Vocational Psychology: Its Problems and MethodsHollingworth, Harry L. (Harry Levi)
Science
Vocational Psychology: Its Problems and Methods
Hollingworth, Harry L. (Harry Levi)
Psychophysiology
It is a common practice for employers, superintendents, agencies, etc., to
request the applicant for a position to send his or her photograph for
inspection. The urgency of some of these requests and the emphasis placed
on them seem to indicate that the photograph is believed to be valuable not
only for its service in revealing the general features but also for some
further and more specific indications which it affords. Very few attempts
seem to have been made to test actually the value of judgments of character
when they are based on photographs rather than on acquaintance. Experiments
recently conducted yield some interesting preliminary data on this
question. The question proposed was: "What relation exists between the
judgments which strangers form, on the basis of an individual's photograph,
and the judgments which acquaintances make on the basis of daily
familiarity and long observation?"[5]
All the members of a group of college women were judged by twenty-four of
their associates, for a number of more or less definite characteristics.
The twenty-five individuals constituting the group were arranged in an
order of merit for each trait, by each of the twenty-four judges. Only one
arrangement, for one trait, was made by any one judge within a given week.
The judgments were thus distributed over a considerable interval so that
judgments for one trait might influence as slightly as possible the
judgments of later traits. All these twenty-four judgments were then
averaged for each trait, and the final position of each person in each
trait thus determined by the consensus of opinion of the judges. This
measure is then a combined estimate on the basis of actual conduct and
behavior.
Photographs of all the members of the group were then secured, all of them
taken by the same photographer, in the same style and size. These
photographs were now judged, by a group of twenty-five men and a group of
twenty-five women, all of whom were _totally unacquainted_ with the
individuals who were being judged. These strangers arranged the photographs
in order of merit for the various traits of character, just as the earlier
group of judges had arranged the names of the members of the group, with
all of whom they were acquainted. The various arrangements of the
photographs were then averaged, yielding for each photograph an average
position in each trait. We thus have three measures of the group of college
women: (1) the judgments of their intimate associates; (2) the judgments
of twenty-five men, on the basis of photographs, and (3) the judgments of
twenty-five women, on the basis of photographs. All of these measures may
be compared with each other, and correlated so as to show their respective
amounts of correspondence. The results are as follows:
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