interests of economy will, therefore, be served by such considerations
of group psychology only if the employment, not of a single person,
but of a large number, is in question, as it is most probable that the
average character will show itself in a sufficient degree as soon as
many members of the group are involved.
Even in this case the presupposition ought to be that the average
characteristics found out with scientific exactitude by statistical
and experimental methods, and not that they are simply deduced from
superficial impressions. I have found that just this race
psychological diagnosis is frequently made in factories with great
superficiality. Some of the American industrial centres offer
extremely favorable conditions for the comparative study of
nationality. I have visited many manufacturing establishments in which
almost all workers are immigrants from foreign countries and in which
up to twenty different nationalities are represented. The employment
officers there easily develop some psychological theories on the
basis of which they are convinced that they are selecting the men with
especial skill, knowing for each in which department he will be most
successful. They consider it settled that for a particular kind of
activity the Italians are the best, and for another, the Irish, and
for a third, the Hungarians, and for a fourth, the Russian Jews. But
as soon as these factory secrets have been revealed, you may be
surprised to find that in the next factory a decidedly different
classification of the wage-earners is in force. In a gigantic
manufacturing concern, I received the definite information that the
Swedish laborers are preferable wherever a steady eye is needed, and
in another large factory on the same street I was assured that just
the Swedes are unfit for such work. Sometimes this diversity of
opinion is the result of different points of view. In one factory in
which a certain industrial operation is rather dangerous, they told me
that they took no southern Europeans, especially no Italians and
Greeks, because they are too hasty and careless in their movements,
while they gladly filled the places with Irishmen. In a quite similar
factory, on the other hand, they had a prejudice against the Irishmen
alone for this work, because the Irish laborers are too willing to run
a risk and to expose themselves to danger. Probably both
psychological observations are on the whole correct, but in the first
factory only the one and in the second factory only the other was
recognized. Much more thorough statistical inquiries than those which
as yet exist, especially as to the actual differences of wages and
piecework for wage-earners of various nationalities, would have to
furnish a basis for such race psychological statements, until the time
arrives when the psychological experiment comes to its own.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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