Psychology and Social Sanity

by Hugo Münsterberg

We city people who are feeding on city-made public opinion forget that we are in the minority, and that the interests of the fifty millions of the rural population are fundamental for the welfare of the whole nation. Moreover, the life of the city itself is most intimately intertwined with the work on the farm; banking and railroading, industrial enterprises and commercial life, are dependent upon the farmers' credit and the farmers' prosperity. The nation is beginning to understand that it would be a calamity indeed if the tempting attractiveness of the city should drain off still more the human material from the village and from the field. The cry “back to the land” goes through the whole world, and this means more than a camping tour in the holidays and some magazine numbers of Country Life in America by the fireplace. Its meaning ought to be that every nation which wants to remain healthy and strong must take care that the obvious advantages of metropolitan life are balanced by the joys and gains of the villager who lacks the shop windows and the exciting turmoil.

Certainly the devices of the city inventor, the telephone and the motor car and a thousand other gifts of the last generation, have overcome much of the loneliness, and the persistent efforts of the states to secure better roads and better schools in the country have enriched and multiplied the values of rural life. Yet the most direct aid is, after all, that which increases the efficiency of farming itself. In this respect, too, we feel the rapid progress throughout the country. The improvements in method which the scientific efforts of all nations have secured are eagerly distributed to the remotest corners. The agents of the governmental Bureau of Agriculture, the agricultural county demonstrators, the rapidly spreading agricultural schools, take care that the farmer's “commonsense” with its backwardness and narrowness be replaced by an insight which results from scientific experiment and exact calculation. Agricultural science, based on physics and chemistry, on botany and zoölogy, has made wonderful strides during the last few decades. It must be confessed that the self-complaisance of the farmer and the power of tradition have offered not a little resistance to the practical application of the knowledge which the agricultural experiments establish, and the blending of the well-known conservative attitude of the farmer with a certain carelessness and deficiency in education has kept the production of the American farm still far below the yielding power which the present status of knowledge would allow. Other nations, more trained in hard labour and painstaking economy and accustomed to most careful rotation of crops, obtain a much richer harvest from the acre, even where the nature of the soil is poor. But the longing of the farmer for the best methods is rapidly growing, too, and in many a state he shows a splendid eagerness to try new ways, to develop new plans, and to progress with the advance of science.

In such an age it seems fair to ask whether the circle of sciences which are made contributory to the efficiency of the agriculturist has been drawn large enough. It is, of course, most important for every farmer to know the soil and whatever may grow on it and feed on it. All the new discoveries as to the power of phosphates to increase the crop or as to the part which protozoa play in the inhibition of fertility, or the influence of parasites on the enemies of the crops and the numberless naturalistic details of this type, are certainly most important. Yet does it not look as if in all the operations which the worker on the land has to perform everything is carefully considered by science, and only the chief thing left out, the worker and his work? He is earnestly advised as to every detail in the order of nature: he learns by what chemical substances to improve the soil, what seeds are to be used, and when they are to be planted, what breeds of animals to raise and how to feed them. But no scientific interest has thrown light on his own activity in planting the seed and gathering the harvest, in picking the fruit and caring for the stock.

No doubt, the agent of some trust has recommended to him the newest machines; but their help still belongs, after all, to the part of outer nature. They are physical apparatus, and even if the farmer uses nowadays dynamite to loosen the soil, all this new-fashioned power yet remains scientific usage of the knowledge of nature. But behind all this physical and chemical material in which and through which the farmer and his men are working stand the farmer himself with his intelligence, and his men themselves with their lack of intelligence. This human factor, this bundle of ideas and volitions and feelings and judgments, must ultimately be the centre of the whole process. There is no machine which can do its best if it is wrongly used, no tool which can be effective if it is not set to work by an industrious will. The human mind has to keep in motion that whole great mechanism of farm life. It is the farmer's foresight and insight which plough and plant and fill the barns. For a long while the average farmer thought about nature, too, that he could know all he needed, if he applied his homemade knowledge. That time has passed, and even he relies on the meteorology telegram of the scientific bureaus rather than on the weather rules of his grandfather. But when it comes to the mental processes which enter into the agricultural work, he would think it queer to consult science. He would not even be aware that there is anything to know. The soil and the seed and even the plough and the harvester are objects about which you can learn. But the attention with which the man is to do his work, the memory, the perception, the ideas which make themselves felt, the emotions and the will which control the whole work, would never be objects about which he would seek new knowledge; they are no problems for him, they are taken for granted.

