this ability being measured by the wages the individuals earn at
piecework. The wage and the emotional attitude were not seldom inversely
related. Those who were able to produce by far more than others and

accordingly earned the most were sometimes the very ones who hated the
work, while the less skillful workers earned less but enjoyed the work more.
The consulting economic psychologist will, therefore at first reasonably
confine himself to warning the misfits at an early time. Even within these
limits his service can be useful to both parties, the employers and the
employees. He will only slowly reach the stage at which this negative
warning may be supplemented by positive suggestions, as to the
commercial industrial activities for which the psychophysical dispositions
promise particular success.
A real assumption of responsibility for success of course cannot be risked
by the psychologist, inasmuch as the man who may be fitted for a task by
his mental working dispositions may nevertheless destroy his chances for
success by secondary personal traits. He may be dishonest, or dissipated, or
a drinker, or a fighter, or physically ill. Finally, we ought not to forget that
all such efforts to adjust to one another the psychological traits and the
requirements of the work can never have reference to the extreme variations
of human traits. The exceptionally talented man knows anyhow where he
belongs, and the exceptionally untalented one will be excluded anyhow. The
psychological aid in the selection of the fit refers only to the remaining four
fifths of mankind for whom the chances of success can indeed be increased
as soon as the psychological personal equation is systematically and with
scientific exactitude brought into the calculation of the life development.
How far a part of this effort will have to be undertaken by the school is a
social problem which must be considered from various points of view. Its
discussion would lead us beyond the limits of our present inquiry, but it
seems probable that the real psychological laboratory experiment in the
service of vocational guidance does not belong in the schoolroom itself, but
ought to be left to special municipal institutions.

XII
INDIVIDUALS AND GROUPS

One point here must not be overlooked. The effort to discover the personal
structure of the individual in the interest of his vocational chance does not
always necessarily involve a direct analysis of his individuality, as material
of some value can be gained indirectly. Such indirect knowledge of a man's
mental traits may be secured first of all through referring the man to the
groups to which he belongs and inquiring into the characteristic traits of
those groups. The psychology of human variations gives not only an
account of the differences from person to person, but studies no less the
psychical inequalities of the races, of the nations, of the ages, of the
professions, and so on. If an economic activity demands a combination of
mental traits, we may take it for granted that an individual will be fit for the
work as soon as we find out that he belongs to a group in which these
required mental traits habitually occur. Such a judgment based on group
psychology can of course be no more than a mere approach to a solution of
the problem, as the psychical qualities may vary strongly in the midst of the
group. The special individual may happen to stand at the extreme limit of
the group, and the traits which are usually characteristic of it may be very
little developed or entirely lacking in his special case. We may know that
the inhabitants of a special country are rather alert, and yet the particular
individual with whom we have to deal may be clumsy and phlegmatic. The
interests of economy will, therefore, be served by such considerations of
group psychology only if the employment, not of a single person, but of a
large number, is in question, as it is most probable that the average
character will show itself in a sufficient degree as soon as many members of
the group are involved.
Even in this case the presupposition ought to be that the average
characteristics found out with scientific exactitude by statistical and
experimental methods, and not that they are simply deduced from
superficial impressions. I have found that just this race psychological
diagnosis is frequently made in factories with great superficiality. Some of

the American industrial centres offer extremely favorable conditions for the
comparative study of nationality. I have visited many manufacturing
establishments in which almost all workers are immigrants from foreign
countries and in which up to twenty different nationalities are represented.
The employment officers there easily develop some psychological theories
on the basis of which they are convinced that they are selecting the men
with especial skill, knowing for each in which department he will be most
successful. They consider it settled that for a particular kind of activity the
Italians are the best, and for another, the Irish, and for a third, the
Hungarians, and for a fourth, the Russian Jews. But as soon as these factory
secrets have been revealed, you may be surprised to find that in the next
factory a decidedly different classification of the wage-earners is in force.
In a gigantic manufacturing concern, I received the definite information that
the Swedish laborers are preferable wherever a steady eye is needed, and in
another large factory on the same street I was assured that just the Swedes
are unfit for such work. Sometimes this diversity of opinion is the result of
different points of view. In one factory in which a certain industrial
operation is rather dangerous, they told me that they took no southern
Europeans, especially no Italians and Greeks, because they are too hasty
and careless in their movements, while they gladly filled the places with
Irishmen. In a quite similar factory, on the other hand, they had a prejudice
against the Irishmen alone for this work, because the Irish laborers are too
willing to run a risk and to expose themselves to danger. Probably both
psychological observations are on the whole correct, but in the first factory
only the one and in the second factory only the other was recognized. Much
more thorough statistical inquiries than those which as yet exist, especially
as to the actual differences of wages and piecework for wage-earners of
various nationalities, would have to furnish a basis for such race
psychological statements, until the time arrives when the psychological
experiment comes to its own.
In a similar way so far we have to rely on general theories of group
psychology when the psychological differences of the sexes are to be
reckoned with in economic interests. So long as laboratory methods for
individual tests are not usual, the mental analysis of the general groups of
men and women must form the background for industrial decisions. To be
sure, it is not difficult to emphasize certain mental traits as characteristic of

women in general in contrast to men in general, and to relate them to certain
fundamental tendencies of their psychophysical organism. As soon as this is
done, it is easy theoretically to deduce that certain industrial functions are
excellently adapted to the minds of women and that certain others stand in
striking antagonism to them. If the employment of large numbers is in
question, and average values alone are involved, such a decision on the
basis of group psychology may be adequate. In most factories this vague
sex psychology, to be sure, usually with a strong admixture of wage
questions, suggests for which machines men and for which women ought to
be employed. But here again it is not at all improbable that in the case of a
particular woman the traditional group value may be entirely misleading
and the personality accordingly unfit for the place. Only the subtle
psychological individual analysis can overcome the superficial prejudices
of group psychology. The situation lies differently when problems of
economic policy are before us. Such general policies as, for instance,
colonial politics, or immigration politics, or politics concerned with city and
rural communities, or with coast and mountain population, will always have
to be based on group psychology as far as the economic problems are
involved, inasmuch as they refer to the average and not to the individual,
differences.
Finally, another indirect scheme to determine the personal qualities needed
for economic efficiency may be suggested by the psychology of the typical
correlations of human traits. We have seen that group psychology proclaims
that a certain individual probably has certain traits because he belongs to
this or that nation or to this or that otherwise well-known group. Correlation
psychology proclaims that a particular individual possesses or does not
possess certain traits because he shows or does not show some other
definite qualities. A correlation, for instance, which the commercial world
often presupposes, may exist between individual traits and the handwriting.
Graphologists are convinced that a certain loop or flourish, or the steepness
or the length of the letters, or the position of the i dot, is a definite
indication that the writer possesses certain qualities of personality; and if
just these qualities are essential requirements for the position, the
impression of the handwriting in a letter may be taken as a sufficient basis
for appointment. The scientist has reason to look upon this particular case
of graphological correlation with distrust. Yet even he may acknowledge

that certain correlations exist between the neatness, carefulness, uniformity
energy, and similar features of the letter, and the general carefulness,
steadiness, neatness, and energy of the personality.
However, the laboratory psychologists nowadays have gone far beyond
such superficial claims for correlations of symptoms. With experimental
and statistical methods they have gathered ample material which
demonstrates the exact degree of probability with which we have a right to
expect that certain qualities will occur together. Theoretically we may take
it for granted that those traits which are always present together or absent
together ultimately have a common mental root. Yet practically they appear
as two independent traits, and therefore it remains important to know that, if
we can find one of them, we may be sure that the other will exist there too.
Inasmuch as the one of the two traits may be easily detected, while the other
may be hidden and can be found out only by long careful tests, it would be
valuable, indeed, for the employment manager to become acquainted with
such correlations as the psychologist may discover: as soon as he becomes
aware of the superficially noticeable symptom, he can foresee that the other
disposition is most probably present. To give an illustration: in the interest
of such measurements of correlations we have studied in the Harvard
laboratory the various characteristics of attention and their mutual
dependence.[18] We found that typical connections exist between apparently
independent features of attention. Persons who have a rather expansive span
of attention for acoustical impressions have also a wide span for the visual
objects. Persons whose attention is vivid and quick have on the whole the
expansive type of attention, while those who attend slowly have a narrow
field of attention, and so on. Hence the manifestation of one feature of
attention allows us to presuppose without further tests that certain other
features may be expected in the particular individual.
The problem of attention, indeed, seems to stand quite in the centre of the
field of industrial efficiency. This conviction has grown upon me in my
observation of industrial life. The peculiar kind of attention decides more
than any mental trait for which economic activity the individual is adapted.
The essential point is that such differences of attention cannot be
characterized as good or bad; it is not a question of the attentive and of the
inattentive mind. One type is not better than another, but is simply different.
Two workingmen, not only equally industrious and capable, but also

equally attentive, may yet occupy two positions in which they are both
complete failures because their attention does not fit the places, and both
may become highly efficient as soon as they exchange positions. Their
particular types of attention have now found the right places. The one may
be disposed to a strong concentration by which everything is inhibited
which lies on the mental periphery, the other may have the talent for
distributing his attention over a large field, while he is unable to hold it for a
long while at one point. If the one industrial activity demands the attentive
observation of one little lever or one wheel at one point, while the other
demands that half a dozen large machines be simultaneously supervised, all
that is necessary is to find the man with the right type of attention for each
place. It would be utterly arbitrary to claim that the expansive type of
attention is economically more or less valuable than the concentrated type.
Both in English and in German we have a long popular series of pamphlets
with descriptions of the requirements and conditions for the various
occupations to which a boy or a girl may turn, but I have nowhere found
any reference to the most essential mental functions such as the particular
kind of attention or memory or will. These pamphlets are always cut after
the same pattern. Where the detail refers at all to the mental side, it points
only to particular knowledge which may be learned in school or trade or
work, or to abilities which may be developed by training. But the individual
differences which are set by the particular conditions and dispositions of the
mind are neglected with surprising uniformity in the vocational literature of
all countries. The time seems ripe for at last filling this blank in the
consciousness of the nation and in the institutions of the land.

PART II
THE BEST POSSIBLE WORK

XIII
LEARNING AND TRAINING

We have placed our psychotechnical interest at the service of economic
tasks. We therefore had to start from the various economic purposes and had
to look backward, asking what ways might lead to these goals. All our
studies so far were in this sense subordinated to the one task which ought to
be the primary one in the economic world, and yet which has been most
ignored. The purpose before us was to find for every economic occupation
the best-fitted personality, both in the interest of economic success and in
the interest of personal development. Individual traits under this point of
view become for us the decisive psychological factors, and experimental
psychology had to show us a method to determine those personal
differences and their relation to the demands for industrial efficiency. This
first goal may be reached with all the means of science, as we hope it will
be in the future, or everything may be left to unscientific, haphazard
methods as in the past: in any case a second task stands before the
community, namely, the securing of the best possible work from every man
in his place. Indeed, the nation cannot delay the solution of this second
problem until the first has been solved in a satisfactory way. We might even
say that the answer to the second question is the more important, the less
satisfactory the answer to the first is. If every place in the economic world
were filled only by those who are perfectly adapted by their mental traits, it
would be much less difficult to get efficient work from everyone. The fact
that so many misfits are at work makes it such an urgent necessity to find
ways and means by which the efficiency can be heightened.
It must be acknowledged, however, that the problem of the best work is not
quite such a clear one as that of the best man. From various standpoints a
different answer may be given to the question which kind of work is the
best. A capitalistic, profit-seeking egotism may consider the quickest
performance, or, if differences of quality are involved, the most skillful
performance, the only desirable end. The social reformers, on the other
hand, may consider the best work that which combines the greatest and best

possible output with the highest possible saving of the organism and the
fullest development of the personality. We have emphasized from the start
that the practical psychologist as such has not the right to give a decision
upon problems of social civilization. He has to accept the economic tasks
from the community for which he is working and his impartial service
commences only when the goals have been determined. It is not his share to
select the ends, but simply to determine the means after the valuable ends
have been chosen. As a psychological scientist he has not the right to enter
into the arena of different social party fights. Yet we find after all a broad
region which seems rather untouched by any conflict of reasonable
opinions. A reckless capitalism on the one side and a feeble sentimentality
on the other side may try to widen or to narrow the boundaries of this
region, but taken all together, a vigorous healthy nation which is eagerly
devoted to its work is on the whole in agreement as to the essential
economic demands for efficient labor.
Experience, to be sure, shows that great changes in the conditions of work
can never enter into the history of civilization without certain disturbances,
and that opposition must therefore necessarily arise in certain groups even
against such changes as are undoubtedly improvements and advances from
the point of view of the whole nation. Such dissatisfaction arose when the
factory system was introduced, and it is only natural that some irritation
should accompany the introduction of psychological improvements in the
methods of work, inasmuch as not a few wage-earners may at first have to
lose their places because a small number of men will under the improved
conditions be sufficient for the performance of tasks which needed many
before. But the history of economics has clearly shown that from the point
of view of the whole community such an apparent disturbance has always
been only temporary. If the psychologists succeed in fundamentally
improving the conditions of labor, the increased efficiency of the individual
will promote such an enriched and vivified economic life that ultimately an
increase in the number of laborers needed will result. The inquiry into the
possible psychological contributions to the question of reinforced
achievement must not be deterred by the superficial objection that in one or
another industrial concern a dismissal of wage-earners might at first result.
Psychotechnics does not stand in the service of a party, but exclusively in
the service of civilization.

To begin at the beginning, we may start from the commonplace that every
form of economic labor in the workshop and in the factory, in the field and
in the mine, in the store and in the office, must first be learned. How far do
the experiments of the psychologist offer suggestions for securing the most
economic method of learning practical activities? Bodily actions in the
service of economic work are taught and learned in hundreds of thousands
of places. It is evident that one method of teaching must reach the goal
more quickly and more reliably than another. Some methods of teaching
must therefore be economically more advantageous, and yet on the whole
the methods of teaching muscular work are essentially left to chance. It is
indeed not difficult to observe how factory workers or artisans have learned
the same complex motion according to entirely different methods. The
result is that they carry out the various partial movements in a different
order, or with different auxiliary motions, or in different positions, or in a
different rhythm, or with different emphasis, simply because they imitate
different teachers, and because no norm, no certainty as to the best methods
for the teaching, has been determined. But the process of learning is still
more fluctuating and still more dependent upon chance than the process of
teaching. The apprentice approaches the instruction, in any chance way, and
the beginner usually learns even the first steps with a psychophysical
attitude which is left to accident. An immense waste of energy and a quite
anti-economic training in unfit movements is the necessary result.
The learning of the elements of school knowledge in the classroom in
earlier times proceeded after exactly such chance methods. Any one who
knew how to read, write, and calculate felt himself prepared to pour
reading, writing, and arithmetic into the unprotected children. Methods
which are based on scientific examination of the psychophysical process of
reading and writing were not at the disposal of the schools, and exact results
from comparative studies of pedagogical methods had not been secured.
The last few decades have created an entirely new foundation for
enlightened school work. The experimental investigations of pedagogical
psychology have determined exactly how the consciousness of the child
reacts on the various methods of teaching and have built up a real
systematic economic learning. All which was left to dilettantic caprice has
been transformed into more or less definite standard forms. For instance,
the old scheme of teaching reading by the alphabet method is practically

eliminated from our modern schools. It is clear that this learning of the
names of the single letters as a starting-point for the reading of words was
not only a wasting of time and energy, but an actual disturbance in the
development of the reading process in the older generation. As those names
of the letters do not occur at all in the words to be read, but only their
sounds, what had been learned in seeing the single letters had to be
inhibited in pronouncing the whole word. It seems not too much to say that
the learning of industrial activities on the whole still stands on the level of
such alphabet methods, and this cannot be otherwise, as the real problem,
namely, the systematic investigation of the psychophysical activities
involved, has never been brought into the psychological laboratory.
The pedagogical experiment has shown clearly enough that the subjective
feeling of easier or quicker learning may be entirely unreliable and
misleading. If the task is to learn a page by heart, we may proceed after
many different methods. We may learn very small fractions of the text,
repeating only a few words, or we may read whole paragraphs every time;
we may repeat the whole material again and again, or we may put in long
periods of rest after a few repetitions; we may frequently recite it from
memory and have some one to prompt us; we may give our attention
especially to the meaning of the words, or merely to the sounds, or we may
introduce any number of similar variations. Now the careful experiment
shows that of two such methods one which appears to us the better and
more appropriate in learning, perhaps even as the easier and more
comfortable, may prove itself the less efficient one in the practical result.
The psychology of learning, which won its success by introducing
meaningless syllables as experimental material, has slowly determined the
most reliable methods for impressing knowledge on memory. Where such
results have once been secured, it would surely be a grave mistake simply
to stick to the methods of so-called common sense and to leave it to the
caprice of the individual teacher to decide what method of learning he will
suggest to his pupils. The best method is always the only one which should
be considered. The psychology of economic work must aim toward similar
goals. We must secure a definite knowledge as to the methods by which a
group of movements can best be learned. We must understand what value is
to be attached to the repetitions and to the pauses, to the imitations and to
the special combinations of movements, to the exercise in parts of the

movements, to the rhythm of the work, and to many similar influences
which may shape the learning process.
The simplest aspect, that of the mere repetition of the movement, has
frequently been examined by psychophysicists. The real founder of
experimental psychology, Fechner, showed the way; he performed fatiguing
experiments with lifted dumb-bells. Then came the time in which the
laboratories began to make a record of the muscular activities with the help
of the ergograph, an instrument with which the movements of the arm and
the fingers can easily be registered on the smoked surface of a revolving
drum. The subtlest variations of the activity, the increase and decrease of
the psychomotor impulse, the mental fatigue, can be traced exactly in such
graphic records. This psychomotor side of the process, and not the mere
muscle activity as such, is indeed the essential factor which should interest
us. The results of exercise are a training of the central apparatus of the brain
and not of the muscular periphery. The further development of those
experiments soon led to complex questions, which referred not only to the
mere change in the motor efficiency, but to the learning of particular groups
of movements and to the influences on the exactitude and reliability of the
movements. The purely mental factors of the will-impulse, especially the
consciousness of the task, came into the foreground. These experiences of
the scientists concerning the influences of training, the mechanization of
repetition, and the automatization of movements have been thoroughly
discussed by a brilliant political economist[19] as an explanation of certain
industrial facts, but they have not yet practically influenced life in the
factory.
The nearest approach from the experimental side to the study of the effect
of training in actual industrial tasks may be found in certain laboratory
investigations which refer to the learning of telegraphing, typewriting, and
so on. For instance, we have a careful study[20] of the progress made in
learning telegraphy, both as to the transmitting of the telegrams by the key
movement and the receiving of the telegrams by the ear. It was found that
the rapidity of transmitting increases more rapidly and more uniformly than
the rapidity of receiving. But while the curve of the latter rises more slowly
and more irregularly, it finally reaches the greater height. The ability in
transmitting, represented by a graphic record, shows an ascent which
corresponds to the typical, steady curve of training. In the receiving curve,

on the other hand, we find not far from the beginning a characteristic period
during which no progress whatever can be noticed, and this is also repeated
at a later stage. The psychological analysis shows that the increase of ability
in the receiving of telegrams depends upon the development of a complex
system of psychophysical habits. The periods in which the curve does not
ascend represent stages of training in which the elementary habits are
almost completely formed, but have not become sufficiently automatic. The
attention is therefore not yet ready to start habits of a higher order. The
lowest correlation refers to the single letters, after that to the syllables and
words. As soon as the apprentice has reached this point, he stops, because
he must learn to master more and more new words until his telegraphic
vocabulary is large enough to make it possible for him to turn his
consciousness to whole groups of words at once. Only when this new habit
has been made automatic by a training of several months can he advance to
a level at which whole groups of words are perceived as telegraphic units. A
time follows in which this mastery of whole phrases advances rapidly, until
a new period of rest comes, from which, only after years and often quite
suddenly, a last new ascent can be noticed. Instead of concentrating the
attention with conscious strain on single phrases, the operator progresses to
a perfect liberty in which whole sentences are understood automatically.
We also have a model experimental research into the psychological
conditions of learning in the case of writing on a typewriter.[21] By
electrical connections between the typewriting machine and a system of
levers which registered their movements on the rotating drum of a
kymograph, graph, each striking of a key, each completion of a word, or of
a line, could be recorded in exact time-relations. Each glance at the copy
was also registered. It was found that the process of learning consisted first
of a continuous simplification of the cumbersome methods with which the
beginner commences. A steady elimination of unfit movements, a selection,
a reorganization, and finally, a combination of psychophysical acts to
impulses of higher order, could be traced exactly. Here, too, the curve of
learning at first rises quickly and then more and more slowly. Of course the
usual fluctuations in the growth of the ability can also be found, and above
all the irregular periods of rest in which the learning itself does not
progress, for some of these so-called plateaus which lie between the end of
one ascent and the beginning of the next may cover a month and more. At

the beginning we have the elementary association between the single letter
and the position of the corresponding key, but soon an immediate
connection between the visual impression of the whole syllable or the
whole word and the total group of movements necessary to strike the keys
for it is developed. The more the ability grows, the more these psychical
impulses of higher order become organized without conscious intention.
The study shows that this development of higher habits has already begun
before the lower habits are fully settled.
How far the special training involves at the same time a general training
which could be of advantage for other kinds of labor has not yet been
studied at all with reference to industrial technique. There we are still
completely dependent upon certain experiences in the field of experimental
pedagogy, and upon certain statistics, for instance, in the textile industry.
Many patient investigations, with every independent group of apparatus and
machines, may be necessary before psychotechnics will be able to supply
industry with reliable advice for teaching and learning. Nor have we the
least right hastily to carry over the results from one group of movements to
another. Even where superficially a certain similarity between the technical
factors exists, the psychophysical conditions may be essentially different. In
the two cases mentioned, for instance, telegraphing and typewriting, the
chief factor seems the same, as in both cases the aim is to make the quickest
possible finger movements for purposes of signals; and yet it is not
surprising that the development of the ability from the beginnings to the
highest mastery is rather unlike, as all the movements in telegraphing are
performed with the same finger, while in typewriting the chief trait is the
organization of groups from the impulses to all ten fingers. At least it is
certain that learning always means far more than a mere facilitation of the
movement by mechanical repetition, and this is true of the simplest
handling of the tools in the workshop, of the movements at the machine in
the factory, and of the most complex performances at the subtlest
instruments. The chief factor in the development is always the organization
of the impulses by which the reactions which are at first complicated
become simplified, later mechanized, and finally synthesized into a higher
group which becomes subordinated to one simple psychical impulse. The
most reliable and psychophysically most economic means for this
organization will have to be studied in the economic psychological

