Psychology and Industrial Efficiency eBook

Hugo Münsterberg
This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 219 pages of information about Psychology and Industrial Efficiency.

Psychology and Industrial Efficiency eBook

Hugo Münsterberg
This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 219 pages of information about Psychology and Industrial Efficiency.

In studying the results so far as the memory experiments were concerned, we found that it would be useless to consider the figures with more than 10 digits.  We took the results only of those with 8,9, and 10 digits.  There were 54 possibilities of mistakes.  The smallest number of actual mistakes was 2, the largest, 29.  In the experiment on attention made with the crossing-out of letters, we found that the smallest number of correctly marked letters was 107, the largest number in the six minutes, 272; the smallest number of overlooked letters was 2, the largest, 135; but this last case of abnormal carelessness stood quite isolated.  On the whole, the number of overlooked letters fluctuated between 5 and 60.  If both results, those of the crossed-out and those of the overlooked letters, are brought into relation, we find that the best results were a case of 236 letters marked, with only 2 overlooked, and one of 257 marked, with 4 overlooked.  The very interesting details as to the various types of attention which we see in the distribution of mistakes over the six minutes were not taken into our final table.  The word experiments by which we tested the intelligence showed that no one was able to reproduce more than 22 of the 24 words.  The smallest number of words remembered was 7.  The mistakes in the perception of distances fluctuated between 1 and 14 millimeters; the time for the sorting of the 48 cards, between, 35 and 58 seconds; the association-time for the 6 associated words taken together was between 9 and 21 seconds.  The pointing experiments could not be made use of in this first series, as it was found that quite a number of participants were unable to perform the act with the rapidity demanded.

Several ways were open to make mathematical use of these results.  I preferred the simplest way.  I calculated the grade of the girls for each of these achievements.  The same candidate who stood in the 7th place in the memory experiment was in the 15th place with reference to the number of letters marked, in the 3rd place with reference to the letters overlooked, in the 21st place with reference to the number of word pairs which she had grasped, in the 11th place with reference to the exactitude of space-perception, in the 16th place with reference to the association-time, and in the 6th place with reference to the time of sorting.  As soon as we had all these independent grades, we calculated the average and in this way ultimately gained a common order of grading.  It is evident that this kind of calculation contains accidental factors, especially as a consequence of the fact that we give equal value to every one of these results.  It might be better, for instance, to attribute a higher value to the attention experiment or to the intelligence experiment.  This could be done by multiplying the results of some of these grades by 2 or by 3, which would bring the high or low grade of a girl for a particular function to stronger influence in the final result.  But in this first trial I contented myself with the simplest uniform scheme in order to exclude all arbitrariness, and therefore considered the mere average of all the grades as the expression of the experimental result.

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Psychology and Industrial Efficiency from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.