In the proposals to direct individuals into their proper life careers, the advocates have quite commonly failed to make sufficient allowance for the overwhelming importance of incentive, motive, attitude and purpose, and the large rôle they play in determining the possible achievements of a nervous system. It is well enough to test the memory span, attention type, and reaction time of an applicant for a job as motorman on a street car. It is still more important to learn the strength of his instinctive competitive reactions, to measure the degree of his belief in hell or in socialism, or the firmness of his intention to effect the higher education of his children. By "more important" I mean better calculated to reveal his fitness for the work. I would rather trust my life and limb to a motorman whose feeble memory span is reënforced by a loyal devotion to the comfort of his grandmother than to a mnemonic prodigy whose chief actuating motive in life is to be a "good fellow."
These comments should not be construed as an underestimation of the usefulness of the simple intellectual test as a preliminary precaution in engaging employees or in detecting extreme departures from the mode or average. The use of such tests in discovering such departures and variants as idiocy, imbecility and general stupidity has been amply justified by experience with them. But we are primarily concerned here with the determination of individual differences and qualifications within the large middle range of the curve of distribution. My conviction is that, in the case of the average individual, we must either:
1. Demonstrate that these important non-rational determinants of vocational aptitude and satisfaction correlate very, very closely with more strictly intellectual capacity;
2. Postpone the entire work of vocational guidance in these cases, on the basis of psychological examination, until that distant day when these characteristics can be approached by means of scales and norms; or
3. Otherwise guidance must rest, as it now largely does in democratic communities, on the broad knowledge of opportunity afforded by industrial and pre-vocational training, the encouragement of thorough and systematic self-scrutiny, and the method of repeated trials.
The first of these alternatives has scarcely been attempted; the second will probably not occur in our immediate generation; the third we have had always with us.
It is important to note that the employments here referred to are not "blind alley" occupations. They all offer possibilities of promotion and advancement which in the main are so open to competition that the individual inevitably tends to reach that level of responsibility, independence, opportunity and remuneration which his total equipment merits. It is also important that promotion or advancement by no means implies the continued use of the particular traits which distinguished the individual from his fellows on the lower levels of achievement. Thus the boy who enters business as a responsible clerk may often move on through the work of sales management, buying, general promotion, superintendency, and ultimate partnership. The capable artisan or mechanic may proceed from the work of general helper to that of special expert workman, foreman, superintendent, inspector, contractor, and commissioner of public works or postmaster general. Marked boyhood propensities for wood-work indicate neither that the lad is capable of moving through these very diverse steps of promotion, nor, on the other hand, that he must forever remain a journeyman or an expert workman.
Progress in these vocations does not then imply, in fact almost never does imply, merely increasing the quantity or quality of the work at which one starts. The promotion of a teacher is often from teaching and disciplining classes satisfactorily, to clerical assistance in the principal's office, the principalship, general school superintendence, administrative counselling and public lecturing, or the college or national presidency. The case of the teacher of biology who becomes the principal of a commercial high school is not at all unprecedented. For occupations of this character and for this main group of average individuals it is indeed hopeless to seek for vocational psychographs. It is here if anywhere that the general principle holds that one who does anything well could have done almost anything else well if he had cared to try. But the degree to which one cares is not measured by reaction time or cancellation tests. The question of the degree to which ability of one sort implies ability of other sorts is one of the several matters to be considered in a later chapter.
This fivefold division of the vocations is based on the degree to which the tasks involved require complete and normal psychological equipment. The foregoing consideration of these five main occupational groups may be said to constitute a brief summary of the present outstanding results of vocational psychology. The mentally incompetent can easily be discovered at an early age by the use of the graded intelligence scales. Their subsequent direction into forms of useful work appropriate to their degree of defect is not a psychological enterprise, but, rather, a civic obligation and industrial economy. The apparently small group of individuals who are by original nature fitted for the pursuit of work involving special or unit characters will, whether otherwise incompetent or generally capable, commonly demonstrate their unique abilities without the application of psychological technique. The much larger group of unspecialized workers, requiring rather higher degrees of mental competence, may be chosen without difficulty with the aid of the standard mental scales and norms, their academic records, and the judgments of their associates. These may be guided into such tasks as involve mainly a moderate degree of intellectual capacity and make no notable demand for the exercise of the social and moral virtues. The vocational psychology of the future will find its chief problems in dealing with the numerous and permanent tasks requiring workers who, in addition to their varying degrees of strictly intellectual proficiency, possess particular or complete instinctive, emotional and volitional equipment, and who are amenable to those social and educational agencies which seek to impress upon them the moral virtues of their community and age.