Yet we have to-day a full-fledged science which does deal with these mental processes. Psychology speaks about real things as much as chemistry, and the laws of mental life may be relied on now more safely than the laws of meteorology. It seems unnatural that those who have the interests of agriculture at heart should turn the attention of the farmer exclusively to the results of the material sciences and ignore completely the thorough, scientific interest in the processes of the mind. To be sure, until recently we had the same shortcoming in industrial enterprises of the factories. Manufacturer and workingman looked as if hypnotized at the machines, forgetting that those wheels of steel were not the only working powers under the factory roof. A tremendous effort was devoted to the study and improvement of the industrial apparatus and of the raw material, while the mental fitness and the mental method of the army of workingmen was dealt with unscientifically and high-handedly. But within the last few years the attention of the industrial world has been seriously turned to the matter-of-course fact that the workman's mind is more important than the machine and the material, if the highest economic output is to be secured. The great movement for scientific management, however much or little its original plans may survive, has certainly once for all convinced the world that the study of the man and his functions ought to be the chief interest of the market, even in our electrical age; and the more modest movement for vocational guidance has emphasized this personal factor from sociological motives. At last the psychologists themselves approached the problem of the worker in the factory, began to examine his individual fitness for his work, and to devise tests in order to select quickly those whose inborn mental capacity makes them particularly adjusted to special lines of work. Above all, they examined the methods by which the individual learned and got his training in the technical activities, they began to determine the exact conditions which secured the greatest amount of the best possible work with the greatest saving of human energy. All this is certainly still at its beginning, but even if the solutions of the problems are still insufficient, the problems themselves will not again be lost sight of. The most obvious acknowledgment of the importance of these demands lies in the fact that already the quack advice of pseudo-psychologists is offered from many sides. The up-to-date manufacturer knows, even if he is not interested in the social duties involved, that the mere economic interest demands a much more serious study of the workingman's mind than any one thought of ten years ago.

This change must finally come into the agricultural circles. The consequences of the usual, or rather invariable neglect, are felt less in agriculture than in industry, because the work is so much more scattered. The harmful effects of poor adjustment and improper training must be noticed more easily where many thousands are crowded together within the walls of the same mill. But it would be an illusion to fancy that the damage and the loss of efficiency are therefore less in the open field than in the narrow factory. On the contrary, the conditions favour the workshop. There everybody stands under constant supervision, and what is still more important, always has the chance for imitation. Every improvement, almost every new trick and every new hand movement which succeeds with one, is taken up by his neighbour and spreads over the establishment. The principle of farm work is isolation. One hardly knows what another is doing, and where several do coöperate, they are generally engaged in different functions. Even where the farmhands work in large groups, the attitude is much less that of team work than of a mere summation of individual workers. In the country as a whole the man who works on the farm has to gather his experience for himself, has to secure every advance for himself, and has to miss the benefit which the social atmosphere of industrial work everywhere furnishes.

It would be utterly misleading to think that the long history of mankind's agricultural pursuits ought to have been sufficient to bring together the necessary experience. The analysis of the vocational activities has given every evidence that even the oldest functions are performed in an impractical, inefficient way. The students of scientific management have demonstrated how the work of the mason, as old as civilization itself, is carried on every day in every land with methods which can be improved at once, as soon as a scientific study of the motions themselves is started. It could hardly be otherwise, and the principle might be illustrated by any chance case. If a girl were left to herself to learn typewriting, the best way would seem to her to be to pick out the letters with her two forefingers. She would slowly seek the right key for each letter and press it down. In this way she would be in the pleasant position of producing a little letter after only half an hour of trial. As soon as she has succeeded with such a first half page, she will see only the one goal of increasing the rapidity and accuracy, and by hard training she will indeed gain steadily in speed and correctness, and after a year she will write rather quickly. Yet she will never succeed in reaching the ideal proficiency. In order to attain the highest point, she ought to have started with an entirely different method. She ought to have begun at once to use all her fingers, and, moreover, to use them without looking at the keyboard. If she had started with this difficult method she would never have succeeded in writing a letter the first day. It would have taken weeks to reach that achievement which the simpler method yields almost at once. But in plodding along on this harder road she would finally outdistance the competitor with the commonsense method and would finally gain the highest degree of efficiency. This is exactly the situation everywhere. Commonsense always grasps for those methods which quickly lead to a modest success, but which can never lead to maximum achievement. On the other hand, up to the days of modern experimental psychology the interest was not focussed on the mental operations involved in industrial life as such. Everything was left to commonsense, and therefore it is not surprising that the farmhand like the workingman in the mill has never hit upon the one method which is best, as all his instincts and natural tendencies had to lead him to the second or third best method, since these alone give immediate results.