laboratories of the future for every particular technique. Then only can the
enormous waste of psychical energy resulting from haphazard methods be
brought to an end.
A problem which is still too little considered in industrial life is the mutual
interference of acquired technical activities. If one connected series of
movements is well trained by practice, does it become less firmly fixed, if
another series is studied in which the same beginning is connected with
another path of discharge? I approached this psychophysical question of
learning by experiments which I carried on for a long while with variations
of ordinary habits of daily life, asking whether a habit associated with a
certain sensory stimulus can function automatically while dispositions for a
different habit, previously acquired, remain in the psychophysical system.
For instance, I was accustomed to carry my watch in my left-hand vest
pocket. For a week I carried it in the right-hand pocket of my trousers and
recorded every case in which I first automatically made the movement to
the vest. After some time the movement to the right-hand pocket became
entirely automatic. When it was sufficiently fixed, I again put the watch in
the left-hand vest pocket and recorded how often I unconsciously grasped at
the right side when I wanted to see what time it was. As soon as the vest
pocket movement had again become fixed, I went back to the right-hand
trousers pocket. And so I alternated for a long while, always changing only
after reaching complete automatism. But the results in this case and in other
similar experiments which I carried on showed that the new automatic
connection did not extinguish the after effects of the previous habit. With
every new change the number of wrong movements became smaller and
smaller, and finally a point was reached at which the dispositions for both
movements were equally developed so that no wrong movements occurred
when the watch was put into the new position.[22]
This problem has been followed up very recently in a valuable investigation
at Columbia University,[23] in which various habits of typewriting and of
card-sorting were acquired and studied in their mutual interference. These
very careful experiments also show that when two opposing associations
are alternately practiced, they have an interference effect on each other, but
that the interference grows less and less as the practice effect becomes
greater. The interference effect is gradually overcome and both opposing
associations become automatic, so that either of them can be called up

independently without the appearance of the other. Many details of the
research suggest that this whole group of interference problems deserves
the most careful attention by those who would practically profit from
increased industrial efficiency.
Finally, in the experimental study of the problem of technical learning, we
cannot ignore the many side influences which may hasten or delay, improve
or disturb, the acquisition of industrial skill. In the Harvard laboratory, for
instance, we are at present engaged in an investigation which deals with the
influence of feelings on the rapidity with which new movement
coördinations are mastered.[24] In order to have unlimited comparable
material a very simple technical performance is required, namely, the
distribution of the 52 playing-cards into 52 boxes. Labels on the boxes
indicate changing combinations for the distribution to be learned. We
examine, on the one side, the influence of feelings of comfort or of
discomfort on the learning of the new habit, these feeling states being
produced by external conditions, such as pleasant or unpleasant sounds,
odors, and so on. On the other side we trace the effects of those feelings
which arise during the learning process itself, such as feelings of
satisfaction with progress, or disappointment, or discomfort, or disgust or
joy in the activity.

XIV
THE ADJUSTMENT OF TECHNICAL TO PSYCHICAL
CONDITIONS

Teaching and learning represent only the preliminary problem. The
fundamental question remains, after all, how the work is to be done by
those who have learned it in accordance with the customs of the economic
surroundings and who are accordingly already educated and trained for it.
What can be done to eliminate everything which diminishes and decreases
efficiency, and what remains to be done to reinforce it. Such influences are
evidently exerted by the external technical conditions, by variations of the
activity itself, and by the play of the psychical motives and counter-
motives. It must seem as if only this last factor would belong in the realm of
psychology, but the technical conditions, of which the machine itself is the
most important part, and the bodily movements also have manifold relations
to the psychical life. Only as far as these relations prevail has the
psychologist any reason to study the problem. The purely physical and
economic factors of technique do not interest him at all, but when a
technical arrangement makes a psychophysical achievement more difficult
or more easy, it belongs in the sphere of the psychologist, and just this
aspect of the work may become of greatest importance for the total result.
In all three of these directions, that is, with reference to the technical, to the
physiological, and to the purely psychical, the scientific management
movement has prepared the way. The engineers of scientific management
recognized, at least, that no part of the industrial process is indifferent, even
the apparently most trivial activity, the slightest movement of arm or hand
or leg, became the object of their exact measurement. The stopwatch which
measures every movement in fractions of a second has become the symbol
of this new economic period. As long as special psychological experiments
in the service of industrial psychology are still so exceptional, it may,
indeed, be acknowledged that the practical experiments in the service of
scientific management have come nearest to the solution of these special
psychotechnical problems.

To proceed from without toward the centre, we may begin our review with
the physical technique of the working conditions and its relations to the
mind. Tue history of technique shows on every page this practical
adjustment of external labor conditions to the psychophysical necessities
and psychophysical demands. No machine with which a human being is to
work can survive in the struggle for technical existence, unless it is to a
certain degree adapted to the human nerve and muscle system and to man's
possibilities of perception, of attention, of memory, of feeling, and of will.
Industrial technique with its restless improvements has always been
subordinated to this postulate. Every change which made it possible for the
workingman to secure equal effects with smaller effort or to secure greater
or better effects with equal effort counted as an economic gain, which was
welcome to the market. For instance, throughout the history of industry we
find the fundamental tendency to transpose all activities from the great
muscles to the small muscles. Any activity which is performed with the
robust muscles of the shoulder when it can be done with the lower arm, or
labor which is demanded from the muscles of the lower arm when it can
just as well be carried out by the fingers, certainly involves a waste of
psychophysical energy. A stronger psychophysical excitement is necessary
in order to secure the innervation of the big muscles in the central nervous
system. This difference in the stimulation of the various muscle groups has
been of significant consequence for the differentiation of work throughout
the development of mankind.[25] Labor with the large muscles has, for these
psychophysical reasons, never been easily combined with the subtler
training of the finer muscles. Hence a social organization which obliged the
men to give their energy to war and the hunt, both, in primitive life,
functions of the strongest muscles, made it necessary for the domestic
activities, which are essentially functions of the small muscles, to be carried
out by women. The whole history of the machine demonstrates this
economic tendency to make activities dependent upon those muscles which
presuppose the smallest psychophysical effort. It is not only the smaller
effort which gives economic advantage to the stimulation of the smaller
muscles, but the no less important circumstance that the psychophysical
after-effect of their central excitement exerts less inhibition than the after-
effect of the brain excitement for the big muscles.

But we must not overlook another feature in the development of technique.
The machines have been constantly transformed in the direction which
made it possible to secure the greatest help from the natural coördination of
bodily movements. The physiological organization and the psychophysical
conditions of the nervous system make it necessary that the movement
impulses flow over into motor side channels and thus produce accessory
effects without any special effort. If a machine is so constructed that these
natural accessory movements must be artificially and intentionally
suppressed, it means, on the one side, a waste of available psychophysical
energy, and on the other side it demands a useless effort in order to secure
this inhibition. The industrial development has moved toward both the
fructification of those side impulses and the avoidance of these inhibitions.
It has adjusted itself practically to the natural psychical conditions.
Ultimately it is this tendency which shaped the technical apparatus for the
economic work until the muscle movements could become rhythmical. The
rhythmical activity necessarily involves a psychophysical saving and this
saving has been instinctively secured throughout the history of civilization.
All rhythm contains a repetition of movement without making a real
repetition of the psychophysical impulse necessary. In the rhythmical
activity a large part of the first excitement still serves for the second, and
the second for the third. Inhibitions fall away and the mere after-effect of
each stimulus secures a great saving for the new impulse. The history of the
machine even indicates that the newer technical development not only
found the far-reaching division of labor already in the workshops of earlier
centuries, but a no less far-reaching rhythmization of the labor in fine
adaptation to the needs of the psychophysical organism, long before the
appearance of the machines. The beginnings of the machine period
frequently showed nothing but an imitation of the rhythmical movements of
man.[26] To be sure, the later improvements of the machine have frequently
destroyed that original rhythm of man's movement, as the movement itself,
especially in the electric machines, has become so quick that the subjective
rhythmical experience has been lost. Moreover, the rhythmical horizontal
and vertical movements were for physical reasons usually replaced by
uniform circular movements. But even the most highly developed machine
demands human activity, for instance, for the supplying with material; and
this again has opened new possibilities for the adjustment of technical
mechanism to the economic demand for rhythmical muscle activity. The

growth of technical devices has thus been constantly under the control of
psychological demands, in spite of the absence of systematic psychological
investigations. But the decisive factor was, indeed, that these psychological
motives always remained in the subconsciousness of civilization. The
improvements were consciously referred to the machine as such, however
much the practical success was really influenced by the degree of its
adjustment to the mental conditions of the workingmen. The new
movements of scientific management and of experimental psychology aim
toward bringing this adaptation consciously into the foreground and toward
testing and studying systematically what technical variations can best suit
the psychophysical status of man.
Those who are familiar with the achievements of scientific management
remember that by no means only the complicated procedures on a high
level are in question. The successes are often the most surprising where the
technique is old, and where it might have been imagined that the
experiences of many centuries would have secured through mere common
sense the most effective performance. The best-known case is perhaps that
of the masons, which one of the leaders of the scientific management
movement has studied in all its details.[27] The movements of the builders
and the tools which they use were examined with scientific exactitude and
slowly reshaped under the point of view of psychology and physiology. The
total result was that after the new method 30 masons completed without
greater fatigue what after the old methods it would have taken 100 masons
to do, and that the total expense for the building was reduced to less than a
half in spite of the steady increase of the wages of the laborers. For this
purpose it was necessary that exact measurements be made of the height at
which the bricks were lying and of the height of the wall on which they
must be laid, and of the number of bricks which should be carried to the
masons at once. He studied how the trowel should be shaped and how the
mortar should be used and how the bricks should be carried to the
bricklayers. In short, everything which usually is left to tradition, to caprice,
and to an economy which looks out only for the most immediate saving,
was on the basis of experiments of many years replaced by entirely new
means and tools, where nothing was left to arbitrariness. Yet these changes
did not demand any invention or physically or economically new ideas, but
merely a more careful adaptation of the apparatus to the psychological

energies of the masons. The new arrangement permitted a better
organization of the necessary bodily movements, fatigue was diminished,
the accessory movements were better fructified, fewer inhibitions were
necessary, a better playing together of the psychical energies was secured.
The students of scientific management stepped still lower in the scale of
economic activity. There is no more ordinary productive function than
shoveling. Yet in great establishments the shoveling of coal or of dirt may
represent an economically very important factor. It seems that up to the
days of scientific management, no one really looked carefully into the
technical conditions under which the greatest possible economic effect
might be reached. Now the act of shoveling was approached with the
carefulness with which a scholar turns to any subtle process in his
laboratory. The brilliant originator of the scientific management movement,
who carried out these investigations[28] in the great Bethlehem Steel Works,
where hundreds of laborers had to shovel heavy iron ore or light ashes,
found that the usual chance methods involve an absurd economic waste.
The burden was sometimes so heavy that rapid fatigue developed and the
movements became too slow, or the lifted mass was so light that the larger
part of the laborer's energies remained unused. In either case the final result
of the day's work must be anti-economic. He therefore tested with carefully
graded experiments what weight ensured the most favorable achievement
by a strong healthy workingman. The aim was to find the weight which
would secure with well-arranged pauses the maximum product in one day
without over-fatigue. As soon as this weight was determined, a special set
of shovels had to be constructed for every particular kind of material. The
laborers were now obliged to operate with 10 different kinds of shovels,
each of such a size that the burden always remained an average of 21
pounds for any kind of material. The following step was an exact
determination of the most favorable rapidity and the most perfect
movement of shoveling, the best distribution of pauses, and so on, and the
final outcome was that only 140 men were needed where on the basis of the
old plan about 500 laborers had been engaged. The average workingman
who had previously shoveled 16 tons of material, now managed 59 tons
without greater fatigue. The wages were raised by two thirds and the
expenses for shoveling a ton of material were decreased one half This

calculation of expenses included, of course, a consideration of the increased
cost for tools and for the salaries of the scientific managers.
Whoever visits factories in which the new system has been introduced by
real specialists must be surprised, indeed, by the great effects which often
result from the better psychophysical adaptation of the simplest and
apparently most indifferent tools and means. As far as the complicated
machines are concerned, we are accustomed to a steady improvement by
the efforts of the technicians and we notice it rather little if the changes in
them are introduced for psychological instead of the usual physical reasons.
But the fact that even the least complicated and most indifferent devices can
undergo most influential improvements, as soon as they are seriously
studied from a psychological point of view, remains really a source for
surprise. Sometimes no more is needed than a change in the windows or in
the electric lamps, by which the light can fall on the work in a
psychologically satisfactory way; sometimes long series of experiments
have to be made with a simple hammer or knife or table. Often everything
must be arranged against the wishes of the workingmen, who feel any
deviation from the accustomed conditions as a disturbance which is to be
regarded with suspicion. In one concern I heard that the scientific manager
became convinced that all the working-chairs for the women were too low
and that the laborers therefore had to hold their arms in a psychophysically
unfavorable position during the handling of the apparatus. All were strongly
opposed to the introduction of higher chairs. The result was that the
manager arranged for the chairs to be raised a few millimeters every
evening, without the knowledge of the working-women, as soon as the
factory was empty. After a few weeks the chairs had reached the right
height without those engaged in the work having noticed it at all. The
outcome was a decided increase of efficiency.
But the most rational scheme will after all be to prepare for such
arrangements of tools and apparatus by systematic experiments in the
psychological laboratory. The subtlety of such investigations will lead far
beyond the point which is accessible to the attempts of scientific
management. Exact experiments on attention, for instance, will have to
determine how the various parts of the apparatus are to be distributed best
in space if the laborer must keep watch for disturbances at various places.
Only the laboratory experiment can find the most favorable speed of the

machine or can select the muscles to which the mind can send the most
effective impulses. The construction of the machine must then be adapted to
such results. In the Harvard laboratory, for instance, a practical question led
us to examine which fingers would allow the quickest alternation of key
movements.[29] If any two of the ten fingers perform for ten seconds the
quickest possible alternation of motion, as in a trill, the experiment can
demonstrate exactly the differences between the various combinations of
fingers and the individual fluctuations for these differences. With an
electrical registration of the movements of the alternating fingers we
studied in hundredths of a second the time for the motions of two hands and
of fingers of the same hand, in order to adjust the keys of a certain machine
to the most favorable impulses.
We approach this group of problems from another side when we test the
relations of various kinds of machines to various mental types.
Psychologists have studied, for example, the various styles of typewriting
machines.[30] From a purely commercial point of view the merits of one or
another machine are praised as if they were advantageous for every possible
human being. The fact is that such advantages for one may be
disadvantages for another on account of differences in the mental
disposition. One man may write more quickly on one, another on another
machine. As every one knows, the chief difference is that of the keyboard
and that of the visible or invisible writing. Machines like the Remington
machine work with a shift key; that is, a special key must be pressed when
capital letters are to be written. Other machines like the Oliver even demand
double shifting, one key for the capital letters, and one for the figures, and
so on. On the other hand, machines like the Smith Premier have no shift
key, but a double keyboard. It is evident that both the shift-key arrangement
and the double keyboard have their particular psychological advantages.
The single alphabet demands much less from the optical memory, and the
corresponding motor inner attitude of consciousness is adjusted to a smaller
number of possibilities. But the pressure on the shift key, which goes with
the single alphabet, is not only a time-wasting act; from the psychological
point of view it is first of all a very strong interruption of the uniform chain
of impulses. If the capital and small letters are written for a minute
alternatingly with the greatest possible speed, the experiment shows that the
number of letters for the machine with the double alphabet is about three

times greater than for the machine with simple alphabet and shift key. Both
systems accordingly have their psychological advantages and
disadvantages. Human beings of distinct visual ideational type or of highly
developed motor type will prefer the double alphabet, provided, of course,
that the touch system of writing is learned, and this will be especially true if
their inner attitude is easily disturbed by interruptions. But those who have
a feebly developed optical mental centre and who have small ability for the
development of complex motor habits will be more efficient on the
machines with the single alphabet, especially if their nervous system is little
molested by interruptions and thus undisturbed by the intrusion of the shift
key act.
In a similar way the visibility of the writing will be for certain individuals
the most valuable condition for quick writing, while for others, who depend
less upon visual support, it may mean rather a distraction and an
interference with the speediest work. The visible writing attracts the
involuntary attention, and thus forces consciousness to stick to that which
has been written instead of being concentrated on that which is to be
produced by the next writing movements. The operator himself is not aware
of this hindrance. On the contrary, the public will always be inclined to
prefer the typewriters with visible writing, because by a natural confusion
the feeling arises that the production of the letter is somewhat facilitated,
when the eye is coöperating, just as in writing with a pen we follow the
lines of the written letter. But the situation lies differently in the two cases.
When we are writing with a pen, the letter grows under our eyes, while in
the machine writing we do not see any part of the letter until the whole
movement which produces the single letter is finished. By such a
misleading analogy many a man is led to prefer the typewriter with visible
writing, while he would probably secure a greater speed with a machine
which does not tempt him to attend the completed letters, while his entire
attention ought to belong to the following letters.
These last observations point to another psychological aspect of the
machine and of the whole technical work, namely, their relations to the
impressions of the senses. The so-called dynamogenic experiments of the
psychological laboratory have demonstrated what a manifold influence
flows from the sense-impressions to the will-impulses. If the muscle
contraction of a man's fist is measured, the experiment shows that the

strongest possible pressure may be very different when the visual field
appears in different colors, or tones of different pitch or different noises are
stimulating the ear, and so on. As yet no systematic experiments exist by
which such results can be brought into relation to the sense-stimuli which
reach the laborer during his technical work. The psychophysical effect of
colors and noises has not been fructified at all for industrial purposes. The
mere subjective judgment of the workingman himself cannot be
acknowledged as reliable in such questions. The laborer, for instance,
usually believes that a noise to which he has become accustomed does not
disturb him in his work, while experimental results point strongly to the
contrary. In a similar way the effect of colored windows may appear
indifferent to the workmen, and yet may have considerable influence on his
efficiency. Numberless performances in the factory are reactions on certain
optical or acoustical or tactual signals. Both the engineer and the workman
are satisfied if such a signal is clearly perceivable. The psychological
laboratory experiment, however, shows that the whole psychophysical
effect depends upon the character of the signal; a more intense light, a
quicker change, a higher tone, a larger field of light, a louder noise, or a
harder touch may produce a very different kind of reaction.
With a careful time-measurement of the motions, it can often be directly
traced how purely technical processes in the machine itself influence and
control the whole psychical system of impulses in the man. I observed, in a
factory, for instance, the work at a machine which performed most of its
functions automatically. It had to hammer fine grooves into small metal
plates. A young laborer stood before every such machine, took from a pile,
alternately from the right and from the left, the little plates to be serrated,
placed them in the machine, turned a lever to bring the hammer into motion,
and then removed the serrated plates. The speed of the work was dependent
upon the operative, as he determined by his lever movement the instant at
which the automatic serrating hammer should be released. The man's
activity demanded 9 independent movements. I found that those who
worked the most quickly were able to carry out this labor for hours at a
uniform rapidity of 4 to 4-1/2 second for those 9 movements. But the time-
measurement showed that even these fastest workers were relatively slow in
the first 5 movements which they made while the machine stood quiet, and
that they reached an astonishing quickness of movement in the 4 last

actions during which at the same time the serrating hammer in bewildering
rapidity was beating on the plate with sharp loud cracks. The hammer
reinforced the energy of the young laborers to an effectiveness which could
never have been attained by mere voluntary effort.
Often the simplicity or complication of the stimulus may be decisive in
importance, and this also holds true where the most elementary reactions
are involved, for instance, the mere act of counting which enters into many
industrial functions. Experiments carried on in my laboratory[31] have
shown that the time needed to count a certain number of units becomes
longer as soon as the units themselves become more complicated. Their
inner manifoldness exerts a retarding influence on the eye as it moves from
one figure to another. A certain psychical inhibition arises; the mind is held
back by the complexity of the impression and cannot proceed quickly
enough to the next. Psychologically no less important is the demand that the
external technical conditions so far as they influence consciousness, should
remain as far as possible the same, if the same psychical effect is desired,
because then only can a perfectly firm connection between stimulus and
movement be formed. In technical life this demand is much sinned against.
A typical case is that of the signals for which the engineer on the
locomotive has to watch. In the daytime the movable arms of the semaphore
indicate by their horizontal, oblique, or vertical position whether the tracks
are clear. At night-time, on the other hand, the same information reaches
him by the different colors of the signal lanterns. From a psychical point of
view it is probable that the safety of the service would be increased if an
unchangeable connection between signal and movement were formed. It
would be sufficient for that purpose if the color signals at night were given
up and were replaced by horizontal, oblique, or vertical lines of white light
or rows of points. Successful experiments of this kind have been carried on
by psychologists in the service of this railroad problem.[32]
The interest in all these problems of large concerns, in transportation and
factory work and complex industries, ought not to make us overlook the
fact that on principle the same problems can be found in the simplest
industrial establishment. Even the housewife or the cook destroys economic
values if daily she has to spend useless minutes or hours on account of
arrangements in the household which are badly adjusted to the
psychological conditions. She sacrifices her energy in vain and she wastes

her means where she herself is under the illusion of especial economy.
Scientific management would perhaps be nowhere so wholesome as in
kitchen and pantry, in laundry and cellar, just because here the saving would
be multiplied millionfold and the final sum of energy saved and of feeling
values gained would be enormous, even if it could not be calculated with
the exactitude with which the savings of a factory budget can be proven.
The profusion of small attractive devices which automatically perform the
economic household labor and disburden the human workers must not hide
the fact that the chief activities are still little adjusted to the psychophysical
conditions. The situation is similar to that of the masons, whose function
has also been performed for thousands of years, and yet which did not find
a real adaptation to the psychical factors until a systematic time-measuring
study was introduced. A manufacturer who sells an improved pan or
mixing-spoon or broom expects success if he brings to the market
something the merits of which are evident and make the housewife
anticipate a decrease of work or a simplification of work, but the
development of scientific management has shown clearly that the most
important improvements are just those which are deduced from scientific
researches, without at first giving satisfaction to the laborers themselves,
until a new habit has been formed.
Perhaps the most frequent technical activity of this simple kind is sewing by
hand, which is still entirely left to the traditions of common sense, and yet
which is evidently dependent upon the interplay of many psychical factors
which demand a subtle adaptation to the psychical conditions. To approach,
at least, this field of human labor a careful investigation of the
psychophysics of sewing has been started in my laboratory.[33] The sewing
work is done, with the left hand supported, and the right hand connected
with a system of levers which make a graphic record of every movement on
the smoked surface of a revolving drum. For instance, we begin with simple
over and over stitches, measuring the time and the character of the right
hand movements for 50 stitches under a variety of technical conditions. The
first variation refers to the length of the thread. The thread itself, fixed at the
needle's eye, varied between 3 feet and 6 inches in length. Other changes
refer to the voluntary speed, to the number of stitches, to fatigue, to external
stimuli, to attention, to methods of training, and so on, but the chief interest
remains centred on the psychical factors. We are still too much at the

beginning already to foresee whether it will be possible to draw from these
psychophysical experiments helpful conclusions. The four young women
engaged in this laboratory research will later extend it to the psychological
conditions of work with the various types of sewing-machines.

