the psychophysical conditions appeared to us the most momentous aid
toward the heightening of efficiency. But even if the superfluous,
unfit, and interfering movement impulses were eliminated and the
conditions of work completely adjusted to the demands of psychology,
there would still remain a large number of possibilities through which
productiveness might be greatly decreased, or at least kept far below
the possible maximum of efficiency. For instance, even the best
adapted labor might be repeated to the point of exhaustion, at which
the workman and the work would be ruined. Fatigue and restoration
accordingly demand especial consideration. In a similar way emotions
may be conditions of stimulation or interference, and no one ought to
underestimate the importance of higher motives, intellectual,
æsthetic, and moral motives, in their bearing on the psychophysical
impulses of the laborer. If these higher demands are satisfied, the
whole system gains a new tonus, and if they are disappointed, the
irritation of the mental machinery may do more harm than any break in
the physical machine at which the man is working. In short, we must
still look in various directions to become aware of all the relations
between the psychological factors and the economic output. We may
begin with one question which plays a large, perhaps too large, rôle
in the economic and especially in the popular economic literature. I
refer to the problem of monotony of labor.
In the discourses of our time on the lights and shades of our modern
industrial life, all seem to agree that the monotony of industrial
labor ought to be entered on the debit side of the ledger of
civilization. Since the days when factories began to spring up, the
accusation that through the process of division of labor the
industrial workingman no longer has any chance to see a whole product,
but that he has to devote himself to the minutest part of a part, has
remained one of the matter-of-course arguments. The part of a part
which he has to cut or polish or shape in endless repetition without
alteration cannot awake any real interest. This complete division of
labor has to-day certainly gone far beyond anything which Adam Smith
described, and therefore it now appears undeniable that the method
must create a mental starvation which presses down the whole life of
the laborer, deprives it of all joy in work, and makes the factory
scheme a necessary but from the standpoint of psychology decidedly
regrettable evil. I have become more and more convinced that the
scientific psychologist is not obliged to endorse this judgment of
popular psychology.
To be sure the problem of division of labor, as it appears in the
subdivision of manufacture, is intimately connected with many other
related questions. It quickly leads to the much larger question of
division of labor in our general social structure, which is necessary
for our social life with its vocational and professional demands, and
which undoubtedly narrows to a certain degree every individual in the
completeness of his human desires. No man in modern society can devote
himself to everything for which his mind may long. But as a matter of
course these large general problems of civilization lie outside of the
realm of our present inquiry. In another direction the problem of
monotony comes very near to the question of fatigue. But we must see
clearly that these two questions are not identical and that we may
discuss monotony here without arguing the problem of fatigue. The
frequent repetition of the same movement or of the same mental
activity certainly may condition an objective fatigue, which may
interfere with the economic output, but this is not the real meaning
of the problem of monotony. About fatigue we shall speak later. Here
we are concerned exclusively with that particular psychological
attitude which we know as subjective dislike of uniformity and lack of
change in the work. Within these limits the question of monotony is,
indeed, frequently misunderstood in its economic significance.
Let us not forget that the outsider can hardly ever judge when work
offers or does not offer inner manifoldness. If we do not know and
really understand the subject, we are entirely unable to discriminate
the subtler inner differences. The shepherd knows every sheep, though
the passer-by has the impression that they all look alike. This
inability to recognize the differences which the man at work feels
distinctly shows itself even in the most complicated activities. The
naturalist is inclined to fancy that the study of a philologist must
be endlessly monotonous, and the philologist is convinced that it must
be utterly tiresome to devote one's self a life lone to some minute
questions of natural science. Only when one stands in the midst of the
work is he aware of its unlimited manifoldness, and feels how every
single case is somehow different from every other.
In the situation of the industrial workman, the attention may be
directed toward some small differences which can only be recognized
after long familiarity with the particular field. Certainly this field
is small, as every workman must specialize, but whether he
manufactures a whole machine, or only a little wheel, makes no
essential difference in the attitude. The attraction of newness is
quickly lost also in the case of the most complicated machine. On the
other hand, the fact that such a machine has an independent function
does not give an independent attraction to the work. Or we might
rather say, as far as the work on a whole machine is of independent
value, the work of perfecting the little wheel is an independent task
also and offers equal value by its own possibilities. Whoever has
recognized the finest variations among the single little wheels and
has become aware of how they are produced sometimes better, sometimes
worse, sometimes more quickly, sometimes more slowly, becomes as much
interested in the perfecting of the minute part as another man in the
manufacture of the complex machine. It is true that the laborer does
not feel interest in the little wheel itself, but in the production of
the wheel. Every new movement necessary for it has a perfectly new
chance and stands in new relations, which have nothing to do with the
repetition. As a matter of course this interest in the always new best
possible method of production is still strongly increased where
piece-wages are introduced. The laborer knows that the amount of his
earning depends upon the rapidity with which he finishes faultless
products. Under this stimulus he is in a continuous race with himself,
and thus has every reason to prefer the externally uniform and
therefore perfectly familiar work to another kind which may bring
alternation, but which also brings ever new demands.