A highly educated man who spent his youth in a corn-raising community reports to me the following psychological observation: However industrious all the boys of the village were, one of them was always able to husk about a half as much more corn than any one else. He seemed to have an unusual talent for handling so many more ears than any one of his rivals could manage. Once my friend had a chance to inquire of the man with the marvellous skill how he succeeded in outdoing them so completely, and then he learned that no talent was involved, but a simple psychological device, almost a trick. The worker who husks the ear is naturally accustomed to make his hand and finger movements while his eyes are fixed on them. As soon as one ear is husked, the attention turns to the next, the eyes look around and find the one which best offers itself to be handled next. When the mind, under the control of the eyes, has made its choice, the mental impulse is given to the arms, and the hands take hold of it. Yet it is evident that these manipulations can be carried on just as well without the constant supervision of the eyes. The eye is needed only to find the corn and to direct the impulse of the hands toward picking it up. But the eye is no longer necessary for the detailed movements in husking. Hence it must be possible to perform that act of vision and that choice of the second ear while the hands are still working on the first. The initial stage of the work on the second ear then overlaps the final stages of the work with the first, and this must mean a considerable saving of time.

This was exactly the scheme on which that marvel of the village had struck. He had forced on himself this artificial breaking of the attention, and had trained himself to have his eyes performing their work independent of the activity of the hands. My friend assures me that as soon as he had heard of the trick, there was no difficulty in his imitating it, and immediately the number of ears which he was able to husk in a given time was increased by 30 per cent. The mere immediate instinct would always keep the eye movement and the hand movements coupled together. A certain artificial effort is necessary to overcome this natural coördination. But if this secret scheme had been known to all the boys in the village, ten would have been able to perform what fifteen did. Of course this is an utterly trivial incident, and where my friend husked corn in his boyhood days, to-day probably the cornharvester is doing it more quickly anyhow. But as long as real scientific effort has not been applied toward examining the details, we have to rely on such occasional observations in order at first to establish the principle. Every one knows that just such illustrations might as well be taken from the picking of berries, in which the natural method is probably an absurd waste of energy, and yet which in itself seems so insignificant that up to present days no scientific efforts have been made to find out the ideal methods.

Similar accidental observations are suggested by the well-known experiments with shovelling carried on in the interest of industry, where the shovelling of coal and of pig iron demanded a careful investigation into the best conditions for using the shovel. It was found that it is an unreasonable waste of energy to use the same size and form of tool for lifting the heavy and the light material. With the same size of shovel the iron will make such a heavy load that the energies are exhausted, and the coal will give such a light load that the energies are not sufficiently made use of. It became necessary to determine the ideal load with which the greatest amount of work with the slightest fatigue could be performed, and that demanded a much larger shovel for the light than for the heavy substance. Exactly this situation repeats itself with the spade of the farmer. The conditions are somewhat different, but the principle must be the same. Of course the farmer may use spades of different sizes, but he is far from bringing the product of spade surface and weight to a definite equation. Sometimes he wastes his energies and sometimes he exhausts them. But it is not only a question of the size of shovel or spade. The whole position of the body, the position of the hands, the direction of the attention, the rhythm of the movement, the pauses between the successive actions, the optical judgment as to the place where the spade ought to cut the ground, the distribution of energy, the respiration, and many similar parts of the total psychophysical process demand exact analysis if the greatest efficiency is to be reached. Everybody knows what an amount of attention the golf player has to give to every detail of his movement, and yet it would be easier to discover by haphazard methods the best way to handle the golf stick than to use the spade to the best effect.