XV
THE ECONOMY OF MOVEMENT

The study of the technical aspect of labor can nowhere be separated by a
sharp demarcation line from the study of the labor itself as a function of the
individual organism. Many problems, indeed, extend in both directions. The
student of industrial efficiency is, for instance, constantly led to the
question of fatigue. He may consider this fatigue as a function of brain and
muscle activity and discuss it with reference to the psychophysical effort,
but he is equally interested in the question of how far the apparatus or the
machine or the accessory conditions of the work might be changed in order
to avoid fatigue. The accidents of the electric street railways were regarded
as partly related to fatigue. The problem was accordingly how to shorten the
working time of the motormen in the interest of the public, but it was soon
recognized that the difficulty might also be approached from the mere
technical side. Some companies introduced seats which the motormen can
use whenever they feel fatigue coming and excellent results have followed
this innovation. In our last discussions the technical apparatus stood in the
foreground. We may now consider as our real topic the psychophysical
activity.
Here, too, the leaders of scientific management have secured some signal
successes. Their chief effort in this field was directed toward the greatest
possible achievement by eliminating all superfluous movements and by
training in those movement combinations which were recognized as the
most serviceable ones. We may return to the case of the masons in order to
clear up the principle. When Gilbreth began to reform the labor of the
mason after scientific principles, he gave his chief interest to the men's
motions. Every muscle contraction which was needed to move the brick
from the pile in the yard to the final position in the wall was measured with
reference to space-and time-relations and the necessary effort. From here he
turned to the application of well-known psychophysical principles. A
movement is less fatiguing and therefore economically most profitable if it
occurs in a direction in which the greatest possible use of gravitation can be

made If both hands have to act at the same time, the labor can be carried out
most quickly and with the smallest effort if corresponding muscle groups
are at work and this means if symmetrical movements are performed. If
unequal movements have to be made simultaneously, the effort will become
smaller if they are psychically bound together by a common unified
impulse. The distance which has to be overcome by hands, arms, or feet
must be brought to a minimum for each partial movement. Most important,
however, is this rule. If a definite combination of movements has been
determined as economically most suitable, this method must be applied
without any exception from the beginning of the learning. The point is to
train from the start those impulse combinations which can slowly lead to
the quickest and best work. The usual method is the opposite. Generally the
beginner learns to produce from the beginning work which is as good and
correct as possible. In order to produce such qualitatively good results at an
early stage, it is left to him to choose any groups of movements which
happen to be convenient to him. Then these become habitual, and as soon as
he tries to go on to quicker work, these chance habits hinder him in his
progress. The movements which may be best suited for fair production by a
beginner may be entirely unsuited for really quick work, such as would be
expected from an experienced man. The laborer must replace the first habits
which he has learned by a new set, instead of starting in the first place with
motions which can be continued until the highest point of efficiency has
been reached, even if this involves rather a poor showing at the beginning.
A final maximum rapidity must be secured from the start by the choice of
those motions which have been standardized by careful experiments.
It is also psychophysically important to demand that the movements shall
not be suddenly stopped, if that can be avoided. Any interruption of a
movement presupposes a special effort of the will which absorbs energy,
and after the interruption a new start must be made of which the same is
true. On the other hand, if chains of movements become habitual, the
psychophysical effort will be reduced to the minimum, inasmuch as each
movement finds its natural end and is not artificially interrupted by will,
and at the same time each movement itself becomes a stimulus for the next
movement by its accompanying sensations. The traditional method, for
instance, demands that a brick be lifted with one hand and a trowel with
mortar by the other hand. After that the lifting movement is interrupted, the

brick comes to rest in the hand of the mason until the mortar has been
spread on and the place prepared for the new brick. Then only begins a new
action with the brick. This method was fundamentally changed. The
laborers learned to swing the brick with one hand from the pack to the wall
and at the same time to distribute the mortar over the next brick with the
other hand. This whole complex movement is of course more difficult and
demands a somewhat longer period of learning, but as soon as it is learned
an extreme saving of psychophysical energy and a correspondingly great
economic gain is secured. The newly trained masons are not even allowed
to gather up with the trowel any mortar which falls to the floor, because it
was found that the loss of mortar is economically less important than the
waste of psychophysical energy in bending down.
Whoever has once schooled his eye to observe the limitless waste of human
motions and psychophysical efforts in social life has really no difficulty in
perceiving all this at every step. This ability to recognize possible savings
of impulse may be brought to a certain virtuosity. Gilbreth, one of the
leaders of the new movement, seems to be such a virtuoso. When he was in
London, there was pointed out to him in the Japanese British Exhibition a
young girl who worked so quickly that there at least he would find a rhythm
of finger movement which could not any further be improved. In an
exhibition booth the woman attached advertisement labels to boxes with
phenomenal rapidity. Gilbreth watched her for a little while and found that
she was able to manage 24 boxes in 40 seconds. Then he told the young girl
that she was doing it wrongly, and that she ought to try a new way which he
showed her. At the first attempt, she disposed of 24 boxes in 26 seconds and
at the second trial in 20 seconds. She did not have to make more effort for
it, but simply had fewer movements to make. If such economic gain can be
secured with little exertion in the simplest processes, it cannot be surprising
that in the case of more complex and more advanced technical work which
involves highly skilled labor, a careful psychophysical study of motions
must bring far-reaching economic improvements.
Yet the more important steps will have to be guided by special experimental
investigations, and here the psychological laboratory must undertake the
elaboration of the details. Only the systematic experiment can determine
what impulses can be released at the least expense of energy and with the
greatest exactitude of the motor effect. Investigations on the psychophysics

of movement and the influences which lead toward making the movement
too large or too small have played an important rôle in the psychological
laboratories for several decades. It was recognized early that the mistakes
which are made in reproducing a movement may spring from two different
sources. They result partly from an erroneous perception or memory of the
movement carried out, and partly from the inability to realize the movement
intention. One series of investigations was accordingly devoted to the
studies of those sensations and perceptions by which we become aware of
the actual movement. Everything which accentuates these sensations must
lead to an overestimation of the motion, and the outcome is that the
movement is made too small. The concentration of attention, therefore, has
the effect of reducing the actual motion, and the same influence must result
from any resistance which is not recognized as such and hence is not
subtracted in the judgment of the perceiver. Another series of researches
was concerned with the inner attitude which causes a certain external
movement effect and which may lead to an unintended amount of
movement as soon as the weight to be lifted is erroneously judged upon.
Closely related studies, finally, deal with a mistake which enters when the
movement is reproduced from memory after a certain time. The exactitude
of a simple arm movement seems to increase in the first ten seconds, then
rapidly to decrease. The emotional attitude, too, is of importance for the
reproduction of a movement. I trained myself in making definite extensor
and flexor movements of the arm until I was able to reproduce them under
normal conditions with great exactitude. In experiments extending over
many months, which were carried on through the changing emotional
attitudes of daily life, the exact measurement showed that both groups of
movements became too large in states of excitement and too small in states
of fatigue. But in a state of satisfaction and joy the extensor movement
became too large, the flexor movement too small, and vice versa, in
unpleasant emotional states the flexor movement was too strong and the
extensor movement too weak.[34]
We have a very careful investigation into the relations between rapidity of
movement and exactitude.[35] The subjects had to perform a hand
movement simultaneously with the beat of a metronome, the beats of which
varied between 20 and 200 in the minute. In general the accuracy of the
movement decreases as the rapidity increases, but the descent is not

uniform. Motions in the rhythm of 40 to the minute were on the whole just
as exact as those in the rhythm of 20, and, on the other hand movements in
the rhythm of 200 almost as accurate as those of 140 to the minute. Thus we
have a lower limit below which decrease of rapidity does not increase the
accuracy any further, and an upper limit beyond which a further increase of
rapidity brings no additional deterioration. The mistakes of the unskilled
left hand increase still more rapidly than the number of movements. If the
eyes are closed, the rapid movements are usually too long and the slow ones
too short.
An investigation in the Harvard laboratory varied this problem in a
direction which brings it still nearer to technical conditions of industry. Our
central question was whether the greatest exactitude of rhythmical
movement is secured at the same rapidity for different muscle groups.[36]
We studied especially rhythmical movements of hand, foot, arm, and head,
and studied them, moreover, under various conditions of resistance. The
result from 340,000 measured movements was the demonstration that every
muscle group has its own optimum of rapidity for the greatest possible
accuracy and that the complexity of the movement and the resistance which
it finds has most significant influence on the exactitude of the rhythmical
achievement. If we abstract at first from the fluctuations around the average
value of a particular group of movements and consider only this average
itself in its relation to the starting movement which it is meant to imitate,
we find characteristic tendencies toward enlargement or reduction
dependent upon the rapidity. The right foot, for instance, remained nearest
to the original movement at a rapidity of 80 motions in the minute, while
the head did the same at about 20. For a hand movement of 14 centimeters,
the most favorable rapidity was 120 repetitions in the minute, while for a
hand movement of 1 centimeter the average remained nearest to the
standard at about 40 repetitions. The mean variation from time average is
the smallest for the left foot at 20 to 30 movements, for the right at 160 to
180, for the head at 40, for the larger hand movement at 180, and so on.
Investigations of this kind have so far not affected industrial life in the least,
but it seems hardly doubtful that a systematic study of the movements
necessary for economic work will have to pass through such strictly
experimental phases. The essential point, however, will be for the managers
of the industrial concerns and the psychological laboratory workers really to

come nearer to each other from the start and undertake the work in
common, not in the sense that the laboratory is to emigrate to the factory,
but in the better sense that definite questions which grow out of the
industrial life be submitted to the scientific investigation of the
psychologists.

XVI
EXPERIMENTS ON THE PROBLEM OF MONOTONY

The systematic organization of movements with most careful regard to the
psychophysical conditions appeared to us the most momentous aid toward
the heightening of efficiency. But even if the superfluous, unfit, and
interfering movement impulses were eliminated and the conditions of work
completely adjusted to the demands of psychology, there would still remain
a large number of possibilities through which productiveness might be
greatly decreased, or at least kept far below the possible maximum of
efficiency. For instance, even the best adapted labor might be repeated to
the point of exhaustion, at which the workman and the work would be
ruined. Fatigue and restoration accordingly demand especial consideration.
In a similar way emotions may be conditions of stimulation or interference,
and no one ought to underestimate the importance of higher motives,
intellectual, æsthetic, and moral motives, in their bearing on the
psychophysical impulses of the laborer. If these higher demands are
satisfied, the whole system gains a new tonus, and if they are disappointed,
the irritation of the mental machinery may do more harm than any break in
the physical machine at which the man is working. In short, we must still
look in various directions to become aware of all the relations between the
psychological factors and the economic output. We may begin with one
question which plays a large, perhaps too large, rôle in the economic and
especially in the popular economic literature. I refer to the problem of
monotony of labor.
In the discourses of our time on the lights and shades of our modern
industrial life, all seem to agree that the monotony of industrial labor ought
to be entered on the debit side of the ledger of civilization. Since the days
when factories began to spring up, the accusation that through the process
of division of labor the industrial workingman no longer has any chance to
see a whole product, but that he has to devote himself to the minutest part
of a part, has remained one of the matter-of-course arguments. The part of a
part which he has to cut or polish or shape in endless repetition without

alteration cannot awake any real interest. This complete division of labor
has to-day certainly gone far beyond anything which Adam Smith
described, and therefore it now appears undeniable that the method must
create a mental starvation which presses down the whole life of the laborer,
deprives it of all joy in work, and makes the factory scheme a necessary but
from the standpoint of psychology decidedly regrettable evil. I have become
more and more convinced that the scientific psychologist is not obliged to
endorse this judgment of popular psychology.
To be sure the problem of division of labor, as it appears in the subdivision
of manufacture, is intimately connected with many other related questions.
It quickly leads to the much larger question of division of labor in our
general social structure, which is necessary for our social life with its
vocational and professional demands, and which undoubtedly narrows to a
certain degree every individual in the completeness of his human desires.
No man in modern society can devote himself to everything for which his
mind may long. But as a matter of course these large general problems of
civilization lie outside of the realm of our present inquiry. In another
direction the problem of monotony comes very near to the question of
fatigue. But we must see clearly that these two questions are not identical
and that we may discuss monotony here without arguing the problem of
fatigue. The frequent repetition of the same movement or of the same
mental activity certainly may condition an objective fatigue, which may
interfere with the economic output, but this is not the real meaning of the
problem of monotony. About fatigue we shall speak later. Here we are
concerned exclusively with that particular psychological attitude which we
know as subjective dislike of uniformity and lack of change in the work.
Within these limits the question of monotony is, indeed, frequently
misunderstood in its economic significance.
Let us not forget that the outsider can hardly ever judge when work offers
or does not offer inner manifoldness. If we do not know and really
understand the subject, we are entirely unable to discriminate the subtler
inner differences. The shepherd knows every sheep, though the passer-by
has the impression that they all look alike. This inability to recognize the
differences which the man at work feels distinctly shows itself even in the
most complicated activities. The naturalist is inclined to fancy that the study
of a philologist must be endlessly monotonous, and the philologist is

convinced that it must be utterly tiresome to devote one's self a life lone to
some minute questions of natural science. Only when one stands in the
midst of the work is he aware of its unlimited manifoldness, and feels how
every single case is somehow different from every other.
In the situation of the industrial workman, the attention may be directed
toward some small differences which can only be recognized after long
familiarity with the particular field. Certainly this field is small, as every
workman must specialize, but whether he manufactures a whole machine,
or only a little wheel, makes no essential difference in the attitude. The
attraction of newness is quickly lost also in the case of the most
complicated machine. On the other hand, the fact that such a machine has
an independent function does not give an independent attraction to the
work. Or we might rather say, as far as the work on a whole machine is of
independent value, the work of perfecting the little wheel is an independent
task also and offers equal value by its own possibilities. Whoever has
recognized the finest variations among the single little wheels and has
become aware of how they are produced sometimes better, sometimes
worse, sometimes more quickly, sometimes more slowly, becomes as much
interested in the perfecting of the minute part as another man in the
manufacture of the complex machine. It is true that the laborer does not feel
interest in the little wheel itself, but in the production of the wheel. Every
new movement necessary for it has a perfectly new chance and stands in
new relations, which have nothing to do with the repetition. As a matter of
course this interest in the always new best possible method of production is
still strongly increased where piece-wages are introduced. The laborer
knows that the amount of his earning depends upon the rapidity with which
he finishes faultless products. Under this stimulus he is in a continuous race
with himself, and thus has every reason to prefer the externally uniform and
therefore perfectly familiar work to another kind which may bring
alternation, but which also brings ever new demands.
For a long while I have tried to discover in every large factory which I have
visited the particular job which from the standpoint of the outsider presents
itself as the most tiresome possible. As soon as I found it, I had a full frank
talk with the man or woman who performed it and earnestly tried to get
self-observational comment. My chief aim was to bring out how far the
mere repetition, especially when it is continued through years, is felt as a

source of discomfort. I may again point to a few chance illustrations. In an
electrical factory with many thousands of employees I gained the
impression that the prize for monotonous work belonged to a woman who
packs incandescent lamps in tissue paper. She wraps them from morning
until night, from the first day of the year to the last, and has been doing that
for the last 12 years. She performs this packing process at an average rate of
13,000 lamps a day. The woman has reached about 50,000,000 times for the
next lamp with one hand and with the other to the little pile of tissue sheets
and then performed the packing. Each lamp demands about 20 finger
movements. As long as I watched her, she was able to pack 25 lamps in 42
seconds, and only a few times did she need as many as 44 seconds. Every
25 lamps filled a box, and the closing of the box required a short time for
itself. She evidently took pleasure in expressing herself fully about her
occupation. She assured me that she found the work really interesting, and
that she constantly felt an inner tension, thinking how many boxes she
would be able to fill before the next pause. Above all, she told me that there
is continuous variation. Sometimes she grasps the lamp or paper in a
different way, sometimes the packing itself does not run smoothly,
sometimes she feels fresher, sometimes less in the mood for the work, and
there is always something to observe and something to think about.
This was the trend which I usually found. In some large machine works I
sought for a long time before I found the type of labor which seemed to me
the most monotonous. I finally settled on a man who was feeding an
automatic machine which was cutting holes in metal strips and who simply
had to push the strips slowly forward; only when the strip did not reach
exactly the right place, he could stop the automatic machine by a lever. He
made about 34,000 uniform movements daily and had been doing that for
the past 14 years. But he gave me the same account, that the work was
interesting and stimulating, while he himself made the impression of an
intelligent workingman. At the beginning, he reported, the work had
sometimes been quite fatiguing, but later he began to like it more and more.
I imagined that this meant that at first he had to do the work with full
attention and that the complex movement had slowly become automatic,
allowing him to perform it like a reflex movement and to turn his thoughts
to other things. But he explained to me in full detail that this was not the
case, that he still feels obliged to devote his thoughts entirely to the work at

hand, and that he is able only under these conditions to bring in the daily
wage which he needs for his family, as he is paid for every thousand holes.
But he added especially that it is not only the wage which satisfies him, but
that he takes decided pleasure in the activity itself.
On the other hand, I not seldom found wage-earners, both men and women,
who seemed to have really interesting and varied activities and who
nevertheless complained bitterly over the monotonous, tiresome factory
labor. I became more and more convinced that the feeling of monotony
depends much less upon the particular kind of work than upon the special
disposition of the individual. It cannot be denied that the same contrast
exists in the higher classes of work. We find school-teachers who constantly
complain that it is intolerably monotonous to go on teaching immature
children the rudiments of knowledge, while other teachers with exactly the
same task before them are daily inspired anew by the manifoldness of life in
the classroom. We find physicians who complain that one case in their
practice is like another, and judges who despair because they always have to
deal with the same petty cases, while other judges and physicians feel
clearly that every case offers something new and that the repetition as such
is neither conspicuous nor disagreeable. We find actors who feel it a torture
to play the same rôle every evening for several weeks, and there are actors
who, as one of the most famous actresses assured me after the four
hundredth performance of her star rôle, repeat their parts many hundred
times with undiminished interest, because they feel that they are always
speaking to new audiences. It seems not impossible that this individual
difference might be connected with deeper-lying psychophysical conditions.
I approached the question, to be sure, with a preconceived theory. I fancied
that certain persons had a finer, subtler sense for differences than others and
that they would recognize a manifoldness of variations where the others
would see only uniformity. In that I silently presupposed that the perception
of the uniformity must be something disturbing and disagreeable and the
recognition of variations something which stimulates the mind pleasantly.
But when I came to examine the question experimentally, I became
convinced that such a hypothesis is erroneous, and if I interpret the results
correctly, I should say that practically the opposite relation exists. Those
who recognize the uniformities readily are not the ones who are disturbed
by them.

I proceeded in the following way. To make use of a large number of
subjects accustomed to intelligent self-observation, I made the first series of
experiments with the regular students in my psychology lecture course in
Harvard University. Last winter I had more than four hundred men students
in psychology who all took part in that introductory series. The task which I
put before them in a number of variations was this: I used lists of words of
which half, or one more or less than half, belonged to one single
conceptional group. There were names of flowers, or cities, or poets, or
parts of the body, or wild animals, and so on. The remaining words of the
list, on the other hand, were without inner connection and without
similarity. The similar and the dissimilar words were mixed. The subjects
listened to such a list of words and then had to decide without counting
from the mere impression whether the similar words were more or equally
or less numerous than the dissimilar words. In other experiments the
arrangement was that two different lists were read and that in the two lists a
larger or smaller number of words were repeated from the first list. Here,
too, the subjects had to decide from the mere impression whether the
repeated words were in the majority or not. In every experiment the
judgment referred to those words which belonged to the same group and
which were in this sense uniform, or to the repeated words, and it had to be
stated with reference to them whether their number was larger, equal to, or
smaller than the different words. If all replies had been correct, the
judgment would have been 40 per cent equal, 30 per cent smaller, and 30
per cent larger, as they were arranged in perfect symmetry. As soon as I had
the results from the students, we figured out for every one what number he
judged equal, smaller, or greater. Then we divided the equal judgments by 2
and added half of them to the larger and half to the smaller judgments. In
this way we were enabled by one figure to characterize the whole tendency
of the individual. We found that in the whole student body there was a
tendency to underestimate the number of the similar or of the repeated
words. The majority of my students had a stronger impression from the
varying objects than from those which were in a certain sense equal. Yet
this tendency appeared in very different degrees and for about a fourth of
the participants the opposite tendency prevailed. They received a stronger
impression from the uniform ideas.

