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
"The mistakes in the perception of distances fluctuated between
one and fourteen millimeters; the time for the sorting of the
forty-eight cards, between thirty-five and fifty-eight seconds; the
association-time for the six associated words taken together was
between nine and twenty-one 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
seventh place in the memory experiment was in the fifteenth place with
reference to the number of letters marked, in the third place with
reference to the letters overlooked, in the twenty-first place with
reference to the number of word pairs which she had grasped, in the
eleventh place with reference to the exactitude of space-perception,
in the sixteenth place with reference to the association-time, and in
the sixth 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. * * *
"With this average rank list, we compared the practical results of the
telephone company after three months had passed. These three months
had been sufficient to secure at least a certain discrimination
between the best, the average, and the unfit. The result of this
comparison was on the whole satisfactory. First, the skeptical
telephone company had mixed with the class a number of women who had
been in the service for a long while, and had even been selected as
teachers in the telephone school. I did not know, in figuring out
the results, which of the participants in the experiments these
particularly gifted outsiders were. If the psychological experiments
had brought the result that these individuals who stood so high in
the estimation of the telephone company ranked low in the laboratory
experiment, it would have reflected strongly on the reliability of the
laboratory method. The results showed, on the contrary, that these
women who had proved most able in practical service stood at the
top of our list. Correspondingly, those who stood the lowest in our
psychological rank list had in the mean time been found unfit in
practical service, and had either left the company of their own accord
or else had been eliminated. The agreement, to be sure, was not a
perfect one. One of the list of women stood rather low in the
psychological list, while the office reported that so far she had done
fair work in the service, and two others, to whom the psychological
laboratory gave a good testimonial were considered by the telephone
office as only fair.
[Sidenote: _Theory and Practice_]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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