For a long while I have tried to discover in every large factory which
I have visited the particular job which from the standpoint of the
outsider presents itself as the most tiresome possible. As soon as I
found it, I had a full frank talk with the man or woman who performed
it and earnestly tried to get self-observational comment. My chief aim
was to bring out how far the mere repetition, especially when it is
continued through years, is felt as a source of discomfort. I may
again point to a few chance illustrations. In an electrical factory
with many thousands of employees I gained the impression that the
prize for monotonous work belonged to a woman who packs incandescent
lamps in tissue paper. She wraps them from morning until night, from
the first day of the year to the last, and has been doing that for
the last 12 years. She performs this packing process at an average
rate of 13,000 lamps a day. The woman has reached about 50,000,000
times for the next lamp with one hand and with the other to the little
pile of tissue sheets and then performed the packing. Each lamp
demands about 20 finger movements. As long as I watched her, she was
able to pack 25 lamps in 42 seconds, and only a few times did she need
as many as 44 seconds. Every 25 lamps filled a box, and the closing of
the box required a short time for itself. She evidently took pleasure
in expressing herself fully about her occupation. She assured me that
she found the work really interesting, and that she constantly felt an
inner tension, thinking how many boxes she would be able to fill
before the next pause. Above all, she told me that there is continuous
variation. Sometimes she grasps the lamp or paper in a different way,
sometimes the packing itself does not run smoothly, sometimes she
feels fresher, sometimes less in the mood for the work, and there is
always something to observe and something to think about.
This was the trend which I usually found. In some large machine works
I sought for a long time before I found the type of labor which seemed
to me the most monotonous. I finally settled on a man who was feeding
an automatic machine which was cutting holes in metal strips and who
simply had to push the strips slowly forward; only when the strip did
not reach exactly the right place, he could stop the automatic machine
by a lever. He made about 34,000 uniform movements daily and had been
doing that for the past 14 years. But he gave me the same account,
that the work was interesting and stimulating, while he himself made
the impression of an intelligent workingman. At the beginning, he
reported, the work had sometimes been quite fatiguing, but later he
began to like it more and more. I imagined that this meant that at
first he had to do the work with full attention and that the complex
movement had slowly become automatic, allowing him to perform it like
a reflex movement and to turn his thoughts to other things. But he
explained to me in full detail that this was not the case, that he
still feels obliged to devote his thoughts entirely to the work at
hand, and that he is able only under these conditions to bring in the
daily wage which he needs for his family, as he is paid for every
thousand holes. But he added especially that it is not only the wage
which satisfies him, but that he takes decided pleasure in the
activity itself.
On the other hand, I not seldom found wage-earners, both men and
women, who seemed to have really interesting and varied activities and
who nevertheless complained bitterly over the monotonous, tiresome
factory labor. I became more and more convinced that the feeling of
monotony depends much less upon the particular kind of work than upon
the special disposition of the individual. It cannot be denied that
the same contrast exists in the higher classes of work. We find
school-teachers who constantly complain that it is intolerably
monotonous to go on teaching immature children the rudiments of
knowledge, while other teachers with exactly the same task before them
are daily inspired anew by the manifoldness of life in the classroom.
We find physicians who complain that one case in their practice is
like another, and judges who despair because they always have to deal
with the same petty cases, while other judges and physicians feel
clearly that every case offers something new and that the repetition
as such is neither conspicuous nor disagreeable. We find actors who
feel it a torture to play the same rôle every evening for several
weeks, and there are actors who, as one of the most famous actresses
assured me after the four hundredth performance of her star rôle,
repeat their parts many hundred times with undiminished interest,
because they feel that they are always speaking to new audiences. It
seems not impossible that this individual difference might be
connected with deeper-lying psychophysical conditions. I approached
the question, to be sure, with a preconceived theory. I fancied that
certain persons had a finer, subtler sense for differences than others
and that they would recognize a manifoldness of variations where the
others would see only uniformity. In that I silently presupposed that
the perception of the uniformity must be something disturbing and
disagreeable and the recognition of variations something which
stimulates the mind pleasantly. But when I came to examine the
question experimentally, I became convinced that such a hypothesis is
erroneous, and if I interpret the results correctly, I should say that
practically the opposite relation exists. Those who recognize the
uniformities readily are not the ones who are disturbed by them.