I had coupled with these experimental tests a series of questions, and had
asked every subject to express with fullest possible self-analysis his
practical attitude to monotony in life. Every one had to give an account
whether in the small habits of life he liked variety or uniform repetition. He
was asked especially as to his preferences for or against uniformity in the
daily meals, daily walks, and so on. Furthermore he had to report how far
he is inclined to stick to one kind of work or to alternate his work, how far
he welcomes the idea that vocational work may bring repetition, and so on.
And finally I tried to bring the results of these self-observations into
relation with the results of those experiments. It was here that the opposite
of the hypothesis which I had presupposed suggested itself to me with
surprising force. I found that just the ones who perceive the repetition least
hate it most, and that those who have a strong perception of the uniform
impressions and who overestimate their number are the ones who on the
whole welcome repetition in life.
As soon as I had reached this first experimental result, I began to see how it
might harmonize with known psychological facts. Some years ago a
Hungarian psychologist[37] showed by interesting experiments that if a
series of figures is exposed to the eye for a short fraction of a second, equal
digits are seen only once, and he came to the conclusion that equal
impressions in such a series inhibit each other. In the Harvard laboratory we
varied these experiments by eliminating the spatial separation of those
numbers. In our experiments the digits did not stand side by side, but
followed one another very quickly in the same place.[38] Similar
experiments we made with colors and so on. Here, too, we found that
quickly succeeding equal or very similar impressions have a tendency to
inhibit each other or to fuse with each other. Where such an inhibition
occurs, we probably ought to suppose that the perception of the first
impression exhausts the psychical disposition for this particular mental
experience. The psychophysical apparatus becomes for a moment unable to
arouse the same impression once more.
The above described new experiments suggest to me that this inhibition of
equal or similar impressions is found unequally developed in different
individuals. They possess a different tendency to temporary exhaustion of
psychophysical dispositions. There are evidently persons who after they
have received an impression are unable immediately to seize the same

impression again. Their attention and their whole inner attitude fails. But
there are evidently other persons for whom, on the contrary, the experience
of an impression is a kind of inner preparation for arousing the same or a
similar impression. In their case the psychophysical dispositions become
stimulated and excited, and therefore favor the repetition. If, as in our
experiments, the task is simply to judge the existence of equal or similar
impressions without any strain of attention, the one group of persons must
underestimate the number of the equal impressions because many words are
simply inhibited in their minds and remain neglected, the other groups of
persons must from their mental dispositions overestimate the number of
similar words. From here we have to take one step more. If these two
groups of persons have to perform a task in which it is necessary that not a
single member of a series of repetitions be overlooked, it is clear that the
two groups must react in a very different way. Now a perfect perception of
every single member is forced on them. Those who grasp equal impressions
easily, and who are prepared beforehand for every new repetition by their
inner dispositions, will follow the series without strain and will experience
the repetition itself with true satisfaction. On the other hand, those in whom
every impression inhibits the readiness to receive a repetition, and whose
inner energy for the same experience is exhausted, must feel it as a painful
and fatiguing effort if they are obliged to turn their attention to one member
after another in a uniform series. This mental torture is evidently the
displeasure which such individuals call the dislike of monotony in their
work. Whether this theoretical view is correct, we have to determine by
future studies. In our Harvard laboratory we have now proceeded from such
preparatory mass experiments to subtle investigations on a small number of
persons well trained in psychological self-observation with whom the
conditions of the experiment can be varied in many directions.[39]
It would seem probable that such experiments might also win
psychotechnical significance. A short series of tests which would have to be
adapted to the special situations, and which for the simple wage-earner
would have to be much easier than those sketched above, would allow it to
be determined beforehand whether an individual will suffer from repetition
in work. Even if we abstract from arguments of social reform and consider
exclusively the economic significance, it must seem important that labor
which involves much repetition be performed by men and women whose

mental dispositions favor an easy grasp of successive uniform impressions.
Experimentation could secure the selection of the fit workmen and the
complaint of monotony would disappear. The same selection could be
useful in the opposite direction, as many economic occupations, especially
in our time of automatic machines, demand a quick and often rhythmical
transition from one activity to another. It is evident that those whose natural
dispositions make every mental excitement a preparation not for the
identical but for the contrasting stimulation will be naturally equipped for
this kind of economic tasks.

XVII
ATTENTION AND FATIGUE

The problem of monotony may lead us on to other conditions through
which attention is hindered and the product of labor thereby decreased. The
psychologist naturally first thinks of external distractions of attention. If he
turns to practical studies of the actual economic life, he is often decidedly
surprised to find how little regard is given to this psychophysical factor. In
industrial establishments in which the smallest disturbance in the machine
is at once remedied by a mechanic in order that the greatest possible
economic effect may be secured, frequently nobody takes any interest in the
most destructive disturbances which unnecessarily occur in the subtlest part
of the factory mechanism, namely, the attention apparatus of the laborers.
Such an interference with attention must, for instance, be recognized when
the workingman, instead of devoting himself to one complex function, has
to carry out secondary movements which appear to be quite easily
performed and not to hinder him in his chief task. Often his own feeling
may endorse this impression. Of course the individual differences in this
direction are very great. The faculty of carrying on at the same time various
independent functions is unequally distributed and the experiment can show
this clearly. It is also well known from practical life that some men can
easily go on dictating to a stenographer while they are affixing their
signature to several hundred circular letters, or can continue their fluent
lecture while they are performing experimental demonstrations. With others
such a side activity continually interrupts the chief function. Then some
succeed better than others in securing a certain automatism of the accessory
function to such a point that its special acts do not come to consciousness at
all. For example, I watched a laborer who was constantly engaged in a
complicated technical performance, and he seemed to give to it his full
attention. Nevertheless he succeeded in moving a lever on an automatic
machine which stood near by whenever a certain wheel had made fifty
revolutions. During all his work he kept counting the revolutions without
being conscious of any idea of number. A system of motor reactions had

become organized which remained below the threshold of consciousness
and which produced only at the fiftieth recurrence the conscious psychical
impulse to perform the lever movement. Yet whether the talent for such
simultaneous mastery of independent functions be greater or smaller and
the demand more or less complex, in every case the principal action must
be hampered by the side issue. To be sure, it may sometimes be
economically more profitable to allow the hindrance to the chief work in
order to save the expense of an extra man to do the side work. In most
cases, however, such a consideration is not involved; it is simply an
ignoring of the psychological situation. As the accessory work seems easy,
its hindering influence on other functions is practically overlooked.
Psychological laboratory experiments have shown in many different
directions that simultaneous independent activities always disturb and
inhibit one another.
We must not forget that even the conversations of the laborers belong in this
psychophysical class. Where a continuous strain of attention has produced a
state of fatigue, a short conversation will bring a certain relief and
relaxation, and the words which the speaker hears in reply will produce a
general stimulation of psychical energy for the moment. Moreover, the
mere existence of the social conversational intercourse will raise the general
emotional mood, and this feeling of social pleasure may be the source from
which may spring new psychophysical powers. Nevertheless the
fundamental fact, after all, is that any talking during the labor, so far as it is
not necessary for the work itself, surely involves a distraction of attention.
Here, too, the individual is not conscious of the effect. He feels certain that
he can perform his task just as well, and even the piece-worker, who is
anxious to earn as much as possible, is convinced that he does not retard
himself by conversation. But the experiments which have been carried on in
establishments with scientific management speak decidedly against such a
supposition. A tyrannical demand for silence would, of course, be felt as
cruelty, and no suggestion of a jail-like discipline would be wise in the case
of industrial labor, for evident psychological reasons. But various factories
in rearranging their establishments according to the principles of scientific
management have changed the positions of the workmen so that
conversations become more difficult or impossible. The result reported
seems to be everywhere a significant increase of production. The individual

concentrates his mind on the task with an intensity which seems beyond his
reach as long as the inner attitude is adjusted to social contact. The help
which is rendered by the feeling of social coöperation, on the other hand, is
not removed by the mere abstaining from speaking. Interesting
psychopedagogical experiments have, indeed, demonstrated that working in
a common room produces better results than isolated activity. This is not
true of the most brilliant, somewhat nervous school children, who achieve
in their own room at home more than in the classroom. But for the average,
which almost alone is in question for life in the factory, the consciousness
of common effort is a source of psychophysical reinforcement. This
evidently remains effective when the workingmen can see one another, even
if the arrangement of the seats precludes the possibility of chatting during
the work.
However, by far the more important cause of distraction of attention lies in
those disturbances which come from without. Here again the chief interest
ought to be attached to those interferences which the workman himself no
longer feels as such. In a great printing-shop a woman who was occupied
with work which demanded her fullest attention was seated at her task in an
aisle where trucking was done. Removing this operator to a quiet corner
caused an increase of 25 per cent in her work.[40] To be sure there are many
such disturbances in factory life which can hardly be eliminated with the
technical means of to-day. For instance, the noise of the machines, which in
many factories makes it impossible to communicate except by shouting,
must be classed among the real psychological interferences in spite of the
fact that the laborers themselves usually feel convinced that they no longer
notice it at all. Still more disturbing are strong rhythmical sounds, such as
heavy hammer blows which dominate the continuous noises, as they force
on every individual consciousness a psychophysical rhythm of reaction
which may stand in strong contrast to that of a man's own work. From the
incessant inner struggle of the two rhythms, the one suggested by the labor,
the other by the external intrusion, quick exhaustion becomes unavoidable.
If it were our purpose to elaborate a real system of psychological
economics, we should have to proceed here to a careful study of the
influences of fatigue on the industrial achievement. We should have to
discuss the various kinds of fatigue and exhaustion, the conditions of
restoration, and the whole group of related problems of psychophysics. But

this is the one field which has been thoroughly ploughed over by science
and by practical life in the course of the last decades. No new suggestion
and no new hint of the importance of the problem is needed here. Our short
discussion was planned to be confined to those regions which have not been
worked up in systematic investigations and for which new devices seemed
desirable. Hence we do not reproduce here the rich material of facts which
the physiologists and psychophysicists have brought together in the last
half-century, the importance of which for industrial labor is perfectly
evident. Moreover, the practical applications and the insight into the social
needs have transformed the factories themselves into one big laboratory in
which the problem of fatigue has been studied by practical experiments.
The problem of the dependence of fatigue and output upon the length of the
working day has been tested in numberless places with the methods of
really exact research, as it was easy to find out how the achievement of the
laborers became quantitatively and qualitatively changed by the shortening
of the working hours.
When in one civilized country after another the exhaustingly long working
days of the industrial wage-earner were shortened more and more, the
theoretical discussions of the legislators and of the social reformers were
soon supplemented by careful statistical inquiries in the factories. It was
found that everywhere, even abstracting from all other cultural and social
interests, a moderate shortening of the working day did not involve loss, but
brought a direct gain. The German pioneer in the movement for the
shortening of the workingman's day, Ernst Abbé, the head of one of the
greatest German factories, wrote many years ago that the shortening from
nine to eight hours, that is, a cutting-down of more than 10 per cent, did not
involve a reduction of the day's product, but an increase, and that this
increase did not result from any supplementary efforts by which the
intensity of the work would be reinforced in an unhygienic way.[41] This
conviction of Abbé still seems to hold true after millions of experiments
over the whole globe. But the problem of fatigue has forced itself on the
consideration of the men of affairs from still another side. It has been well
known for a long while how intimate the relations are between fatigue and
industrial accidents. The statistics of the various countries and of the
various industries do not harmonize exactly, but a close connection between
the number of accidents and the hours of the day can be recognized

everywhere. Usually the greatest number of injuries occurs between ten and
eleven o'clock in the forenoon and between three and four o'clock in the
afternoon. The different distribution of the working hours, and of the pauses
for the meals, make the various statistical tables somewhat incomparable.
But it can be traced everywhere that in the first working hours in which
fatigue does not play any considerable rôle, the number of accidents is
small, and that this number sinks again after the long pauses. It is true that
the number also becomes somewhat smaller at the end of the forenoon and
of the afternoon period, but this seems to have its cause in the fact that with
growing fatigue and with the feeling that the end of the working period is
near, the rhythm of the activity becomes much slower, and with such slower
movements the danger of accidents is greatly reduced. In a similar way the
factories have had to give the fullest attention to the fatigue problem in its
relation to the distribution of pauses, and above all in its relation to the
advisable speed of the machines, the limits of which are set by the fatigue
of the workingmen, and still more of the working-women.
The legislatures, the labor unions, and the manufacturers have then had this
problem of fatigue constantly before their eyes.[42] On the other hand, the
psychologists and physiologists have continuously studied the fatigue and
restoration of the muscle system and of the central nervous system, and
have analyzed the facts with the subtlest methods. Yet, in spite of this, it
cannot be denied that a real mutual enrichment has so far hardly been in
question. On the contrary, the whole situation has again demonstrated the
old experience. The mere trying and trying again in practical life can never
reach the maximum effects which may be secured by systematic,
scientifically conducted efforts. On the other side the studies of the
theoretical scholars can never yield the highest values for civilization if the
problems which offer themselves in practical life are ignored. The theorists
have to prepare the ground, and in this preparatory work they must, indeed,
remain utterly regardless of any practical situations. But after that a second
stage must be reached at which on the foundation of this neutral research
special theoretical investigations are undertaken which originate from
practical conditions. As long as industrial managers have no contact with
the experiments of the laboratory and the experimentalists are shy of any
contact with the industrial reality, humanity will pass through social

suffering. The hope of mankind will be realized by the mutual fertilization
of knowing and doing.
The practical efforts of the factories have, indeed, not yet reached the point
at which the greatest possible achievement which can be reached without
over-fatigue may be secured. We called the abbreviation of the working day
an experimental scheme. The question of reducing the working hours is so
simple that no further special experiments are needed. But when we come
to the questions of the pauses at work, the speed of work and similar factors
related to fatigue, the situation is by far more complicated, and the often
capricious changes in the plant have very little in common with a
systematic experiment. Some well-known studies of the efficiency
engineers clearly demonstrate the possibility of such systematic efforts. The
best-known case is probably Taylor's study of the pig-iron handlers of the
Bethlehem Steel Company. He found that the gang of 75 men was loading
on the average about 12-1/2 tons per man per day. When he discussed with
various managers the question of what output would be the possible
maximum, they agreed that under premium work, piecework, or any of the
ordinary plans for stimulating the men, an output of 18 to 25 tons would be
the extreme possibility. Then he proceeded to a systematic study of the
fatigue in its relation to the burden and of the best possible relation between
working time and resting time. His first efforts to find formulas were
unsuccessful, because he calculated only the actual mechanical energy
exerted and found that some men were tired after exerting energy of 1/8 hp.,
while others seemed to be able to produce the energy of 1/2 hp. without
greater fatigue. But soon he discovered the mistake in his figures. He had
considered only the actual movements, and had neglected the period in
which the laborer was not moving and was not exerting energy, but in
which a weight was pulling his arms and demanding a corresponding
muscular effort. As soon as this muscular achievement was taken into
account, too, he found that for each particular weight a definite relation
exists between the time that a man is under a heavy load and the time of
rest. For the usual loads of 90 pounds, he found that a first-class laborer
must not work more than 43 per cent of time working day and must be
entirely without load 57 per cent. If the load becomes lighter, the relation is
changed. If the workman is handling a half pig weighing 46 pounds, he can

be under load 58 per cent of the day and only has to rest during 42 per cent.
[43]

As soon as these figures were experimentally secured, Taylor selected fit
men, and did not allow them to lift and to carry the loads as they pleased,
but every movement was exactly prescribed by foremen who timed exactly
the periods of work and rest. If he had simply promised his men a high
premium in case they should carry more than the usual 12 tons a day, they
would have burdened themselves as heavily as possible and would have
carried the load as quickly as possible, thus completely exhausting
themselves after three or four hours of labor. In spite of such senseless
exaggeration of effort in the first hours, the total output for the day would
have been relatively small. Now the foremen determined exactly when
every individual should lift and move the load and when he should sit
quietly. The result was that the men, without greater fatigue, were able to
carry 47-1/2 tons a day instead of the 12-1/2 tons. Their wages were
increased 60 per cent. Such a trivial illustration demonstrates very clearly
the extreme difference between an increase of the economic achievement by
scientific, experimental investigation and a mere enforcing of more work by
artificially whipping-up the mind with promises of extraordinary wages. Yet
even such rules as the scientific management engineers have formed, may
be elaborated to more lasting prescriptions as soon as the purely
psychological factors are brought more into the foreground and are
approached with the careful analysis of the experimental psychologist.
Such a systematic psychological inquiry is the more important for questions
of fatigue, as we know that the subjective feeling of displeasure in fatigue is
no reliable measure for the objective fatigue, that is, for the real reduction
of the ability for work. Daily experience teaches us how easily some people
overstep the limits of normal fatigue, and in extreme cases even come to a
nervous breakdown because nature did not protect them by the timely
appearance of strong fatigue feelings. On the other hand, we find many men
and still more women who feel tired even after a small exertion, because
they did not learn early to inhibit the superficial feelings of fatigue, or
because the sensations of fatigue have in fact a certain abnormal intensity in
their case. The question how far the psychophysical apparatus has really
been exhausted by a certain effort must be answered with the help of

objective research and not on the basis of mere subjective feelings. But such
objective measurements demand systematic experiments in the laboratory.
The experiments which really have been carried on in the laboratory as yet,
as far as they were not merely physiological, have on the whole been
confined to so-called mental labor, and were essentially devoted to
problems of school instruction or medical diagnosis. We have no doubt
excellent experiments which are devoted to the study of the individual
differences of exhaustion, fatigue, exhaustibility, ability to recover the lost
energy, ability to learn from practice, and so on, but they are still
exclusively adjusted to the needs of the school-teacher and of the nerve
specialist and would hardly be immediately useful to the manager of a
factory. We shall need a long careful series of investigations in order to
determine how far those manifold results from experiments with memory
work, thought work, writing work, and so on can be applied to the work
which the industrial laborer is expected to perform.

XVIII
PHYSICAL AND SOCIAL INFLUENCES ON THE
WORKING POWER

The increase and decrease of the ability to do good work depends of course
not only upon the direct fatigue from labor and the pauses for rest; a large
variety of other factors may lead to fluctuations which are economically
important. The various hours of the day, the seasons of the year, the
atmospheric conditions of weather and climate, may have such influence.
Some elements of this interplay have been cleared up in recent years. Just
as the experiments of pedagogical psychology have determined the exact
curve of efficiency during the period of an hour in school, so other
investigations have traced the typical curve of psychical efficiency
throughout the day and the year. Sociological and criminological statistics
concerning the fluctuations in the behavior of the masses, common-sense
experience of practical life, and finally, economic statistics concerning the
quantity and quality of industrial output in various parts of the day and of
the year, have supplemented one another. The systematic assistance of the
psychological laboratory, however, has been confined to the educational
aspect of the problem. Psychological experiments have determined how the
achievement of the youth in the schoolroom changes with the months of the
year and the hours of the day. It seems as if it could not be difficult to
secure here, too, a connection between exact experiment and economic
work. Much will have to be reduced to individual variations. The laboratory
has already confirmed the experience of daily life that there are morning
workers whose strongest psychophysical efficiency comes immediately
after the night's rest, while the day's work fatigues them more and more;
and that there are evening workers who in the morning still remain under
the after effects of the night's sleep, and who slowly become fresher and
fresher from the stimuli of the day. It would seem not impossible to
undertake a systematic selection of various individuals under this point of
view, as different industrial tasks demand a different distribution of
efficiency between morning and night.

