Psychology and Industrial Efficiency | Page 4

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