This mental prepossession may at times have quite different and curious results. When, for instance, the goal to be reached is given, when the answer may be looked up in the back of the book, it is surprising what peculiar and irrational steps will be taken to secure and justify the answer so given. This is all the more striking when the answer happens to be wrong; however simply such error may be discovered, the prepossessed mind will work away until by a more or less roundabout procedure the desired answer is reached. A noted professor of chemistry has an apt illustration of such a case. In a chemical test his assistant by mistake referred the class to the wrong bottle, so that the substance which the correct liquid would have dissolved could not be at all dissolved in the liquid actually used. However, on the professor's next round in his laboratory nearly every student assured him that the substance had dissolved, and a few went so far as to describe the precise manner of its dissolution.
It is quite clear that illustrations of mental prepossession, as also of inertia, may be found in many of the industries and occupations of life. The bicycle has added a very characteristic one. At a certain stage in the acquisition of the art of cycling, there comes a time when every obstacle and irregularity in the road absorbs the attention of the rider with a fascination that is quite irresistible. The rider is so possessed with the idea that he or she is going to run into the post or the curb or a rut or another vehicle, that the dreaded calamity may actually ensue. When the attention can be directed to the clear pathway, and the obstacles driven out from the focus of attention, the difficulty is surmounted. So in jumping or running and in other athletic trials, the entertainment of the notion of a possible failure to reach the mark lessens the intensity of one's effort, and prevents the accomplishment of one's best. He who hesitates is lost, because the hesitation makes possible the suggestion of a failure, the prepossession by a sense of difficulty.
II
Some of the illustrations of prepossession are somewhat trivial; others more important, but perhaps not so definite as might be desired. It is seldom that an instance of this propensity can be pointed out in which an accurate and quantitative comparison may be made between the possessed and the unpossessed mind. One such illustration, which seems to me comprehensive and significant, is worthy of more detailed record.[11] It is derived from the experience of the United States Census office in 1890, in tabulating the returns of the enumeration by means of machines specially devised for this purpose. I give an account of the manipulation of these machines in the words of one who had an intimate acquaintance with their use, and add italics to emphasize the points of special psychological significance.
"The adoption of Mr. Hollerith's tabulating machine for counting the population of the country according, at one and the same time, to sex, color, age, marital condition, nationality, occupation or profession, language and school attendance presented an entirely novel problem to the office. The machines having never been used for any purpose, there was no previous experience by which to act or on which to predicate results. The necessity was upon the office of employing for a very limited time (ninety days) at least five hundred people for this work alone, in addition to the one thousand who could be taken from other branches of the work and placed on this one. Every one, including Mr. Hollerith himself, felt that the rapid and accurate use of the punching machines called for a degree of cultivated intelligence not possessed by every clerk. So much for the mental attitude.
"The clerks (an instructor for every twenty) were taught to edit the family schedules from which the count was to be made, thus learning thoroughly how to read and classify the returns. In order to accommodate the returns to the capacity of a punching machine, a great variety of symbols were adopted for occupations and professions: thus Ad was used for farmer: Ac for farm hands: Kd for merchants: Gd for agents, etc., through twenty-four two-columned octavo pages of ordinary type. Some one symbol must be used for each occupation recorded, and the use of the symbols must be learned, and, for rapid work, they must be committed to memory.[12] After five weeks of editing, one by one, the most reliable and intelligent workers were set to use the punching machines. The task is much like that of using a typewriter, substituting for keys a movable punch which passes through lettered holes, and in place of the forty keys of an ordinary typewriter, about two hundred and fifty holes are to be learned.
"Mr. Hollerith set the number of cards for a day's work at 550. (Each finished card contained, on the average, 10 holes.) It was two weeks before that number of cards was reached by any clerk, and that only in exceptional cases. Then the entire force of the division was set to work. In two weeks most of them had reached five hundred, and the average was daily increasing. These clerks worked at first from edited schedules; that is, those on which had been written the symbols to be punched on the machine. A roll of honor was made out daily showing the highest records, and in a week the clerks were doing from six hundred to fifteen hundred a day, but at a great cost of nervous force. So severe was the nervous strain that complaints were made to the Secretary of the Interior, who forbade any further posting of daily reports, and instead an order was posted that no clerk was required to do more than such a day's work as he or she could readily perform, and that no arbitrary number was required of any one.
"After the work was well under way about two hundred new clerks were put into one room and scattered through the force already at work. They had no experience with schedules, knew nothing of the symbols, had never seen the machines. They saw those around them working easily and rapidly, and in THREE DAYS SEVERAL OF THEM HAD DONE FIVE HUNDRED, IN A WEEK NEARLY EVERY ONE, while the general average was rising. There was no longer any question of nervous strain, and one of these temporary clerks the day before she left beat the record by doing 2,230. I think the influence of the mental attitude quite as remarkable in the matter of their doing the work easily as in that of doing it rapidly. During the first month many were actually sick from overwork when doing seven hundred, while after that time the idea that the work was unusually trying was never referred to. Another significant fact is that after the posting of the daily record was abolished there was no falling off in the daily average, as had been anticipated, while complaints of overwork necessarily ceased."
It is thus demonstrated that an unskilled clerk, with an environment proving the possibility of a task and suggesting its easy accomplishment, can in three days succeed in doing what a skilled clerk, with a preliminary acquaintance of five weeks with the symbols to be used, could do only after two weeks' practice; and this because the latter, doubtless not a whit inferior in ability, had been led to regard his task as difficult.