Such a selection and adjustment may be economically still more important
with reference to the fluctuations during the course of the year. Economic
inquiries, for instance, have suggested that younger and older workingmen
who ordinarily show the same efficiency become unequal in their ability to
do good work in the spring months, and the economists have connected this
inequality with sexual conditions. But other factors as well, especially the
blood circulation of the organism and the resulting reactions to external
temperature, different gland activities, and so on, cause great personal
differences in efficiency during the various seasons of the year. Inasmuch as
we know many economic occupations in which the chief demand is made in
one or another period of the year, a systematic study of these individual
variations might be of high economic value, where large numbers are
involved, and might contribute much to the individual comfort of the
workers. But a constant relation to day and year also seems to exist
independent of all personal variations. When the sun stands at its meridian,
a minimum of efficiency is to be expected and a similar minimum is to be
found at the height of summer. Correspondingly we have an increase of the
total psychical efficiency in winter-time. During the spring-time the
behavior seems, as far as the investigations go, to be different in the
intellectual and in the psychomotor activities. It is claimed that the
efficiency of the intellectual functions decreases as the winter recedes, but
that the efficiency of psychomotor impulses increases.[44]
The influences of the daily temperature, of the weather and of the seasons
may be classed among the physical conditions of efficiency. We may group
with them the effects of nourishment, of stimulants, of sleep, and so on. As
far as the relations between these external factors and purely bodily muscle
work are involved, the interests of the psychologists are not engaged. But it
is evident that every one of these relations also has its psychological aspect,
and that a really scientific psychotechnical treatment of these problems can
become possible only through the agency of psychological experiments. We
have excellent experimental investigations concerning the influence of the
loss of sleep on intellectual labor and on simple psychomotor activities. But
it would be rather arbitrary to deduce from the results of those researches
anything as to the effect of reduction of sleep on special economic
occupations. Yet such knowledge would be of high importance. We have in
the literature concerned with accidents in transportation numerous popular

discussions about the destructive influence of loss of sleep on the attention
of the locomotive engineer or of the helmsman or of the chauffeur, but an
analysis of the particular psychophysical processes does not as yet exist and
can be expected only from systematic experiments. Nor has the influence of
hunger on psychotechnical activities been studied in a satisfactory way.
A number of psychological investigations have been devoted to the study of
the influence of alcohol on various psychical functions and in this field at
least the strictly economic problem of industrial labor has sometimes been
touched. We have the much quoted and much misinterpreted experiments
[45]
which were carried on in Germany with typesetters. The workmen
received definite quantities of heavy wine at a particular point in the work
and the number of letters which they were able to set during the following
quarter-hours were measured and compared with their normal achievement
in fifteen minutes. The reduction of efficiency amounted on the average to
15 per cent of the output. It may be mentioned that the loss referred only to
the quantity of the work and not at all to the quality. The well-known
subjective illusory feeling of the subjects was not lacking; they themselves
believed that the wine had reinforced their working power. As soon as such
experiments are put into the service of economic life, they will have to be
carried on with much more accurate adjustment to the special conditions,
with subtler gradation of the stimuli, and especially with careful study of
individual factors. But at first it seems more in the interest of the practical
task that the extremely complicated problem of the influence of alcohol be
followed up by purely theoretical research in the laboratory in order that the
effect may be resolved into its various components. We must first find the
exact facts concerning the influence of alcohol on elementary processes of
mental life, such as perception, attention, memory, and so on, and this will
slowly prepare the way for the complete economic experiment.
At present the greatest significance for the economic field may be attached
to those alcohol experiments which dealt with the apprehension of the outer
world. They proved a reduction in the ability to grasp the impressions and a
narrowing of the span of consciousness. The indubitable decrease of certain
memory powers, of the acuity in measuring distance, of the time estimation,
and similar psychical disturbances after alcohol, must evidently be of high
importance for industry and transportation, while the well-known increase
of the purely sensory sensibility, especially of the visual acuity after small

closes of alcohol, hardly plays an important rôle in practical life. The best-
known and experimentally most studied effect of alcohol, the increase of
motor excitability, also evidently has its importance for industrial
achievements. It cannot be denied that this facility of the motor impulses
after small doses of alcohol is not a real gain, which might be utilized
economically, but is ultimately an injury to the apparatus, even if we
abstract from the retardation of the reaction which comes as an after-effect.
The alcoholic facilitation, after all, reduces the certainty and the perfection
of the reaction and creates conditions under which wrong, and this in
economic life means often dangerous, motor responses arise. The energy of
the motor discharge suffers throughout from the alcohol.
Some experiments which were recently carried on with reference to the
influence of alcohol on the power of will seem to have especial significance
for the field of economic activity. The method applied in the experiment
was the artificial creation of an exactly measurable resistance to the will-
impulse directed toward a purpose. The experiment had to determine what
power of resistance could be overcome by the will and how far this energy
changes under the influence of alcohol. For this end combinations of
meaningless syllables were learned and repeated until they formed a close
connection in memory. If one syllable was given, the mechanical tendency
of the mind was to reproduce the next syllable in the memorized series. The
will-intention was then directed toward breaking this memory type. For
instance, it was demanded, when a syllable was called, that the subject
should not answer with the next following syllable, but with a rhyming
syllable. This will-impulse easily succeeded when the syllables to be
learned had been repeated only a few times, while after a very frequent
repetition the memory connection offered a resistance which the simple
will-intention could not break. The syllable which followed in the series
rushed to the mind before the intention to seek a rhyming syllable could be
realized. The number of repetitions thus became a measure for the power of
the will. After carrying out these experiments at first under normal
conditions, they were repeated while the subjects were under the influence
of exactly graded doses of alcohol.[46] From such simple tasks the
experiment was turned to more and more complex ones of similar structure.
All together they showed clearly that the alcohol did not influence the
ability to make the will effective and that the actual decrease of

achievement results from a decrease in the ability to grasp the material. As
long as the alcohol doses are small, this feeling of decreased ability stirs up
a reinforcement in the tension of the will-impulse. This may go to such an
extent that the increased will-effort not only compensates for the reduced
understanding, but even over-compensates for it, producing an
improvement in the mental work. But as soon as the alcohol doses amount
to about 100 cubic centimeters, the increased tension of the will is no longer
sufficient to balance the paralyzing effect in the understanding. Yet it must
not be overlooked that in all these experiments only isolated will acts were
in question which were separated from one another by pauses of rest.
Evidently, however, the technical laborer is more often in a situation in
which not isolated impulses, but a continuous tension of the will is
demanded. How far such an uninterrupted will-function is affected by
alcohol has not as yet been studied with the exact means of the experiment.
To be sure an obvious suggestion would be that the whole problem, as far as
economics, and especially industry, are concerned, might be solved in a
simpler way than by the performance of special psychological experiments,
namely, by the complete elimination of alcohol itself from the life of the
wage-earner. The laboratory experiment which seems to demonstrate a
reduction of objective achievement in the case of every important mental
function merely supplements in exact language the appalling results
indicated by criminal statistics, disease statistics, and inheritance statistics.
It seems as if the time had come when scientists could not with a good
conscience suggest any other remedy than the merciless suppression of
alcohol. Indeed, there can be no doubt that alcohol is one of the worst
enemies of civilized life, and it is therefore almost with regret that the
scientist must acknowledge that all the psychological investigations, which
have so often been misused in the partisan writings of prohibitionists, are
not a sufficient basis to justify the demand for complete abstinence.
First, newer experiments make it very clear that many of the so-called
effects of alcohol which the experiment has demonstrated are produced or
at least heightened by influences of suggestion. Experiments which have
been carried on in England for the study of that point show clearly that
certain psychical disturbances which seem to result from small doses of
alcohol fail to appear as soon as the subject does not know that he has taken
alcohol. For that purpose it was necessary to eliminate the odor, and this

was accomplished by introducing the beverages into the organism by a
stomach pump. When by this method sometimes water and sometimes
diluted alcohol was given without the knowledge of the subject, the usual
effects of small doses of alcohol did not arise. But another point is far more
important. We may take it for granted that alcohol reduces the ability for
achievement as soon as such very small doses are exceeded. But from the
standpoint of economic life we have no right to consider a reduction of the
psychical ability to produce work as identical with a decrease in the
economic value of the personality. Such a view would be right if the
influence necessarily set in at the beginning of the working period. But if,
for instance, a moderate quantity of beer is introduced into the organism
after the closing of the working day, it would certainly produce an artificial
reduction of the psychical ability, and yet this decrease of psychophysical
activity might be advantageous to the total economic achievement of the
workingman in the course of the week or the year. To be sure the glass of
beer in the evening paralyzes certain inhibitory centres of the brain and
therefore puts the mind out of gear, but such a way of expressing it may
easily be misleading, as it suggests too much that a real injury is done.
From the point of view of scientific psychology, we must acknowledge that
such a paralyzing effect in certain parts of the psychophysical system sets in
with every act of attention and reaches its climax in sleep, which surely
does no harm to the mind. It may be thoroughly advantageous for the total
work of the normal, healthy, average workingman if the after effects of the
motor excitement of the day are eliminated by a mild, short alcoholic
poisoning in the evening. It may produce that narrowing and dulling of
consciousness which extinguishes the cares and sorrows of the day and
secures the night's sleep, and through it increased efficiency the next
morning. Systematic experiments with exact relation to the various
technical demands must slowly bring real insight into this complex
situation. The usual hasty generalization from a few experiments with
alcohol for partisan interests is surely not justified in the present
unsatisfactory state of knowledge.[47]
Perhaps we know still less of the influences which coffee, tea, tobacco,
sweets, and so on exert on the life of the industrial worker. It will be wise to
resolve these stimuli in daily use into their elements and to study the effects
of each element in isolated form. To know, for instance, the effects of

caffein on the psychophysical activities does not mean to know the effects
of tea or coffee, which contain a variety of other substances besides the
caffein, substances which may be supposed to modify the effect of the
caffein. Yet the first step must in this case be the study of the effects of the
isolated caffein, before the total influences of the familiar beverages can be
followed up. An excellent investigation of this caffein effect on various
psychological and psychomotor functions has recently been completed.[48]
When the caffein effect on tapping movements was studied, it was found
that it works as a stimulation, sometimes preceded by a slight initial
retardation. It persists from one to two hours after doses of from one to
three grains and as long as four hours after doses of six grains. The
steadiness test showed a slight nervousness after several hours after doses
of from one to four grains. After six grains there is pronounced
unsteadiness. A complex test in coördination indicated that the effect of
small, amounts of caffein is a stimulation and that of large amounts a
retardation. Correspondingly the speed of performance in typewriting is
heightened by small doses of caffein and retarded by larger doses. In both
cases the quality of the performance as measured by the number of errors is
superior to the normal result.
The influences of the physiological stimulants have many points of contact
with the effects of social entertainment, the significance of which for the
economic life is still rather unknown in any exact detail. Many factories in
which the labor is noiseless, as in the making of cigars, have introduced
gramophone music or reading aloud, and it is easy to understand
theoretically that a certain animating effect results, which stimulates the
whole psychophysical activity But only the experiment would be able to
decide how this stimulation is related, for instance, to the distraction of
attention, which is necessarily involved, or how it influences various
periods of the work and various types of work, how far it is true that the
musical key exerts an exciting or relaxing influence, what intensity and
what local position, what rhythm and what duration of such æsthetic
stimuli, would bring the best possible economic results. We all have read of
the favorable effects which were secured in a factory when a cat was
brought into every working-room in which women laborers were engaged
in especially fatiguing work. The cat became a living toy for the employees,
which stimulated their social consciousness. In not a few plants the

reinforced achievement is explained by the social means of entertainment,
which have been introduced under the pressure of modern philanthropic
ideas. The lounging-rooms with the newspapers and periodicals the
clubrooms with libraries, the excursions and dances and patriotic festivities,
fill up the reservoir of psychophysical energies. As a matter of course all the
social movements which enhance the consciousness of solidarity among the
laborers and the feeling of security as to their future development in their
career have a similar effect of reinforcing the normal psychical
achievement.
As the strongest factor, finally, the direct material interest must be added to
these conditions. The literature of political economy is full of discussions of
the effect of increase of wages, of the payment of bonuses and premiums, of
piece-wages, of promised pensions, and, as far as Europe is concerned, of
state insurance. In short, the whole individual financial situation in its
relation to the psychophysical achievement of the wage-earner is a favorite
topic of economic inquiry. We cannot participate here in these inexhaustible
discussions, because all these questions are to-day still so endlessly far from
the field of psychological experiments. Nevertheless we ought not to forget
the experience through which general experimental psychology has gone in
the last few decades. When the first experiments were undertaken in order
to deal systematically with the mental life, the friends of this new science
and its opponents agreed, on the whole, in the belief that certainly only the
most elementary phenomena of consciousness, the sensations and the
reactions of impulses, would be accessible to the new method. The
opponents naturally compared this modest field with the great problems of
the mental totality, and therefore ridiculed the new narrow task as
unimportant. The friends, on the other hand, were eager to follow the fresh
path, because they were content to gain real exactitude by the experiment at
least in these simplest questions. Yet as soon as the new independent
workshops were established for the young science, it was discovered that
the method was able to open fields in which no one had anticipated its
usefulness. The experiments turned to the problems of attention, of
memory, of imagination, of feeling, of judgment, of character, of æsthetic
experience and so on. It is not improbable that the method of the economic
psychological experiment may also quickly lead beyond the more
elementary problems, as soon as it is systematically applied, and then it,

too, may conquer regions of inquiry in which to-day no exact calculation of
the psychological factors seems possible.
If such an advance is to be a steady one, the economic psychologist will
emancipate himself from the chance question of what problems are at this
moment important for commerce and industry and will proceed
systematically step by step from those results which the psychological
laboratory has yielded under the non-economic points of view. Many
previous psychological or psychophysical inquiries almost touch the
problems of industrial achievement. For instance, the experiments on
imitation, which psychophysicists have carried on in purely theoretical or
pedagogical interests, move parallel to industrial experiences. It is well
known that the pacemaker plays his rôle not only in the field of sport but
also in the factory. The rhythm of one laborer gains controlling importance
for the others, who instinctively imitate him. Some plants even have
automatically working machines with the special intention that the sharp
rhythm of these lifeless forerunners shall produce an involuntary imitation
in the psychophysical system. In a similar way many laboratory
investigations on suggestion and suggestibility point to such economic
processes, and it seems to me that especially the studies on the influence of
the ideas of purpose which are being undertaken nowadays in many
psychological laboratories may easily be connected with the problems of
economic life. We know how the consciousness of the task to be performed
has an organizing influence on the system of those psychophysical acts
which lead to the goal. The experiment has shown under which conditions
this effect can be reinforced and under which reduced. Pedagogical
experiments have also shown exactly what influence belongs to the
consciousness of the approach to the end of work; the feeling of the
nearness of the close heightens the achievement, even of the fatigued
subject. It would not be difficult to connect psychophysical experiments of
this kind with the problems of the task and bonus system, which is
nowadays so much discussed in industrial life. The practical successes seem
to prove that the individual can do more with equal effort if he does not
stand before an unlimited mass of work of which he has to do as much as
possible in the course of the day, but if he is before a definitely determined,
limited task with the demand that he complete it in an exactly calculated
time. Scientific management has made far-reaching use of this principle, but

whether constant results for the various industries can be hoped for from
such methods must again be ascertained by the psychological experiment.
These hopes surely will not weaken the interest of the psychologist for
those many psychological methods which lie outside of the experimental
research. A sociologist, who himself had been a laborer in his earlier life,
undertook in Germany last year an inquiry into the psychological status of
the laborers' achievement by the questionnaire method.[49] He sent to 8000
workingmen in the mining industries, textile industries, and metal
industries, blanks containing 26 questions, and received more than 5000
replies. The questions referred to the pleasure and interest in the work, to
preferences, to fatigue, to the thoughts during the work, to the means of
recreation, to the attitude toward the wages, to the emotional situation, and
so on. The 5000 answers allowed manifold classifications. The various
mental types of men could be examined, the influence of the machine, the
attitude toward monotony, the changes of pleasure and interest in the work
with the age of the laborer, the time at which fatigue becomes noticeable,
and so on. Many psychological elements of industrial life thus come to a
sharp focus and the strong individual differences could not be brought out
in a more characteristic way. Yet, all taken together, even such a careful
investigation on a psychostatistical basis strongly suggests that a few
careful experimental investigations could lead further than such a heaping-
up of material gathered from men who are untrained in self-observation and
in accurate reports, and above all who are accessible to any kind of
suggestion and preconceived idea. The experimental method is certainly not
the only one which can contribute to reforms in industrial life and the
reinforcement of industrial efficiency, but all signs indicate that the future
will find it the most productive and most reliable.

PART III
THE BEST POSSIBLE EFFECT

XIX
THE SATISFACTION OF ECONOMIC DEMANDS

Every economic function comes in contact with the mental life of man, first
from the fact that the work is produced by the psyche of personalities. This
gave us the material for the first two parts of our discussion. We asked what
mind is best fitted for the particular kind of work, and how the mind can be
led to the best output of work. But it is evident that the real meaning of the
economic process expresses itself in an entirely different contact between
work and mind. The economic activity is separated from all other processes
in the world, not by the fact that it involves labor and achievement by
personalities, but by the fact that this labor satisfies a certain group of
human desires which we acknowledge as economic. The mere performance
of labor, with all the psychical traits of attention and fatigue and will-
impulses and personal qualities, does not in itself constitute anything of
economic value. For instance, the sportsman who climbs a glacier also
performs such a fatiguing activity which demands the greatest effort of
attention and will; and yet the psychotechnics of sport do not belong in
economic psychology, because this mountain climbing does not satisfy
economic desires. The ultimate characteristic which designates an activity
as economic is accordingly a certain effect on human souls. The whole
whirl of the economic world is ultimately controlled by the purpose of
satisfying certain psychical desires. Hence this psychical effect is still more
fundamental for the economic process than its psychical origin in the
mental conditions of the worker. The task of psychotechnics is accordingly
to determine by exact psychological experiments how this mental effect, the
satisfaction of economic desires, can be secured in the quickest, in the
easiest, in the safest, in the most enduring, and in the most satisfactory way.
But we must not deceive ourselves as to the humiliating truth that so far not
the slightest effort has been made toward the answering of this central
scientific question. If the inquiry into the psychical effects were really to be
confined to this problem of the ultimate satisfaction of economic desires,
scientific psychology could not contribute any results and could not offer

anything but hopes and wishes for the future. At the first glance it might
appear as if just here a large amount of literature exists; moreover, a
literature rich in excellent investigations and ample empirical material. On
the one side the political economists, with their theories of economic value
and their investigations concerning the conditions of prices and the
development of luxury, the calculation of economic values from pleasure
and displeasure and many similar studies, have connected the economic
processes with mental life; on the other side the philosophers, with their
theories of value, have not confined themselves to the ethical and æsthetic
motives, but have gone deeply into the economic life too. While such
studies of the economists and of the philosophers are chiefly meant to serve
theoretical understanding, it might seem easy to deduce from them technical
practical prescriptions as well. If we know that under particular conditions
certain demands will be satisfied, we draw the conclusion that we must
realize those conditions whenever such demands are to be satisfied. The
theoretical views of the economists and of the philosophers of value might
thus be directly translated into psychotechnical advice.
As soon as we look deeper into the situation, we must recognize that this
surface impression is entirely misleading. Certainly whenever the
philosophers or political economists discuss the problems of value and of
the satisfaction of human demands, they are using psychological terms, but
the whole meaning which they attach to these terms, feeling, emotion, will,
desire, pleasure, displeasure, joy, and pain, is essentially different from that
which controls the causal explanations of scientific psychology. We cannot
enter into the real fundamental questions here, which are too often
carelessly ignored even in scientific quarters. Too often psychology is
treated, even by psychologists, as if it covered every possible systematic
treatment of inner experience, and correspondingly outsiders like the
economists fancy that they are on psychological ground and are handling
psychological conceptions as soon as they make any statements concerning
the inner life. But if we examine the real purposes and presuppositions of
the various sciences, we must recognize that the human experience can be
looked on from two entirely different points of view. Only from one of the
two does it present itself as psychological material and as a fit object for
psychological study. From the other point of view, which is no less valuable
and no less important for the understanding of our inner life, human

experience offers itself as a reality with which psychology as such has
nothing to do, even though it may be difficult to eliminate the usual
psychological words.
The psychologist considers human experience as a series of objects for
consciousness. All the perceptions and memory ideas and imaginative ideas
and feelings and emotions, are taken by him as mental objects of which
consciousness becomes aware, and his task is to describe and to explain
them and to find the laws for their succession. He studies them as a
naturalist studies the chemical elements or the stars. It makes no difference
whether his explanation leads him to connect these mental contents with
brain processes as one theory proposes, or with subconscious processes as
another theory suggests. The entirely different aspect of inner life is the one
which is most natural in our ordinary intercourse. Whenever we give an
account of our inner life or are interested in the experience of our friends,
we do not consider how their mental experiences as such objective contents
of consciousness are to be described and explained, but we take them as
inner actions and attitudes toward the world, and our aim is not to describe
and to explain them but to interpret and to understand them. We do not seek
their elements but their meaning, we do not seek their causes and effects but
their inner relations and their inner purposes. In short, we do not take them
at all as objects but as functions of the subject, and our dealing with them
has no similarity to the method of the naturalist.
This method of practical life in which we seek to express and to understand
a meaning, and relate every will-act to its aim, is not confined to the mere
popular aspect; it can lead to very systematic scholarly treatment. It is
exactly the treatment which is fundamental in the case of all history, for
example, or of law, or of logic. That is, the historian makes us understand
the meaning of a personality of the past and is really interested in past
events only as far as human needs are to be interpreted. It would be pseudo-
psychology, if we called such an account in the truly historical spirit a
psychological description and explanation. The student of law interprets the
meaning of the will of the legislator; he does not deal with the idea of the
law as a psychological content. And the logician has nothing to do with the
idea as a conscious object in the mind; he asks as to the inner relations of it
and as to the conclusions from the premises. In short, wherever historical
interpretations or logical deductions are needed, we move on in the sphere

of human life as it presents itself from the standpoint of immediate true
experience without artificially moulding it into the conceptions of
psychology. On the other hand, as soon as the psychological method is
applied, this immediate life meaning of human experience is abandoned,
and instead of it is gained the possibility of considering the whole
experience as a system of causes and effects. Mental life is then no longer
what it is to us in our daily intercourse, because it is reconstructed for the
purposes of this special treatment, just as the water which we drink is no
longer our beverage if we consider it under the point of view of chemistry
as a combination of hydrogen and oxygen. Hence we have not two
statements one of which is true and the other ultimately untrue; on the
contrary, both are true. We have a perfect right to give the value of truth to
our experience with water as a refreshing drink, and also to the formula of
the chemist. With a still better right we may claim that both kinds of mental
experience are equally true. Hence not a word of objection is raised against
the discussions of the historians and the philosophers, if we insist that their
so-called psychology stands outside of the really descriptive and
explanatory account of mental life, and is therefore not psychology in the
technical sense of the word.
It is this historical attitude which controls all the studies of the political
economists. They speak of the will-acts of the individuals and of their
demands and desires and satisfactions, but they do not describe and explain
them; they want to interpret and understand them. They may analyze the
motives of the laborer or of the manufacturer, but those motives and
impulses interest them not as contents of consciousness, but only as acts
which are directed toward a goal. The aim toward which these point by their
meaning, and not the elements from which they are made up or their causes
and effects, is the substance of such economic studies. For such a subjective
account of the meaning of actions the only problem is, indeed, the correct
understanding and interpretation, and the consistent psychologist who
knows that it is not his task to interpret but to explain has no right to raise
any questions here. It is, therefore, only a confusing disturbance, if a really
psychological, causal explanation is mixed into the interpretation of such a
system of will-acts and purposes. It is true we find this confusion in many
modern works on economics. Economists know that a scientific explanatory
study of the human mind exists, and they have a vague feeling that they

