Applied Psychology: Driving Power of Thought: Being the Third in a Series of Twelve Volumes on the Applications of Psychology to the Problems of Personal and Business EfficiencyHilton, Warren
Science
Applied Psychology: Driving Power of Thought: Being the Third in a Series of Twelve Volumes on the Applications of Psychology to the Problems of Personal and Business Efficiency
Hilton, Warren
Employees -- Recruiting; Psychology, Applied
"First, every girl had to sort a pack of forty-eight cards into four
piles as quickly as possible. The time was measured in fifths of a
second, with an ordinary stop-watch.
[Sidenote: _Test for Accuracy of Movement_]
"The following experiment which referred to the accuracy of movement
impulses demanded that every one try to reach with the point of a
pencil three different points on the table in the rhythm of metronome
beats. On each of these three places a sheet of paper was fixed with
a fine cross in the middle. The pencil should hit the crossing point,
and the marks on the paper indicated how far the movement had fallen
short of the goal. One of these movements demanded the full extension
of the arm and the other two had to be made with half-bent arm. I
introduced this last test because the hitting of the right holes in
the switchboard of the telephone office is of great importance.
[Illustration: TESTING STEADINESS OF MOTOR CONTROL--INVOLUNTARY
MOVEMENT PRIVATE LABORATORY, SOCIETY OF APPLIED PSYCHOLOGY]
"The last individual experiment was an association test. I called six
words, like 'book,' 'house,' 'rain,' and had them speak the first word
which came to their minds. The time was measured in fifths of a second
only, with an ordinary stop-watch, as subtler experiments, for which
hundredths of a second would have to be considered, were not needed.
[Sidenote: _Results of Experiments_]
"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 ten digits. We took the results only of those with
eight, nine and ten digits. There were fifty-four possibilities of
mistakes. The smallest number of actual mistakes was two, the
largest twenty-nine. 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 two, the
largest 135; but this last case of abnormal carelessness stood quite
isolated. On the whole, the number of overlooked letters fluctuated
between five and sixty. If both results, those of the crossed-out and
those of the overlooked letters, are brought into relations, we find
that the best results were a case of 236 letters marked, with only two
overlooked, and one of 257 marked, with four 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
twenty-two of the twenty-four words. The smallest number of words
remembered was seven.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account