Psychology and Industrial Efficiency
Hugo Münsterberg, 1913
Why do some tram drivers go twenty years without an accident, while others, just as conscientious, crash again and again? The psychologist Hugo Münsterberg took laboratory experiments into the factory, the office and advertising. A classic book from 1913 on how to find each person their work and each job the conditions it needs, and where such tests reach their limit.
Who it is for
For anyone who chooses a job or hires people and wants to understand why a conscientious person fails in one place and thrives in another.
Those who notice repetition least are the ones who hate it most.
A job chosen at random
One day in Boston, Frank Parsons invited all the boys from his neighborhood who were finishing school at the end of the year. He wanted to hear their plans. It turned out that they knew almost nothing about the work they were aiming for, or whether they were suited to it. Out of that meeting grew, in 1908, a small bureau where every graduate was helped to choose a trade. That is how vocational guidance began in America.
Hugo Münsterberg, a psychologist from Harvard, sees in this story a misfortune for the whole of society. The choice of work, he writes, is one of the two most important decisions in a life, together with the choice of a spouse, and people make it by chance: out of imitation, for quick money, on someone else's advice, or out of laziness. A person knows almost nothing about their own attention, memory and will, and knows even less about what the work demands from the inside. That is why everywhere people complain that good workers are hard to find, although often people are simply not in the right places.
In his 1913 book Münsterberg proposes a new science and gives it a name: “psychotechnics”. It should carry the experience of the psychological laboratory into the factory, the office and the shop. He asks three questions. How do you find the person whose mind suits the job best? How do you get the best work out of each person? How do you bring about the desired action in the minds of customers? And at once he sets a limit: the psychologist says only which means will reach a goal, while society chooses the goal itself.
Next come tram drivers who are not to blame for accidents, officers who lose their bearings when a ship looms out of the fog, a packer who has been wrapping light bulbs for twelve years and is not bored, and a small advertisement that people remember better than a whole page.
The tram driver who was not to blame
Trams in American cities crashed so often that some companies paid out as much as thirteen percent of their entire revenue to the injured. And the companies noticed something strange. Some drivers went twenty years with almost no incidents: they seemed to sense in advance where a bewildered pedestrian would step. Others, neither careless nor rule breakers, kept having accidents again and again. They simply lacked that foresight.
Münsterberg was asked to look into it. First he measured reaction time, that is, how quickly a person answers a signal with a movement, and found no difference between the reliable drivers and the accident-prone ones. So he decided to test not a single ability but the whole act of thinking: how a tram driver follows the flow of people and vehicles and guesses who will end up on the tracks.
A toy model of a tram would not do, he explains. Helmsmen who had sailed real ships all their lives got confused when they were shown a collision on models. What matters is not outward resemblance but inner resemblance of the mental state. So the street became a card: down the middle runs a track with the letters A to Z, and along the sides are numbers. A one stands for a pedestrian, a two for a horse, a three for a car, the number showing how many steps it takes per move. Black numbers move along the track, red numbers move towards it. The person turns a crank, a window slides across twelve cards, and they have to name the letters on which a red number will land. Experienced drivers admitted that they felt as if they were on the front platform of their own tram.
The result was simple to calculate: seconds plus ten points for each danger missed. By Münsterberg's estimate, a ten-minute test would screen out roughly a quarter of those now taken on. And he insists that these people are not to blame: in another place they can work excellently.
If you want to know whether a person suits a job, it helps to test the main act of thinking that the job requires, in simplified form, rather than how similar the surroundings look or what a questionnaire says.
About the author
Hugo Münsterberg (1863-1916) was a German psychologist and a pupil of Wilhelm Wundt. At the invitation of William James he moved to Harvard, ran its psychological laboratory, and became one of the first to apply psychological experiments to work, the courtroom and commerce.
All books by this author: Hugo Münsterberg
Terms from the book
- tram driver
- Scott
- Harvard
- Gilbreth
- Parsons: Frank Parsons (1854-1908), an American teacher and public reformer. In 1908 he opened a bureau in Boston where school graduates were helped to choose a profession.
- vocational guidance: Help in choosing a profession that takes account of what a person can do and what they are inclined to, and of what the work itself requires.
- psychotechnics: Münsterberg's word for applied psychology: using knowledge of the mind for practical ends, in work, trade, school and the courtroom.
- reaction time: The time from a signal's appearance to the answering movement, for example from a flash of light to pressing a lever. Laboratories measured it in thousandths of a second.
- bridge: The captain's bridge, the platform above the deck from which the watch officer steers the ship.
- Abbe: Ernst Abbe (1840-1905), a German physicist and optician, head of the Carl Zeiss optical works in Jena. There he introduced the eight-hour working day.
All terms
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