have no right to ignore this real psychology, instead of recognizing that the
psychology really has nothing to do with their particular problem. The
result is that they constantly try to discuss the impulses and instincts, the
hunger and thirst and sexual desire, and the higher demands for fighting and
playing and acquiring, for seeking power and social influence, as a
psychologist would discuss them, referring them to biological and
physiological conditions and explaining them causally. Yet as soon as they
come to their real problems and enter into the interpretation and meaning of
these economic energies, they naturally slide back into the historical,
economic point of view and discuss the economic relations of men without
any reference to their psychologizing preambles. The application of the
psychological, scientific method to the true economic experience is
therefore not secured at all in this way. The demands and volitions which
they disentangle are not the ones which the psychophysiologist studies,
because they are left in their immediate form of life reality. They are
accordingly inaccessible to the point of view of experimental psychology,
and nothing can be expected from such interpretative discussions of the
economists for the psychotechnics at which the psychologist is aiming.
Even where the political economists deal with the problems of value in
exact language, nothing is gained for the kind of insight for which the
psychologist hopes, and the psychologists must therefore go on with their
own methods, if they are ever to reach a causal understanding of the means
by which a satisfaction of the economic demands may be effected.
So far the psychologists have not even started to examine these economic
feelings, demands, and satisfactions with the means of laboratory
psychology. Hence no one can say beforehand how it ought to be done and
how to gain access to the important problems, inasmuch as the right
formulation of the problem and the selection of the right method would here
as everywhere be more than half of the solution. It must be left to the
development of science for the right starting-point and the right methods to
be discovered. Sometimes, to be sure, the experiment has at least
approached this group of economic questions. For instance, the
investigations of the so-called psychophysical law have often been brought
into contact with the experiences of ownership and acquirement. The law,
well known to every student of psychology, is that the differences of
intensity in two pairs of sensations are felt as equal, when the two pairs of

stimuli are standing in the same relation. The difference between the
intensities of the light sensations from 10 candles and 11 candles is equal to
that from 50 candles and 55 candles, from 100 candles and 110, from 500
candles and 550: that is, the difference of one additional candle between 10
and 11 appears just as great as the difference of 50 candles between 500 and
550. The psychologists have claimed that in a corresponding way the same
feeling of difference arises when the amounts of possessions stand in the
same relation. That is, the man who owns $100 feels the gain or loss of $1
as much as one who owns $100,000 feels the gain or loss of $1000. Not the
absolute amount of the difference, but the relative value of the increase or
decrease is the decisive influence on the psychological effect. Some
experimental investigations concerning feelings have also come near to the
economic boundaries. The study of the contrast feelings and of the relativity
of feelings, for instance, has points of contact with the economic problem of
how far economic progress, with its stirring up and satisfying of continually
new demands, really adds to the quantity of human enjoyment. In other
words, how far are those sociologists right who are convinced that by the
technical complexity of modern life, with all its comforts and
mechanizations, the level of individual life is raised, but that the oscillations
about this average level remain the same and produce the same amount of
pleasure and pain? The technical advance would therefore bring no increase
of human pleasure.
We might also put into this class the meagre experimental investigations
concerning the mutual influence of feelings. When sound, light, and touch
impressions, each of which, isolated, produces a feeling of a certain degree,
are combined with one another, the experiment can show very characteristic
changes in the intensity of pleasure and displeasure. From such routine
experiments of the laboratory it might not be difficult to come to more
complex experiments on the mutual relations of feeling values and
especially of the combinations of pleasure with displeasure. This would
lead to an insight into the processes which are involved in the fixing of
prices, as they are always dependent upon the pleasure in the acquisition
and the displeasure in the outlay. The exact psychology of the future may
thus very well determine the conditions under which the best effects for the
satisfaction of economic demands may be secured, but our present-day
science is still far from such an achievement: and it seems hardly justifiable

to propose methods to-day, as it would be like drawing a map with detailed
paths for a primeval forest which is still inaccessible.

XX
EXPERIMENTS ON THE EFFECTS OF
ADVERTISEMENTS

We have said that the time has not yet come for discussing from the
standpoint of experimental psychology the means to secure the ultimate
effects of economic life, namely, the satisfaction of economic demands. If
this were the only effect which had economic significance, this whole last
part of our little book would have to remain a blank, as we wanted to deal
here with the securing of the best effects after having studied the securing
of the best man and of the best work. Yet these ultimate ends are certainly
not the only mental effects which become important in the course of
economic processes. In order to reach that final end of the economic
movement, often an unlimited number of part processes distributed over
space and time must coöperate. The satisfaction of our thirst in a tea-room
may be a trivial illustration of such a final effect, but it is clear that in order
to produce this ultimate mental effect of satisfying the thirst, thousands of
economic processes must have preceded. To bring the tea and the sugar and
the lemon to the table, the porcelain cup and the silver spoon, wage-earners,
manufacturers and laborers, exporters, importers, storekeepers, salesmen,
and customers had to coöperate. Among such part processes which serve
the economic achievement are always many which succeed only if they
produce characteristic effects in human minds. The propaganda which the
storekeeper makes, for instance, his display and his posters, serve the
economic interplay by psychical effects without themselves satisfying any
ultimate economic demand. They must attract the passer-by or impress the
reader or stimulate his impulse to buy, and through all this they reach an
end which is in itself not final, as no human desire to read advertisements
exists. When the salesman influences the customer to buy something which
may later help to satisfy a real economic demand, the art of his suggestive
words secures a mental effect which again is in itself not ultimate. If the
manufacturer influences his employees to work with more attention or with
greater industry, or if the community stirs up the desire for luxury or the

tendency to saving, we have mental effects which are of economic
importance without being really ultimate economic effects.
As far as these effects are necessary and justified stages leading to the
ultimate satisfaction of economic demands, it certainly is the duty of
applied psychology to bring psychological experience and exact methods
into their service. We emphasize the necessary and justified character of
these steps, as it is evident that psychological methods may be made use of
also by those who aim toward mental effects which are unjustified and
which are not necessary for the real satisfaction of valuable demands.
Psychological laws can also be helpful in fraudulent undertakings or in
advertisements for unfair competition. The psychotechnical scientist cannot
be blamed if the results of his experiments are misused for immoral
purposes, just as the chemist is not responsible if chemical knowledge is
applied to the construction of anarchistic bombs. But while psychology, as
we have emphasized before, cannot from its own point of view determine
the value of the end, the psychologist as a human being is certainly willing
to coöperate only where the soundness and correctness of the ends are
evident from the point of view of social welfare.
In order to demonstrate the principle of this kind of psychotechnical help
with fuller detail, at least by one illustration, I may discuss the case of the
advertisements, the more as this problem has already been taken up in a
somewhat systematic way by the psychological laboratories. We have a
number of careful experimental investigations referring to the memory-
value, the attention-value, the suggestion-value, and other mental effects of
the printed business advertisements. Of course this group of experimental
investigations at once suggests an objection which we cannot ignore. A
business advertisement, as it appears in the newspapers, is such an
extremely trivial thing and so completely devoted to the egotistical desire
for profit that it seems undignified for the scientist to spend his time on
such nothings and to shoot sparrows with his laboratory cannon-balls. But
on the one side nothing can be unworthy of thorough study from a strictly
theoretical point of view. The dirtiest chemical substance may become of
greatest importance for chemistry, and the ugliest insect for zoölogy. On the
other side, if the practical point of view of the applied sciences is taken, the
importance of the inquiry may stand in direct relation to the intensity of the
human demand which is to be satisfied by the new knowledge. Present-day

society is so organized that the economic advertisement surely serves a
need, and its intensity is expressed by the well-known fact that in every
year billions are paid for advertising. Measured by the amount of
expenditure, advertising has become one of the largest and economically
most important human industries. It is, then, not astonishing that scientists
consider it worth while to examine the exact foundations of this industry,
but it is surprising that this industry could reach such an enormous
development without being guided by the spirit of scientific exactitude
which appears a matter of course in every other large business. As it is a
function of science to study the physics of incandescent lamps or gas
motors so as to bring the economically most satisfactory devices into the
service of the community, it cannot be less important from the standpoint of
national economics to study scientifically the efficiency of the
advertisements in order that the national means may in this industry, too,
secure the greatest possible effects. It is only a secondary point that
experiments of this kind are of high interest to the theoretical scientist as
well. For us the advertisement is simply an instrument constructed to satisfy
certain human demands by its effects on the mind. It is a question for
psychology to determine the conditions under which this instrument may be
best adapted to its purpose.
The mental effect of a well-adapted advertisement is manifold. It appeals to
the memory. Whatever we read at the street corner, or in the pages of the
newspaper or magazine, is not printed with the idea that we shall
immediately turn to the store, but first of all with the expectation that we
keep the content of the advertisement in our memory for a later purchase. It
will therefore be the more valuable the more vividly it forces itself on the
memory. But if practical books about the art of advertising usually
presuppose that this influence on the memory will be proportionate to the
effect on the attention, the psychologist cannot fully agree. The
advertisement may attract the attention of the reader strongly and yet by its
whole structure may be unfit to force on the memory its characteristic
content, especially the name of the firm and of the article. The pure
memory-value is especially important, as according to a well-known
psychological law the pleasure in mere recognition readily attaches itself to
the recognized object. The customer who has the choice among various
makes and brands in the store may not have any idea how far one is

superior to another, but the mere fact that one among them bears a name
which has repeatedly approached his consciousness before through
advertisements is sufficient to arouse a certain warm feeling of
acquaintance, and by a transposition of feeling this pleasurable tone
accentuates the attractiveness of that make and leads to its selection. This
indirect help through the memory-value is economically no less important
than the direct service.
In order to produce a strong effect on memory the advertisement must be
easily apprehensible. Psychological laboratory experiments with exact time-
measurement of the grasping of various advertisements of the same size for
the same article, but in different formulations, demonstrated clearly how
much easier or harder the apprehension became through relatively small
changes. No mistake in the construction of the advertisement causes so
much waste as a grouping which makes the quick apperception difficult.
The color, the type, the choice of words, every element, allows an
experimental analysis, especially by means of time-measurement. If we
determine in thousandths of a second the time needed to recognize the
characteristic content of an advertisement, we may discriminate differences
which would escape the naïve judgment, and yet which in practical life are
of considerable consequence, as the effect of a deficiency is multiplied by
the number of readers.
We must insist on the further demand that the advertisement make a vivid
impression, so that it may influence the memory through its vividness. Size
is naturally the most frequent condition for the increase of vividness, but
only the relative size is decisive. The experiment shows that the full-page
advertisement in a folio magazine does not influence the memory more than
the full page in a quarto magazine, if the reader is for the time adjusted to
the particular size. No less important than the size is the originality and the
unusual form, the vivid color, the skillful use of empty spaces, the
associative elements, the appeal to humor or to curiosity, to sympathy or to
antipathy. Every emotion can help to impress the content of the
advertisement on the involuntary memory. Unusual announcements
concerning the prices or similar factors move in the same direction.
Together with the question of the apprehension and the vividness of the
impression, we must acknowledge the frequency of repetition as an equally

important factor. We know from daily life how an indifferent advertisement
can force itself on our mind, if it appears daily in the same place in the
newspaper or is visible on every street corner. But the psychologically
decisive factor here is not the fact of the mere repetition of the impression,
but rather the stimulation of the attention which results from the repetition.
If we remained simply passive and received the impression the second and
third and fourth time with the same indifference with which we noticed it
the first time, the mere summation would not be sufficient for a strong
effect. But the second impression makes the consciousness of recognition,
thus exciting the attention, and through it we now turn actively to the
repeated impression which forces itself on our memory with increased
vividness on account of this active personal reaction.
We may consider how such factors can be tested by the psychotechnical
experiment. Scott, for instance, studied the direct influence of the relative
size of the advertisements.[50] He constructed a book of a hundred pages
from advertisements which had been cut from various magazines and which
referred to many different articles. Fifty persons who did not know anything
about the purpose of the experiment had to glance over the pages of the
book as they would look though the advertising parts of a monthly. The
time which they used for it was about ten minutes. As soon as they had
gone through the hundred pages, they were asked to write down what they
remembered. The result from this method was that the 50 persons
mentioned on an average every full-page advertisement 6-1/2 times, every
half-page less than 3 times, every fourth-page a little more than 1 time, and
the still smaller advertisements only about 1/7 time. This series of
experiments suggested accordingly that the memory value of a fourth-page
advertisement is much smaller than one fourth of the memory-value of a
full-page advertisement, and that of an eighth-page again much smaller than
one half of the psychical value of a fourth-page. The customer who pays for
one eighth of a page receives not the eighth part, but hardly the twentieth
part of the psychical influence which is produced by a full page.
These experiments, which were carried on in various forms, demanded as a
natural supplement a study of the effects of repetition in relation to size.
This was the object of a series of tests which I carried on recently in the
Harvard laboratory. I constructed the following material: 60 sheets of
Bristol board in folio size were covered with advertisements which were cut

from magazines the size of the "Saturday Evening Post" and the "Ladies'
Home Journal." We used advertisements ranging from full-page to twelfth-
page in size. Every one of the 6 full-page advertisements which we used
occurred only once, each of the 12 half-page advertisements was given 2
times, each of the fourth-page size, 4 times, each of the eighth-page size, 8
times, and each of the twelfth-page size, 12 times. The repetitions were cut
from 12 copies of the magazine number. The same advertisement never
occurred on the same page; every page, unless it was covered by a full-page
advertisement, offered a combination of various announcements. It is
evident that by this arrangement every single advertisement occupied the
same space, as the 8 times repeated eighth-page advertisement filled a full
page too. Thus no one of the 60 announcements which we used was
spatially favored above another.
Thirty persons took part in the experiment. Each one had to devote himself
to the 60 pages in such a way that every page was looked at for exactly 20
seconds. Between each two pages was a pause of 3 seconds, sufficient to
allow one sheet to be laid aside and the next to be grasped. In 23 minutes
the whole series had been gone through, and immediately after that every
one had to write down what he remembered, both the names of the firms
and the article announced. In the cases where only the name or only the
article was correctly remembered, the result counted 1/2. We found great
individual differences, probably not only because the memory of the
different persons was different, but also because they varied in the degree of
interest with which they looked at such material. The smallest number of
reproductions was 18, of which 14 were only half remembered, that is, only
the name or only the article, and as we counted these half reproductions 1/2,
the memory-value for this person was counted 11. The maximum
reproduction was 46, of which 6 were half remembered.
If these calculated values are added and the sum divided by the number of
participants, that is, 30, and this finally by the number of the advertisements
shown, that is, 60, we obtain the average memory-value of a single
advertisement. The results showed that this was 0.44. But our real interest
referred to the distribution for the advertisements of different size. If we
make the same calculation, not for the totality of the advertisements but for
those of a particular size, we find that the memory-value for the full-page
advertisement was 0.33, for the 2 times repeated half-page advertisement,

0.30, for the 4 times repeated fourth-page advertisement, 0.49, for the 8
times repeated eighth-page advertisement, 0.44, and for the 12 times
repeated twelfth-page advertisement, 0.47. Hence we come to the result that
the 4 times repeated fourth-page advertisement as 1-1/2 times stronger than
one offering of a full-page, or the 2 times repeated half-page, but that this
relation does not grow with a further reduction of the size. Two thirds of the
subjects were men and one third women. On the whole, the same relation
exists for both groups, but the climax of psychical efficiency was reached in
the case of the men by the 4 times repeated fourth-page, in the case of the
women by the 8 times repeated eighth-page. The 4 times repeated fourth-
page in the case of the women was 0.45, in the case of the men, 0.51, the 8
times repeated eighth-page, women, 0.53, men, 0.37.
I am inclined to believe that the ascent of the curve of the memory-value
from the full-page to the fourth-page or eighth-page would have been still
more continuous, if the whole-page advertisements had not naturally been
such as are best known to the American reader. The whole-page
announcement, therefore, had a certain natural advantage. But when we
come to another calculation, even the effect of this advantage is lost. We
examined the relations for the first 10 names and articles, which every one
of the 30 persons wrote down. These first 10 were mostly dashed down
quickly without special thought. They also included only a few half
reproductions. When we study these 300 answers which the 30 persons
wrote as their first 10 reproductions, and calculate from them the chances
which every one of the 60 advertisements had for being remembered, we
obtain the following values: The probability of being remembered among
the first 10 was for the full-page advertisement, 0.5, for the half-page 2
times repeated, 1.2, for the fourth-page 4 times repeated, 2.9, for the eighth-
page 8 times repeated, 2.3, and for the twelfth-page 12 times repeated, 2.4.
The superiority of repetition over mere size appears most impressively in
this form, but we see again in this series that the effect decreases even with
increased number of repetitions as soon as the single advertisement sinks
below a certain relative size, so that the 12 times repeated twelfth-page
advertisement does not possess the memory-value of the 4 times repeated
fourth-page advertisement. If Scott's experiments concerning the size and
these experiments of mine concerning the repetition are right, the memory-
value of the advertisements for economic purposes is dependent upon

complicated conditions. A business man who brings out a full-page
advertisement once in a paper which has 100,000 readers would leave the
desired memory-impression on a larger number of individuals than if he
were to print a fourth-page advertisement in four different cities in four
local papers, each of which has 100,000 readers. But if he uses the same
paper in one town, he would produce a much greater effect by printing a
fourth of a page four times than by using a full-page advertisement once
only.
As a matter of course this would hold true only as far as size and repetition
are concerned. Many other factors have to be considered besides. Some of
these could even be studied with our material. We could study from our
results what memory-value is attached to the various forms of type or
suggestive words, what influence to illustrations, how far they reinforce the
impressiveness and how far they draw away the attention from the name
and the object, how these various factors influence men and women
differently, and so on. Other questions, however, demand entirely different
forms of experiment. We may examine the effects of special contrast
phenomena, of unusual background, of irregular borders and original
headings. The particular position of the advertisement also deserves our
psychological interest. The magazines receive higher prices for the cover
pages and the newspapers for advertisements which are surrounded by
reading matter. In both cases obvious practical motives are decisive. The
cover page comes into the field of vision more frequently. What is
surrounded by reading matter is less easily overlooked.
But the newspaper world hardly realizes how much other variations of
position influence the psychological effect. Starch[51] made experiments in
which he did not use real advertisements, but meaningless syllables so as to
exclude the influence of familiarity with any announcement. He arranged
little booklets, each of 12 pages, on which a syllable such as lod, zan, mep,
dut, yib, and so on was printed in the middle of each page. Each of his 50
subjects glanced over the book and then wrote down what syllables
remained in memory. He found that the syllables which stood on the first
and last page were remembered by 34 persons, those on the second and
eleventh by about 26, and those on the eight other pages by an average of
17 persons. In the next experiment he printed one syllable in the middle of
the upper and one in the middle of the lower half of each page. The results

now showed that of those syllables which were remembered 54 per cent
stood on the upper half and 46 per cent on the lower half of the page.
Finally, he divided every page into four parts and printed one syllable on
the middle of each fourth of a page. The results showed that of the
remembered syllables 28 per cent stood on the left-hand upper fourth, 33
per cent on the right-hand upper fourth, 16 per cent left-hand lower, and 23
per cent right-hand lower. A fourth-page advertisement which is printed on
the outer side of the upper half of the page thus probably has more than
twice the psychological value of one which is printed on the inner side of
the lower half. The economic world spends millions every year for
advertisements on the upper right-hand side and millions for advertisements
on the lower left-hand side, and is not aware that one represents twice the
value of the other. These little illustrations of advertisement experiments
may suffice to indicate how much haphazard methods are still prevalent in
the whole field of economic psychotechnics, methods which would not be
tolerated in the sphere of physical and chemical technology.

XXI
THE EFFECT OF DISPLAY

If we turn from the simple newspaper advertisement to the means of
propaganda in general, we at once stand before a question which is often
wrongly answered. The practical handbooks of advertisements and means
of display treat it as a self-evident fact that every presentation should be as
beautiful as possible. In the first place, we cannot deny that the ugly and
even the disgusting possess a strong power for attracting attention. Yet it is
true that by a transposition of feelings the displeasure in the advertisement
may easily become a displeasure in the advertised object. But, on the other
hand, it is surely a mistake to believe that pure beauty best fulfills the
function of the advertisement. Even the draftsman who draws a poster
ought to give up the ambition to create a perfect picture. It might have the
power to attract attention, but it would hardly serve its true purpose of
fixing the attention on the article which is advertised by the picture. The
very meaning of beauty lies in its self-completeness. The beautiful picture
rests in itself and does not point beyond itself. A really beautiful landscape
painting is an end in itself, and must not stir up the practical wish to visit
the landscape which has stimulated the eye of the painter. If the display is to
serve economic interests, every line and every curve, every form and every
color, must be subordinated to the task of leading to a practical resolution,
and to an action, and yet this is exactly the opposite of the meaning of art.
Art must inhibit action, if it is perfect. The artist is not to make us believe
that we deal with a real object which suggests a practical attitude. The
æsthetic forms are adjusted to the main æsthetic aim, the inhibition of
practical desires. The display must be pleasant, tasteful, harmonious, and
suggestive, but should not be beautiful, if it is to fulfill its purpose in the
fullest sense. It loses its economic value, if by its artistic quality it oversteps
the boundaries of that middle region of arts and crafts. This of course stands
in no contradiction to the requirement that the advertised article should be
made to appear as beautiful as possible. The presentation of something
beautiful is not necessarily a beautiful presentation, just as a perfectly

beautiful picture need not have something beautiful as its content. A perfect
painting may be the picture of a most ugly person.
We have not yet spoken of the suggestive power of the means of
propaganda. Every one knows the influence on taste and smell, on social
vanity, on local pride, on the gambling instinct, on the instinctive fear of
diseases, and above all on the sexual instinct, can gain suggestive power.
Everywhere among the uncritical masses such appeals reach individuals
whose psychophysical attitudes make such influences vivid and
overpowering. Every one knows, too, those often clever linguistic forms
which are to aid the suggestion. They are to inhibit the opposing impulses.
The mere use of the imperative, to be sure, has gradually become an
ineffective, used-up pattern. It is a question for special economic
psychotechnics to investigate how the suggestive strength of a form can be
reinforced or weakened by various secondary influences. What influence,
for example, belongs to the electric sign advertisements in which the
sudden change from light to darkness produces strong psychophysical
effects, and what value belongs to moving parts in the picture?
The psychologist takes the same interest in the examples of window
displays, sample distributions, and similar vehicles of commerce by which
the offered articles themselves and not their mere picture or description are
to influence the consciousness of the prospective customer. Here, too, every
element may be isolated and may be brought under psychotechnical rules.
The most external question would refer to the mere quantity of the
presented material. The psychologist would ask how the mere mass of the
offering influences the attention, how far the feeling of pleasure in the
fullness, how far the æsthetic impression of repetition, how far the
associative thought of a manifold selection, how far the mere spatial
expansion, affects the impression. In any case, as soon as it is
acknowledged as desirable to produce with certain objects the impression of
the greatest possible number, the experimental psychologist stands before
the concrete problem of how a manifoldness of things is to be distributed so
that it will not be underestimated, perhaps even overestimated as to
quantity. Again, the laboratory experiment would not proceed with real
window displays or real exhibitions, but would work out the principle with
the simplified experimental means.

