IOWA’S REMOVAL LAW
Iowa claims to have in her “removal law” the best recall of all. This law makes it the duty of the attorney general, or, if he fails, of the governor or any six citizens, to take steps in the courts for the summary removal of any officer of a town, city or county who neglects to enforce any law.
EDUCATION
THE BEGINNINGS OF A NEW SCIENCE
If a man about town should drop into the Harvard psychological laboratory and see an operator in rough clothes slowly turning a small crank and calling off disconnected letters of the alphabet while a changing panorama of squares and digits passed by beneath a glass plate, he might think that this was the university’s day off and that here was a new game for the amusement of the employes. But if he should ask “What’s the ante?” and want to sit in, he would soon discover his mistake. He would learn that he was looking at one of the few experiments yet contrived for picking the right man for the right job. He might even be told that this was one of the wee beginnings of a new science which, by systematically placing the psychological experiment at the service of education and industry, may some day prevent the tragic waste of misfit starts in life and go far toward solving the problem of vocational guidance for the schools. The observer would probably be warned, however, against construing what he saw as any endorsement of the social desirability of guiding children into this vocation or that.
The device of the changing panorama is designed to test a man’s fitness to be a motorman on an electric street car. Worked out under the direction of Prof. Hugo Munsterberg,[[5]] it is calculated to discover powers of attention, discrimination and adjustment with respect to rapidly moving objects, some going at different rates of speed parallel to the line of vision, others crossing it from side to side. While Professor Munsterberg undertook to transplant the activity of the motorman into laboratory processes, he did not try to reproduce a miniature of the exact conditions under which the motorman works. As the crank is turned, a series of cards slips by under a glass plate, each card having two heavy lines down its center to represent a street car track. Along the sides of this track, between it and the curbstone at the edge of the card, are scattered various digits which have arbitrarily fixed movements, like the pieces on a chess board, though not so complex. The job of the person being tested is to pick out, as the cards slip by, the precise points on the track which are threatened by the moveable digits in the street. Some of these numbers represent pedestrians, some horses and some automobiles.
[5]. Psychology and Industrial Efficiency, by Hugo Munsterberg. Houghton, Mifflin Co. 320 pp. Price $1.50: by mail of The Survey $1.62.
Tried motormen, says Professor Munsterberg, agree that they really pass through this experiment with the feeling they have on the car. Though the test is not regarded as yet perfected, its results are thought to be fairly satisfactory when compared with actual efficiency in service. Efficiency, in this connection, means chiefly ability to avoid accidents. Some electric railroad companies have as many as 50,000 accident indemnity cases per year which involve an expense amounting in some instances to 13 per cent of the annual gross earnings. Professor Munsterberg believes that it may be quite advantageous later on to subject applicants for the position of motorman to tests based on the principle involved in the one here described. Even in this inadequate form, he thinks, the test would be sufficient to exclude perhaps one-fourth of those who are nowadays accepted for service.
In a public address recently Leonard P. Ayres, director of the Division of Education of the Russell Sage Foundation, brought together all the psychological tests in vocational guidance which, so far as he has been able to discover, are being used in any completed form. Besides the simpler tests for vision, hearing and color discrimination to which pilots, ship officers and railroad employes are usually subjected, there are only three, he said, which have for their object the more difficult task of selecting from among all the applicants those best fitted to perform the work. One of these is Professor Munsterberg’s test for motormen.
Another is a test used in a bicycle ball factory, where girls inspect the small polished steel balls for flaws by rolling them over and over on one hand with the fingers of the other and examining them under a strong light. S. E. Thompson, the employer, soon recognized that the quality most necessary in the girls, besides endurance and industry, was a quick power of perception accompanied by quick responsive action. He therefore subjected his girls to the laboratory test which measures in thousandths of a second the time needed to react on an impression with the quickest possible movement. The final outcome was that thirty-five girls did the work formerly done by 120; the accuracy of the work was increased by 66 per cent; the wages of the girls were doubled; the working day decreased from 10½ to 8½ hours; and the profits of the factory were increased.