Our aim is to sketch the outlines of a new science which is intermediate between the modern laboratory psychology and the problems of economics: the psychological experiment is systematically to be placed at the service of commerce
But what are the ends of commerce and industry? Münsterberg leaves that to others: “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." Having relieved his “science" of this burden, and having turned the task of setting the parameters of his investigations over to those who control “commerce and industry," he returns to this subject only when it is suggested that perhaps the point of view of the workers, who are also part of“commerce and industry," should be taken into consideration. So crass and vulgar an appeal to special interests arouses his horror, and he rejects it sternly:
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 6
in the service of civilization.
Having identified the interests of “civilization"not with the immense majority of workers but with those who manage them, he can now face without blanching the everyday effects of “scientific work design" upon the worker: ". . . 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."7 He sees the role of psychological science in industry as the selection of workers from among the pool offered on the labor market, and their acclimatization to the work routines devised by “civilization," the formation of the “new habit":
. .. 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 influence on human minds which 8
are desired in the interests of business.
In this definition we have the aims—although rarely so flatly statedof the subsequent schools of psychological, physiological, and social investigation of the worker and work. By and large, they have sought a model of workers and work groups which would produce the results desired by management: habituation to the terms of employment offered in the capitalist firm and satisfactory performance on that basis. These schools and theories have succeeded one another in a dazzling proliferation of approaches and theories, a proliferation which is more than anything else testimony to their failure.
The spread of industrial psychology in the United States was in the beginning largely due to the efforts of Walter Dill Scott, a psychologist at Northwestern University who took his doctorate at Leipzig and came to the new field by way of a prior career in advertising. During and after World War I, psychological testing was used by a number of major corporations (American Tobacco, National Lead, Western Electric, Loose-Wiles Biscuit, Metropolitan Life), and the first psychological consulting service for industry was established at the Carnegie Institute of Technology in 1915, where Scott assumed the first chair of applied psychology in an American academic institution. During the war such testing was conducted on a grand scale in the United States armed forces, also under Scott, and the popularity this gave to the new device encouraged its spread throughout industry after the war. In England and Germany the trend was similar, with Germany perhaps ahead of all others in the field.º
The premise of industrial psychology was that, using aptitude tests, it was possible to determine in advance the suitability of workers for various positions by classifying them according to degrees of“intelligence,"“manual dexterity," “accident proneness," and general conformability to the “profile” desired by management. The vanity of this attempt to calibrate individuals and anticipate their behavior in the complex and antagonistic dynamics of social life was soon exposed by practice. The prolonged and exhaustive experiments conducted at the Western Electric plant on the west side of Chicago—the so-called Hawthorne experiments—during the last years of the 1920s crystallized the dissatisfaction with industrial psychology. In those experiments, a Harvard Business School team under the leadership of Elton Mayo arrived at chiefly negative conclusions—conclusions, moreover, which were remarkably similar to those with which Taylor had begun his investigations almost a half-century earlier They learned that the performance of workers had little relation to “ability" and in fact often bore an inverse relation to test scores, with those scoring best producing at lower levels and vice-versa—and that workers acted collectively to resist management work-pace standards and demands. “The belief,"said Mayo, "that the behavior of an individual within the factory can be predicted before employment upon the basis of a laborious and minute examination by tests of his mechanical and other capacities is mainly, if not wholly mistaken. 510
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Labor and Monopoly Capital
The Habituation of the Worker
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