An investigation in the Harvard laboratory, for instance, tested the influence
which various factors have upon the estimation of a number of objects seen.
[52]
The question was how far the form or the size or the distribution makes
a group of objects appear larger or smaller. The experiment was started by
showing 20 small cards on a black background in comparison with another
group of cards the number of which varied between 17 and 23. At first the
form of these little cards was changed: triangles, squares, and circles were
tried. Or the color was changed: light and dark, saturated and unsaturated
colors were used. Or the order was varied: sometimes the little cards lay in
regular rows, sometimes in close clusters, sometimes widely distributed,
sometimes in quite irregular fashion. Or the background was changed, or
the surrounding frame, or the time of exposure, and so on. Each time the
subjects had to estimate whether the second group was the larger or equal or
the smaller. These experiments indicated that such comparative estimation
was indeed influenced by every one of the factors mentioned. If the
experiments show that an irregular distribution makes the number appear
larger or a close clustering reduces the apparent number, and so on, the
business man would be quite able to profit from such knowledge. The
jeweler who shows his rings and watches in his window wishes to produce
with his small stock the impression of an ample supply. He lacks the
psychology which might teach him whether he would act more wisely in
having the rings and the watches separated, or whether he should mix the
two, whether he ought to choose a background which is similar in color or
one which contrasts with the pieces exhibited, whether he ought to present
the single object in a special background as in a case, or to show it without
one. He is not aware that by simple psychological illusions, it is not difficult
to change the apparent size of an isolated object by special treatment,
making his show-piece appear larger by a fitting background or
intentionally making a dainty object appear smaller by contrasting
surroundings. These, to be sure, are very trivial illustrations, but the same
fundamental psychological laws which are true for the show-window of the
next corner store are true for the world-display of the nation. The point is to
present clearly the idea, which can be most simply expressed in such trivial
material. But it may be added that even in the case of the most indifferent
example a few hasty experiments with one or two subjects cannot yield any
results of value.

All parts of physiological psychological optics can contribute similar
material. The questions of color harmony and color contrast, light intensity
and mutual support of uniformly colored objects, of irradiation, depth and
perspective, are significant for an effective display in the show-window, and
the laboratory results can easily be translated into psychotechnical
prescriptions. But here it is still more necessary to separate carefully the
merely optical impression from its æsthetic side. All that we claimed as to
the poster is still more justified for the presentation of the saleable objects
themselves. As soon as the display of the articles forms a real work of art, it
must produce inhibitions in the soul of the spectator by which the practical
economic desire is turned aside. Beauty here too has strong power of
attraction, and moreover the suggestive power, by which it withdraws our
senses from the chance surroundings, forces us to lose ourselves in the
offered presentation. But just through this process the content of the display
becomes isolated and separated from the world of our practical interests.
Our desires are brought to silence, we do not seek a personal relation to the
things which we face as admiring spectators, and the intended economic
effect is therefore eliminated. Whoever is to examine the psychotechnics of
displays and exhibitions must therefore study the psychology of æsthetic
stimulation, of suggestion, of the effects of light, color, form and
movement, of apperception and attention, and ought not to forget the
psychology of humor and curiosity, of instincts and emotions. For us the
essential point is that here too the experimental psychological method alone
is able to lead from mere chance arrangements founded on personal taste to
the systematic construction which secures with the greatest possible
certainty the greatest possible mental effect in the service of the economic
purpose.
The problems of the storekeeper who arranges his windows, however,
overlap the problems of the manufacturer who prepares his goods for the
world-market, and who must from the start take care that the outer
appearance of his goods stimulate the readiness to buy. In factories in which
these questions have been carefully considered, the psychological elements
have always been found to be the most influential, but often the most
puzzling. I received material from a number of industrial plants which sold
the same article in a variety of packings. The material which was sent to me
included all kinds of soaps and candies, writing-papers and breakfast foods,

and other articles which are handled by the retailer, the sale of which
depends upon the inclination and caprice of the customer in the store. For
every one of these objects a number of external covers and labels were sent
and with them a confidential report with details about their relative success.
For instance, a certain kind of chocolate was sold under 12 different labels.
One of them was highly successful in the whole country, and one other had
made the same article entirely unsaleable. The other 10 could be graded
between these extremes. In all 12 cases the covers were decorated with
pictures of women with a scenic background. As long as only æsthetic
values were considered, all were on nearly the same level, and æsthetically
skilled observers repeatedly expressed their preference for some of the
unsuccessful pictures over some of the successful ones. But as soon as an
internal relation was formed between the pictures and the chocolate, in the
one case a mental harmony resulted which had strong suggestive power, in
the other case a certain unrest and inner disturbance which necessarily had
an inhibiting influence. The picture which was unsuccessful with the sweets
would perhaps have been eminently successful for tobacco. From such
elementary starting-points, the laboratory experiment might proceed
systematically into spheres of economic life hitherto untouched by scientific
methods. The psychology of the influence of external forms on the
conscious reactions of the masses is so far usually considered only when, as
often happens, the most fundamental demands are violated; for instance,
when objects which are to give the impression of ease are painted in colors
which give a heavy, clumsy appearance, or vice versa, when book-bindings
are lettered in archaic type which makes the reading of the title impossible
for a passer-by, and in many similar antipsychological absurdities which
any stroll through the streets of a modern city forces on us.

XXII
EXPERIMENTS WITH REFERENCE TO ILLEGAL
IMITATION

It is perhaps not without interest to turn into a by-path at this point of our
road. All the illustrations which we have picked out so far have referred to
strictly economic conditions. But we ought not to forget that these
economic problems of commerce and industry are everywhere in contact
with legal interests as well. In order to indicate the manifoldness of
problems accessible to the experimental method, we may discuss our last
question, the question of packing and of labels, in this legal relation too. All
the packings, covers, labels, trademarks, and names by which the
manufacturer tries to stimulate the attention, the imagination, and the
suggestibility of the customer may easily draw a large part of their
psychological effectiveness from without, as soon as they imitate the
appearance of articles which are well introduced and favored in the market.
If the public is familiar with and favorably inclined toward an article on
account of its inner values or on account of its being much advertised, a
similar name or a similar packing may offer efficient help to a rival article.
The law of course protects the label and the deceiving imitation can be
prosecuted. But no law can determine by general conceptions the exact
point at which the similarity becomes legally unallowable. This creates a
situation which has given rise to endless difficulties in practical life.
If everything were forbidden which by its similarity to an accredited article
might lead to a possible confusion in the mind of the quite careless and
inattentive customer, any article once in the market would have a monopoly
in its line. As soon as a typewriter or an automobile or a pencil or a mineral
water existed, no second kind could have access to the market, as with a
high degree of carelessness one economic rival may be taken for another,
even if the new typewriter or the new pencil has a new form and color and
name. On the other side, the purchaser could never have a feeling of
security if imitations were considered as still legally justifiable when the

difference is so small that it needs an intense mental effort and careful
examination of details to notice it.
The result is that the jurisdiction fluctuates between these two extremes in a
most alarming way, and this seems to hold true in all countries. In theory:
"There is substantial agreement that infringement occurs when the marks,
names, labels, or packings of one trader resemble those of another
sufficiently to make it probable that ordinary purchasers, exercising no
more care than such persons usually do in purchasing the article in question,
will be deceived." But it depends upon the trade experts and the judges to
give meaning to such a statement in the particular case, as the amount of
care which purchasers usually exercise can be understood very differently.
Sometimes the customer is expected to proceed with an attention which is
most subtly adjusted to the finest differences, and sometimes it is taken for
granted that he is unable to notice even strong variations. It is clear that this
uncertainty which disturbs the whole trade cannot be eliminated as long as
the psychological background has not been systematically studied. Mere
talking about the attention of the customer, and his ability to decide and
select, and of his observations and his habits in the spirit of popular
common-sense psychology, can never secure exact standards and definite
demarcation lines. The question is important not only where imitations of
morally doubtful character are in the market. Even the most honest
manufacturer is in a certain sense obliged to imitate his predecessors, as
they have directed the taste and habits of the public in particular directions,
and as the product of his company would suffer unnecessarily if he were to
disregard this psychical attitude of the prospective customers. The
economic legal situation accordingly suggests the question whether it would
not be possible to devise methods for an exact measurement of the
permissible similarity, and this demand for exactitude naturally points to the
methods of the psychological experiment. E.S. Rogers, Esq., of Chicago,
who has thoroughly discussed the legal aspect of the problem,[53] first
turned my attention to the psychological difficulty involved.
When I approached the question in the Harvard psychological laboratory, it
was clear to me that the degree of attention and carefulness which the court
may presuppose on the part of the customer can never be determined by the
psychologist and his experimental methods. It would be meaningless, if we
tried to discover by experiments a particular degree of similarity which

every one ought to recognize or a particular degree of attention which
would be sufficient for protection against fraud. Such degrees must always
remain dependent upon arbitrary decision. They are not settled by natural
conditions, but are entirely dependent upon social agreement. A decision
outside of the realm of psychology must fix upon a particular degree in the
scale of various similarity values as the limit which is not to be passed. The
aim of the psychologist can be only to construct such a scale by which
decisions may be made comparable and by which standards may become
possible. The experiment cannot deduce from the study of mental
phenomena what degrees of similarity ought to be still admissible, but it
may be able to develop methods by which different degrees of similarity
can be discriminated and by which a certain similarity value once selected
can always be found again with objective certainty. After many fruitless
efforts I settled on the following form of experiments, which I hope may
bring us nearer to the attainment of the purpose.
A group of objects is observed for a definite time and after a definite
interval another group of objects is offered for comparison. This second
group is identical with the first in all but one of the objects, and this is
replaced by a similar one. The question is how often this substitution will be
noticed by the observers. I may give in detail a characterization of the set of
experiments in which we are at present engaged. We are working with
picture postal cards, using many hundred cards of different kinds, but for
each one we have one or several similar cards. As postal cards are generally
manufactured in sets, it is not difficult to purchase pairs of pictures with any
degree of similarity. Two cards with Christmas trees, or two with Easter
eggs, or two with football players, or two with forest landscapes, and so on,
may differ all the way from a slight variation of color or a hardly noticeable
change in the position of details to variations which keep the same motive
or the same general arrangement, but after all make the card strikingly
different. The first step is to determine for each pair the degree of similarity,
on a percentage basis. To overcome mere arbitrariness, we ask thirty to
forty educated persons to express the similarity value, calling identical
postal cards 100 per cent and two postal cards as different as a colored
flower piece and a black picture of a street scene O. The average value of
these judgments is then considered as expressing the objective degree of
similarity between the two pictures of a pair. After securing such standard

values, we carry on the experiments in the following form. Six different
postal cards, for instance, are seen on a black background through the
opening of a shutter which is closed after 5 seconds. The six may be made
up of a landscape, a building, a head, a genre scene, and so forth. After 20
seconds the same group of postal cards is shown once more, except that one
is replaced by a similar one, instead of one church another church building,
or instead of a vase with roses a vase with pinks. If the substituted picture
has the average similarity value of 80 per cent and we make the experiment
with 10 persons, the substitution may be discovered by 7 persons and
remain unnoticed by 3. We can now easily vary every one of the factors
involved. If instead of 6 cards, we take 10, it may be that only 4 out of 10
persons, instead of 7, will discover the substitution, while if we take 4 cards
instead of 6, perhaps 9 persons out of 10 will recognize the difference under
these otherwise equal conditions. Only an especially careless observer will
overlook it. But instead of changing the number of objects, we may change
the periods of exposure. If we show the 6 cards only for 2 seconds instead
of 5 seconds, the number of those who recognize the difference may sink
from 7 to 5 or 4, and if we make the time considerably longer, we shall of
course reach a point where all 10 will recognize the substitution. The same
holds true of the shortening or lengthening of the time-interval between the
two presentations. The third variable factor is the similarity itself. If instead
of one church, not another church, but a theatre or a skyscraper is shown,
that is, if the similarity value of 80 per cent sinks down to a similarity of 60
per cent or 50 per cent, the number of those who recognize the substitution
will again become larger; if, on the other hand, the substituted card shows
the same church, only from a slightly different angle, bringing the similarity
value up to 90 per cent or 95 per cent, the number of observers who
recognize the substitution may sink to 2 or 3. To make the experiments
reliable, it is also necessary frequently to mix in cases in which no
substitution at all is introduced.
If these experiments are varied sufficiently and a large mass of material
brought together, we must be able to secure definite formulæ. We may find
that if the critical card appears among 6 cards, is shown for 5 seconds, and
the group is again exposed after 20 seconds, 80 per cent of the subjects will
recognize the substitution of a similar card, if the degree of similarity is 30
per cent, but only 60 per cent will recognize it if the degree of similarity is

70 per cent, and only 30 per cent will recognize it if the degree of similarity
is 90 per cent. These are entirely fictitious figures and are only to indicate
the principle. If such an exact formula were definitely discovered, we
should still be unable to say from mere psychological reasoning what
similarity value is legally permissible. If the rules against infringement are
interpreted in a very rigorous spirit, it may seem desirable to prohibit
imitations which are as little similar as those postal cards which were
graded as 40 per cent in our similarity scale, and if the interpretation is a
loose one, it may appear permissible to have imitations on the market which
are as strongly similar as our postal cards graded at 80 per cent in our
similarity scale. All this would have to be left to the lawmakers and to the
judges. But what we would have gained is this. We could say: if our object
exposed for 5 seconds in a group of 6 other objects is replaced after an
interval of 20 seconds by an imitation and this change is recognized by 8
persons among 10, the degree of similarity is 30 per cent and if it is
recognized by 3 out of 10 subjects, the degree of similarity is 90 per cent. In
short, from any percentage of subjects who under these conditions
discovered the substitution, we could determine the degree of similarity,
independent of any individual arbitrariness. If such methods were accepted
by the trade and the courts, it would only be necessary, to agree on the
percentage of similarity which ought to be permitted, and all uncertainty
would disappear. There would be no wrangling of opposing interests; it
would be possible to find out whether the permitted limit were overstepped
or not with an exactitude similar to that with which the weight or the
chemical constitution of a trade commodity is examined. Certainly the
experiment establishes here conditions which are very different from those
of practical life. The customer who wants to buy a particular picture postal
card which he saw once before and to whom the salesman offers a similar
one, suggesting that it is the same, is facing only one card and not a group
of six. But in practical life the card which be has seen was not observed
with the definite intention of keeping the memory picture in mind, and
months may have passed since it was seen. The memory picture which the
customer has in his consciousness when he seeks the particular card is
much weakened by this circumstance too. We secure this weakening
artificially by the arrangement of the experiment in placing the card in a
group of six or ten and exposing them for a few seconds only. The force of

attention and the corresponding memory-value are by this distribution
diminished in a definite degree in the case of every single card.
The investigation must include a careful study of the size of the groups, of
the time-relations, of the percentage of correct answers, all under the point
of view of greatest fitness for practical application. In the Harvard
laboratory the research has been carried on partly with such picture
material, partly with word material, and partly with concrete objects.[54]
Whatever the details of the outcome may be, we hope that the work will
lead to results which may, indeed, make such a psychotechnical use
possible. Its principles and formulæ might easily be adjusted to any
marketable material. As a matter of course, if in future the courts were ever
to accept such psychological, experimental methods, it would be intolerable
dilettantism if such experiments were carried on by lawyers and district
attorneys. It is as true of this economic legal question as of many other legal
psychological problems that its introduction into the courtroom can become
desirable only when psychological experts are engaged and called in the
same way as chemical or medical experts are invited to the court. On the
other hand, there is surely not the slightest desire on the part of
psychologists to be dragged into humiliating performances like those which
not only handwriting experts, but even psychiatric specialists have had to
undergo repeatedly in sensational court trials. The day for the expert
activity in the courtroom will came for the psychologist only when the
country has attached the expert to the court and has eliminated the expert
retained by the plaintiff or the defendant. But this general practical question
as to the position of the psychologist in the courtroom and as to the need of
a psychological laboratory in connection with the courts would lead us too
far aside.

XXIII
BUYING AND SELLING

The effects which we have studied so far were produced by inanimate
objects, posters or displays, advertisements or labels and packings. The
economic psychotechnics of the future will surely study with similar
methods the effects of the living commercial agencies. Experiments will
trace the exact effects which the salesman or customer may produce. But
here not even a modest beginning can be discovered, and it would be
difficult to mention a single example of experimental research. The desired
psychological influences of the salesman are not quite dissimilar to those of
the printed means of propaganda. Here, too, it is essential to turn the
attention of the customer to different points, to awaken a vivid favorable
impression, to emphasize the advantages of the goods, to throw full light on
them, and finally to influence the will-decision either by convincing
arguments or by persuasion and suggestion. In either case the point is to
enhance the impulse to buy and to suppress the opposing ideas. Yet every
one of these factors, when it starts from a man and not from a thing or
paper, changes its form. The influence becomes narrower, it is directed
toward a smaller number of persons; but, on the other hand, it gains just by
the new possibility of individualization. The salesman in the store or the
commercial traveler adjusts himself to the wishes, reactions, and replies of
the buyer. Above all, when it becomes necessary to direct the attention to
the decisive points, the personal agent has the possibility of developing the
whole process through a series of stages so that the attention slowly
becomes focused on one definite point. The salesman observes at first only
the general limits of the interest of the customer as far as it is indicated by
his reactions, but slowly he can find out in this whole field the region of
strongest desires. As soon as he has discovered this narrower region in
which the prospects of success seem to be greatest, he can systematically
eliminate everything which distracts and scatters the attention. He can
discover whether the psyche of the individual with whom he is dealing can
be influenced more strongly by logical arguments or by suggestion, and

how far he may calculate on the pleasure instincts, on the excitement of
emotions, on the impulse to imitate, on the natural vanity, on the desire for
saving, and on the longing for luxury. In every one of these directions the
whole play of human suggestion may be helpful. The voice may win or
destroy confidence, the statement may by its firmness overcome counter-
motives or by its uncertainty reinforce them. Even hand or arm movements
by their motor suggestion may focus the desires of the customers, while
unskillful, erratic movements may scatter the attention and lead to an inner
oscillation of the will to buy.
At every one of these points the psychological experiment may find a
foothold, and only through such methodological study can the haphazard
proceedings of the commercial world be transformed into really economic
schemes. Indeed, it seems nothing but chance that just this field is
controlled by chance alone. The enormous social interplay of energies
which are discharged in the selling and buying of the millions becomes
utterly planless as soon as salesman and customer come into contact, and
this tremendous waste of energy cannot appear desirable for any possible
interest of civilization. The time alone which is wasted by useless
psychophysical operations in front of and behind the counter represents a
gigantic part of the national budget. Even the complaints about the long
working day of the salesgirls might be eliminated from the debit account of
the national ledger, if the commercial companies could study the psychical
processes in selling and buying with the same carefulness with which they
analyze all details in preparing the stock and fixing the prices. In the army
or in the fire department, in the railroad service, and even in the factory, all
necessary activities are so arranged that as far as possible the greatest
achievement is secured by the smallest amount of energy. But when the
hundreds of millions of customers in the civilized world want to satisfy
their economic demands in the stores, the whole dissolves into a flood of
talk, because no one has taken the trouble to examine scientifically the
psychotechnics of selling and to put it on a firm psychological foundation.
The idea of scientific management must be extended from the industrial
concerns to the commercial establishments. The questioning and answering,
the showing and replacing of the goods, the demonstrating and suggesting
by the salesmen, must be brought into an economic system which saves
time and energy, as has been tried with the laborer in the factory. Wherever

economic processes are carried out with superfluous, haphazard
movements, the national resources have to suffer a loss. The single
individual can never find the ideal form of motion and the ideal process by
mere instinct. A systematic investigation is needed to determine the way to
the greatest saving of energy, and the result ought to be made a binding rule
for every apprentice. How the smallest influences grow by summation may
be illustrated by the experience of a large department store, in which the
expense for delivery of the articles sold was felt as too large an item in the
budget. The hundreds of saleswomen therefore received the order after
every sale of moderate-sized articles not to ask, as before, "May we send it
to you?" but instead, "Will you take it with you?" Probably none of the
many thousand daily customers observed the difference, the more as it was
indifferent to most of them whether they took the little package home
themselves or not. In cases in which it was inconvenient, they would
anyhow oppose the suggestion and insist that the purchase be sent to them.
Yet it is claimed that this hardly noticeable suggestion led to a considerable
saving in the following year, distinctly felt in the budget of the whole
establishment.
We must not forget, however, that the process of buying deserves the same
psychological interest as that of selling. If psychotechnics is to be put into
the service of a valuable economic task, the goal cannot possibly be to
devise schemes by which the customer may easily be trapped. The purpose
of science cannot be to help any one to sell articles to a man who does not
need them and who would regret the purchase after quiet thought. The
applied psychologist should help the prospective buyer no less, and must
protect him so that his true intention may become realized in the economic
process. Otherwise through his suggestibility, the determining idea of his
goal might fade in his consciousness and the appeal to his vanity or to his
instincts might awaken an anti-economic desire which he would be too
weak to inhibit. The salesman must know how to use arguments and
suggestions and how to make them effective,[55] but the customer too must
know how to see through a misleading argument and how to resist mere
suggestion.
The postulate that the psychical factors in commercial life are to be
carefully regarded is repeated in more complex form in the wholesale
business and in the stock exchange. It is a perfectly justified and consistent

thought which recently led a large credit bureau to an effort to base its
information on psychological analysis. It is well known that there are
bureaus in which the ledger experiences of a large circle of companies in
the same commercial line are collected, tabulated, and recorded, thus
affording an automatic review of the occurrences, focusing early attention
on doubtful accounts and pointing out weaknesses in the customers'
conditions, as they develop, as well as evidences of prosperity. The ledger
experience which a single company has with all its customers is tabulated
without revealing its identity to the associates, who get reports containing it,
and the many combined ledgers become a valuable guide. Yet all such
methods can show only actual movements in the market, and cannot allow
the prospects of future development to be determined, simply because they
cannot take into account the personal equations. Only an acquaintance with
the character and the temperament, the intelligence and the habits, the
energy and the weakness, of the head of a firm can tell us whether the
company, even with satisfactory resources, may go down, or whether, even
though embarrassed, it may hold out. The psychological pioneer, therefore,
aims not only toward an exchange of ledger accounts, but toward a real
psychological diagnosis and prognosis. If a member of a firm is personally
known to some scores of business men who have had commercial dealings
with him, and each one of them, without disclosing his identity to any one
but the central bureau, sends to it a statement of personal impressions, a
composite picture of the mental physiognomy can be worked out. Of course
all this has been often done in the terms of popular psychology and in a
haphazard, amateurish way. The new plan is to arrange the questions
systematically under the point of view of scientific descriptive psychology.
Regular psychograms, in which the probability of a particular kind of
behavior is to be determined in an exact percentage calculation, are to
replace the traditional vagueness, as soon as a sufficient number of reliable
answers have been tabulated.
Commercial life as a whole finds its contact with psychology, of course, not
only in the problem of how to secure the best mental effect. Those other
questions which we have discussed essentially with reference to factory life
and industrial concerns, namely, how the best man and the best work are to
be secured, recur in the circle of commercial endeavors. It seems, indeed,
most desirable to devise psychological tests by which the ability to be a

successful salesman or saleswoman may be determined at an early stage.
The lamentable shifting of the employees in all commercial spheres, with
its injurious social consequences, would then be unnecessary, and both
employers and employees would profit. Moreover, like the selection of the
men, the means of securing the most satisfactory work from them, has also
so far been left entirely to common sense. Commercial work stands under
an abundance of varying conditions, and each may have influences the
isolated effects of which are not known, because they have not been studied
in that systematic form which only the experiment can establish. The
popular literature on this whole group of subjects is extensive, and in its
expansion corresponds to the widespread demand for real information and
advice to the salesman. But hardly any part of the literature in the
borderland regions of economics is so disappointing in its vagueness,
emptiness, and helplessness. Experimental psychology has nothing with
which to replace it to-day, but it can at least show the direction from which
decisive help may be expected in future.

XXIV
THE FUTURE DEVELOPMENT OF ECONOMIC
PSYCHOLOGY

Here we may stop. From those elementary questions concerning the mental
effects, the path would quickly lead to questions of gravest importance.
What is the mental effect which the economic labor produces in the laborer
himself? How do economic movements influence the mind of the
community? How far do non-economic factors produce effects on the
psychical mechanism of the economic agents? But it would be idle to claim
to-day for exact psychology, with its methods of causal thought, regions in
which so far popular psychology, with its methods of purposive thought, is
still sovereign. Our aim certainly was not to review the totality of possible
problems related to economic efficiency, but merely to demonstrate the
principles and the methods of experimental economic psychology by a few
characteristic illustrations. As all the examples which we selected were
chosen only in order to make clear the characteristic point of view of
psychotechnics, it is unimportant whether the particular results will stand
the test of further experimental investigations, or will have to be modified
by new researches. What is needed to-day is not to distribute the results so
far reached as if they were parts of a definite knowledge, but only to
emphasize that the little which has been accomplished should encourage
continuous effort. To stimulate such further work is the only purpose of this
sketch.
This further work will have to be a work of coöperation. The nature of this
problem demands a relatively large number of persons for the experimental
treatment. With most experimental researches in our psychological
laboratories, the number of the subjects experimented on is not so important
as the number of experiments made with a few well-trained participants.
But with the questions of applied psychology the number of persons plays a
much more significant rôle, as the individual differences become of greatest
importance. The same problems ought therefore to be studied in various

places, so that the results may be exchanged and compared. Moreover, these
psychological economic investigations naturally lead beyond the
possibilities of the university laboratories. To a certain degree this was true
of other parts of applied psychology as well. Educational and medical
experimental psychology could not reach their fullest productivity until the
experiment was systematically carried into the schoolroom and the
psychiatric clinic. But the classroom and the hospital are relatively
accessible places for the scientific worker, as both are anyhow conducted
under a scientific point of view. The teacher and the physician can easily
learn to perform valuable experiments with school children or with patients.
This favorable condition is lacking in the workshop and the factory, in the
banks and the markets. The academic psychologist will be able to undertake
work there only with a very disturbing expenditure of time and only under
exceptional conditions. If such experiments, for instance, with laborers in a
factory or employees of a railway are to advance beyond the faint first
efforts of to-day and are really to become serviceable to the cultural
progress of our time with effective completeness, they ought not to remain
an accidental appendix to the theoretical laboratories. Either the universities
must create special laboratories for applied psychology or independent
research institutes must be founded which attack the new concrete problems
under the point of view of national political economy. Experimental
workshops could be created which are really adjusted to the special
practical needs and to which a sufficiently large number of persons could be
drawn for the systematic researches. The ideal solution for the United States
would be a governmental bureau for applied psychology, with special
reference to the psychology of commerce and industry, similar to the model
agricultural stations all over the land under the Department of Agriculture.
Only when such a broad foundation has been secured will the time be ripe
to carry the method systematically into the daily work. The aim will never
be for real experimental researches to be performed by the foreman in the
workshop or by the superintendent in the factory. But slowly a certain
acknowledged system of rules and prescriptions may be worked out which
may be used as patterns, and which will not presuppose any scientific
knowledge, any more than an understanding of the principles of electricity
is necessary for one who uses the telephone. But besides the rigid rules
which any one may apply, particular prescriptions will be needed fitting the

special situation. This leads to the demand for the large establishments to
appoint professionally trained psychologists who will devote their services
to the psychological problems of the special industrial plant. There are
many factories that have scores of scientifically trained chemists or
physicists at work, but who would consider it an unproductive luxury to
appoint a scientifically schooled experimental psychologist to their staff.
And yet his observations and researches might become economically the
most important factor. Similar expectations might be justified for the large
department stores and especially for the big transportation companies. In
smaller dimensions the same real needs exist in the ordinary workshop and
store. It is obvious that the professional consulting psychologist would
satisfy these needs most directly, and if such a new group of engineers were
to enter into industrial life, very soon a further specialization might be
expected. Some of these psychological engineers would devote themselves
to the problems of vocational selection and appointment; others would
specialize on questions of advertisement and display and propaganda; a
third group on problems of fatigue, efficiency, and recreation; a fourth on
the psychological demands for the arrangement of the machines; and every
day would give rise to new divisions. Such a well-schooled specialist, if he
spent a few hours in a workshop or a few days in a factory, could submit
propositions which might refer exclusively to the psychological factors and
yet which might be more important for the earning and the profit of the
establishment than the mere buying of new machines or the mere increase
in the number of laborers.
No one can deny that such a transition must be burdened with difficult
complications and even with dangers; and still less will any one doubt that
it may be caricatured. One who demands that a chauffeur or a motorman of
an electric railway be examined as to his psychical abilities by systematic
psychological methods, so that accidents may be avoided, does not
necessarily demand that a congressman or a cabinet minister or a candidate
for marriage be tested too by psychological laboratory experiments, as the
witty ones have proposed. And one who believes that the work in the
factory ought to be studied with reference to the smallest possible
expenditure of psychical impulses is not convinced that the same
experimental methods will be necessary for the functions of eating and
drinking and love-making, as has been suggested.

And if it is true that difficulties and discomforts are to be feared during the
transition period, they should be more than outweighed by the splendid
betterments to be hoped for. We must not forget that the increase of
industrial efficiency by future psychological adaptation and by
improvement of the psychophysical conditions is not only in the interest of
the employers, but still more of the employees; their working time can be
reduced, their wages increased, their level of life raised. And above all, still
more important than the naked commercial profit on both sides, is the
cultural gain which will come to the total economic life of the nation, as
soon as every one can be brought to the place where his best energies may
be unfolded and his greatest personal satisfaction secured. The economic
experimental psychology offers no more inspiring idea than this adjustment
of work and psyche by which mental dissatisfaction in the work, mental
depression and discouragement, may be replaced in our social community
by overflowing joy and perfect inner harmony.

THE END

NOTES
[1] The fullest account of the modern studies on individual differences is to be
found in: William Stern: Die differentielle Psychologie in ihren methodischen
Grundlagen. (Leipzig, 1911.)
[2] The practical applications of psychology in education, law, and medicine, I
have discussed in detail in the books: Münsterberg: Psychology and the Teacher.
(New York, 1910.) Münsterberg: On the Witness Stand. (New York, 1908.)
(English edition under the title: Psychology and Crime.) Münsterberg:
Psychotherapy (New York, 1909.)
[3] Frank Parsons: Choosing a Vocation. (Boston, 1909.)
[4] M. Bloomfield: The Vocational Guidance of Youth. (Boston, 1911.)
[5] Vocations for Boys. (Issued by the Vocation Bureau of Boston. 1912.)
Vocations for Boston Girls. (Issued by the Girls' Trade Education League. 1911.)
Bulletins of Vocation Series. (Issued by the Women's Educational and Industrial
Union. 1911.)
[6] F.W. Taylor: The Principles of Scientific Management. (New York, 1911.)
H.L. Gantt: Work, Wages, and Profits. (New York, 1912.) And the books of
Emerson, Gilbreth, Goldmark, etc., to be mentioned later.
[7] H. Emerson: Efficiency as a Basis for Operation and Wages. (New York,
1912, p. 107.)
[8] H. Emerson: The Twelve Principles of Efficiency. (New York, 1912, p. 176.)
[9] H Emerson: The Twelve Principles, p. 156.
[10] H. Emerson: The Twelve Principles, p. 177.
[11] F.W. Taylor: The Principles of Scientific Management, pp. 86-97.
[12] The experiments are being conducted and will be published by Mr. J.W.
Bridges.
[13] Investigation of Telephone Companies: Bureau of Labor. (Washington,
Government Printing Office, 1910.)
[14] Ries: Beiträge zur Methodik der Intelligenzprüfung. (Zeitschrift für
Psychologie, 1910, vol. 56.)
[15] For a survey of a large number of such tests and bibliography, compare:
G.M. Whipple: Manual of Mental and Physical Tests. (Baltimore, 1911.)
[16] F.L. Wells: The Relation of Practice to Individual Differences. (American
Journal of Psychology, 1912, vol. 23, pp. 75-88.)

[17] M. Bernays: Auslese und Anpassung der Arbeiterschaft der geschlossenen
Grossindustrie, dargestellt an den Verhältnissen der Gladbacher Spinnerei und
Weberei. (Leipzig, 1910, p. 337.)
[18] H.C. McComas: Some Types of Attention. (Psychological Review
Monographs, vol. 13, 3, 1911.)
[19] Max Weber: Zur Psychophysik der industriellen Arbeit. (Archiv für
Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik, 1908 and 1909, vols. 27 and 28.)
[20] Bryan and Harter: Studies in the Telegraphic Language. (Psychological
Review, vol. 4.)
[21] W.F. Book: The Psychology of Skill. (University of Montana, Publications
in Psychology, 1910.)
[22] H. Münsterberg: Beiträge zur experimentellen Psychologie. (Book iv, 1892.)
[23] A.J. Culler: Interference and Adaptability. (Archives of Psychology, 1912.)
[24] The experiments are being conducted and will be published by Mr. L.W.
Kline.
[25] Adolf Gerson: Die physiologischen Grundlagen der Arbeitsteilung.
(Zeitschrift für Sozialwissenschaft, 1907.)
[26] Karl Bücher: Arbeit und Rhythmus. (Fourth Edition, Leipzig, 1909, p. 438.)
[27] Frank G. Gilbreth: Motion Study. (New York, 1911.)
[28] Taylor: The Principles of Scientific Management. (New York, 1911, p. 71.)
[29] The experiments are being conducted and will be published by Mr. E.R.
Riesen.
[30] R. Herbertz: Zur Psychologie des Maschinenschreibens. (Zeitschrift für
angewandte Psychologie, 1908, vol. 2, p. 551.)
[31] C.L. Vaughan: The Moter Power of Complexity. (Harvard Psychological
Studies, vol. 2, 1906, p. 527.)
[32] G.M. Stratton: Some Experiments in the Perception of the Movement,
Color, and Direction of Lights. (Psychological Review Monographs, vol. 10,
1908.)
[33] The experiments are being conducted and will be published by Miss L.M.
Seeley.
[34] H. Münsterberg: Beiträge sur experimentellen Psychologie. (Book iv, 1892.)
[35] R.S. Woodworth: Accuracy of Voluntary Movement. (Psychological Review
Monographs, vol. 8, 1899.)
[36] B.A. Lenfest: The Accuracy of Linear Movement. (Harvard Psychological
Studies, vol. 2, 1906.)

[37] Ranschburg: Ueber die Bedeutung der Ähnlichkeit beim Erlernen, Behalten
und bei der Reproduktion. (Journal für Psychologie und Neurologie, vol. 6.)
Ranschburg: Zeitschrift für Psychologie und Physiologie der Sinnesorgane. (Vol.
80, 1902.)
[38] H. Kleinknecht: The Interference of Optical Stimuli. (Harvard
Psychological Studies, vol. 2, 1906.)
[39] The experiments are being conducted and will be published by Miss O.E.
Martin.
[40] Henry P. Kendall: Unsystematized, Systematized, and Scientific
Management. (In Addresses and Discussions at the Conference on Scientific
Management held at Dartmouth College, 1912.)
[41] Ernst Abbé: Gesammelte Abhandlungen. (Jena, 1908, vol. 3, p. 206.)
[42] A full survey of the problem and its literature is contained in: Josephine
Goldmark: Fatigue and Efficiency. (New York, 1912.)
[43] F.W. Taylor: The Principles of Scientific Management. (New York, 1911, p.
58.)
[44] W. Hellpach: Die geopsychischen Erscheinungen, Wetter, Klima und
Landschaft und ihr Einfluss auf das Seelenleben (Leipzig, 1911 p. 176-212.)
[45] Aschaffenburg: Praktische Arbeit unter Alkoholwirkung (Psychologische
Arbeiten—Kraepelin, vol 1, 1906.)
[46] Hildebrand Die Beeinflussung der Willenskraft durch den Alkohol
(Königsberg, 1910.)
[47] For the scientific facts concerning alcohol and bibliography compare Hugo
Hoppe: Die Tatsachen über den Alkohol (Munich, 1912.)
[48] H.L. Hollingworth: The Influence of Caffein on Mental and Motor
Efficiency. (New York, 1912.)
[49] Levenstein: Die Arbeiterfrage. (Munich, 1912.)
[50] W.D. Scott: The Psychology of Advertising. (Boston, 1908, p. 166.)
[51] D. Starch: Psychology of Preferred Positions. (Judicious Advertising, New
York, November, 1909.)
[52] C.T. Burnett: The Estimation of Number. (Harvard Psychological Studies,
vol. 2, p. 349.)
[53] E.S. Rogers: The Unwary Purchaser: A Study in the Psychology of Trade
Mark Infringement. (Michigan Law Review, vol. 8, 1910.)
[54] The experiments are being conducted and will be published by Mr. G.A.
Feingold.
[55] W.D. Scott: Influencing Men in Business. (New York, 1911.)

INDEX
Abstinence, 230.
Accidents, 63, 66, 76, 213, 224.
Adjustment, 35, 158.
Advertisement, 255.
Alcohol, 225, 227.
Analysis, 47, 123.
Apperception, 266.
Applied psychology, 5, 10, 15, 304.
Appointment, 116.
Apprentice, 145.
Arguments, 295.
Art, 273.
Artificial track, 71.
Association, 105, 156.
Attention, 21, 66, 101, 106, 135, 197, 206, 284.
Attitude, 68, 75.

Beauty, 272, 278.
Beginner, 182.
Buying, 294.

Caffein, 232.
Capitalism, 143.
Card test, 87.
Choice of vocation, 32, 34.
Color blindness, 30, 57.
Complication, 84.
Concentration, 136.
Confession, 18.
Consciousness, 247.
Conservation, 38.
Consulting psychologist, 307.
Conversation, 208.
Counting, 175.
Correlation, 134.
Court, 292.
Credit bureau, 299.
Criminal, 14.
Customer, 298.

Decision, 85, 94.
Discrimination, 74.
Display, 272.

Dispositions, 27, 125, 170.
Distraction, 206.
Distribution, 276.
Disturbances, 210.
Division of labor, 28, 51, 191.
Dynamogenic, 173.

Economics, 19, 243, 250.
Educational psychology, 11.
Efficiency, 50, 144, 158, 180, 190, 223, 225.
Effort, 161.
Electric railway, 63, 69, 180.
Energy, 175.
Entertainment, 233.
Ergograph, 149.
Exactitude, 186.
Examinations, 29.
Excitability, 226.
Experimental psychology, 4, 57, 251.
Expert, 292.

Factory, 122, 191, 212, 233, 279, 306.
Failure, 35.

Fatigue, 63, 180, 192, 206, 211, 218.
Feeling, 147, 157, 253.
Fitness, 53, 60, 116.
Foresight, 64.

Grading, 103, 107.
Groups, 129.

Habits, 150, 182.
Handwriting, 134.
History, 248.
Household, 177.

Illusions, 277.
Imagination, 66.
Imitation, 236, 282.
Inclination, 126.
Individual differences, 8, 10, 28, 82, 125, 129, 199, 222.
Industrial experiments, 67.
Industry, 59, 160, 191.
Inhibition, 84, 162, 176, 203.
Injuries, 213.
Intelligence, 102.

Interest, 194.
Interference, 154.
Interruption, 183.
Intuition, 53.

Jurisdiction, 283.

Labels, 279, 282.
Labor legislation, 63.
Learning, 141, 147.
Legal psychology, 14, 282.
Localization of sound, 95.
Locomotives, 176.
Logic, 248.

Machine, 160, 162.
Mason, 164.
Meaning, 247.
Medical psychology, 12.
Memory, 101, 147, 171, 226, 227, 259.
Methods, 148.
Mills, 117.
Miniature models, 67.

Monotony, 190, 198.
Motormen, 63, 74.
Movement, 145, 161, 169, 180, 185.
Muscles, 160.

Nationality, 130.
Nervous disease, 13.
Newspaper, 259.
Noise, 173.
Number, 275.
Numerical results, 77.

Optics, 277.
Organization, 154.

Packing, 282.
Pauses, 214.
Pedagogy, 11, 146.
Personality, 112.
Position, 269.
Postal cards, 286.
Prejudices, 133.
Psychiatry, 12.

Psychological laboratories, 5, 45, 257, 304.
Psychophysical law, 252.
Psychotechnics, 17.

Qualities, 27.
Questionnaires, 43.

Race, 130.
Rapidity, 187.
Reaction-time, 54, 65.
Recognition, 268.
Repetition, 148, 162, 192, 262.
Rest, 217.
Rhythm, 162, 187.

Salesman, 294.
Satisfaction, 248.
Saving, 165, 184.
School, 128, 146, 219.
Scientific management, 49, 159, 164, 168, 297.
Selection, 51.
Self-knowledge, 30, 44.
Self-observation, 45.

Selling, 294.
Sewing, 178.
Sex, 132.
Shifting, 118.
Ship models, 67.
Ship service, 83.
Shoveling, 166.
Signals, 176.
Similarity, 283, 286.
Size, 261.
Sleep, 224.
Social influences, 221.
Speed, 169, 233.
Subdivision, 22.
Suggestion, 274, 295.

Task, 237.
Technical sciences, 17.
Technique, 158, 161.
Telegraphy, 150.
Telephone Service, 97.
Temperature, 223.
Tests, 76, 80, 105, 111.

Trade Unions, 50.
Training, 125, 141, 150.
Type-setting, 124.
Typewriting, 151, 170.

Uncertainty, 284.
Unfitness, 31.
Uniformity, 193. 199.

Values, 245.
Visibility, 172.
Vividness, 261.
Vocation, 32, 40, 58.
Vocational counselor, 41.
Vocational guidance, 37, 48.

Wages, 127, 165, 195, 235.
Waste, 38, 145, 160.
Will-impulse, 149, 227.
Witness, 14.
Women, 132, 161.
Working-day, 212, 296.

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