I proceeded in the following way. To make use of a large number of
subjects accustomed to intelligent self-observation, I made the first
series of experiments with the regular students in my psychology
lecture course in Harvard University. Last winter I had more than four
hundred men students in psychology who all took part in that
introductory series. The task which I put before them in a number of
variations was this: I used lists of words of which half, or one more
or less than half, belonged to one single conceptional group. There
were names of flowers, or cities, or poets, or parts of the body, or
wild animals, and so on. The remaining words of the list, on the other
hand, were without inner connection and without similarity. The
similar and the dissimilar words were mixed. The subjects listened to
such a list of words and then had to decide without counting from the
mere impression whether the similar words were more or equally or less
numerous than the dissimilar words. In other experiments the
arrangement was that two different lists were read and that in the two
lists a larger or smaller number of words were repeated from the first
list. Here, too, the subjects had to decide from the mere impression
whether the repeated words were in the majority or not. In every
experiment the judgment referred to those words which belonged to the
same group and which were in this sense uniform, or to the repeated
words, and it had to be stated with reference to them whether their
number was larger, equal to, or smaller than the different words. If
all replies had been correct, the judgment would have been 40 per cent
equal, 30 per cent smaller, and 30 per cent larger, as they were
arranged in perfect symmetry. As soon as I had the results from the
students, we figured out for every one what number he judged equal,
smaller, or greater. Then we divided the equal judgments by 2 and
added half of them to the larger and half to the smaller judgments. In
this way we were enabled by one figure to characterize the whole
tendency of the individual. We found that in the whole student body
there was a tendency to underestimate the number of the similar or of
the repeated words. The majority of my students had a stronger
impression from the varying objects than from those which were in a
certain sense equal. Yet this tendency appeared in very different
degrees and for about a fourth of the participants the opposite
tendency prevailed. They received a stronger impression from the
uniform ideas.
I had coupled with these experimental tests a series of questions, and
had asked every subject to express with fullest possible self-analysis
his practical attitude to monotony in life. Every one had to give an
account whether in the small habits of life he liked variety or
uniform repetition. He was asked especially as to his preferences for
or against uniformity in the daily meals, daily walks, and so on.
Furthermore he had to report how far he is inclined to stick to one
kind of work or to alternate his work, how far he welcomes the idea
that vocational work may bring repetition, and so on. And finally I
tried to bring the results of these self-observations into relation
with the results of those experiments. It was here that the opposite
of the hypothesis which I had presupposed suggested itself to me with
surprising force. I found that just the ones who perceive the
repetition least hate it most, and that those who have a strong
perception of the uniform impressions and who overestimate their
number are the ones who on the whole welcome repetition in life.
As soon as I had reached this first experimental result, I began to
see how it might harmonize with known psychological facts. Some years
ago a Hungarian psychologist[37] showed by interesting experiments
that if a series of figures is exposed to the eye for a short fraction
of a second, equal digits are seen only once, and he came to the
conclusion that equal impressions in such a series inhibit each other.
In the Harvard laboratory we varied these experiments by eliminating
the spatial separation of those numbers. In our experiments the digits
did not stand side by side, but followed one another very quickly in
the same place.[38] Similar experiments we made with colors and so on.
Here, too, we found that quickly succeeding equal or very similar
impressions have a tendency to inhibit each other or to fuse with
each other. Where such an inhibition occurs, we probably ought to
suppose that the perception of the first impression exhausts the
psychical disposition for this particular mental experience. The
psychophysical apparatus becomes for a moment unable to arouse the
same impression once more.
The above described new experiments suggest to me that this inhibition
of equal or similar impressions is found unequally developed in
different individuals. They possess a different tendency to temporary
exhaustion of psychophysical dispositions. There are evidently persons
who after they have received an impression are unable immediately to
seize the same impression again. Their attention and their whole inner
attitude fails. But there are evidently other persons for whom, on the
contrary, the experience of an impression is a kind of inner
preparation for arousing the same or a similar impression. In their
case the psychophysical dispositions become stimulated and excited,
and therefore favor the repetition. If, as in our experiments, the
task is simply to judge the existence of equal or similar impressions
without any strain of attention, the one group of persons must
underestimate the number of the equal impressions because many words
are simply inhibited in their minds and remain neglected, the other
groups of persons must from their mental dispositions overestimate the
number of similar words. From here we have to take one step more. If
these two groups of persons have to perform a task in which it is
necessary that not a single member of a series of repetitions be
overlooked, it is clear that the two groups must react in a very
different way. Now a perfect perception of every single member is
forced on them. Those who grasp equal impressions easily, and who are
prepared beforehand for every new repetition by their inner
dispositions, will follow the series without strain and will
experience the repetition itself with true satisfaction. On the other
hand, those in whom every impression inhibits the readiness to receive
a repetition, and whose inner energy for the same experience is
exhausted, must feel it as a painful and fatiguing effort if they are
obliged to turn their attention to one member after another in a
uniform series. This mental torture is evidently the displeasure which
such individuals call the dislike of monotony in their work. Whether
this theoretical view is correct, we have to determine by future
studies. In our Harvard laboratory we have now proceeded from such
preparatory mass experiments to subtle investigations on a small
number of persons well trained in psychological self-observation with
whom the conditions of the experiment can be varied in many
directions.[39]
It would seem probable that such experiments might also win
psychotechnical significance. A short series of tests which would have
to be adapted to the special situations, and which for the simple
wage-earner would have to be much easier than those sketched above,
would allow it to be determined beforehand whether an individual will
suffer from repetition in work. Even if we abstract from arguments of
social reform and consider exclusively the economic significance, it
must seem important that labor which involves much repetition be
performed by men and women whose mental dispositions favor an easy
grasp of successive uniform impressions. Experimentation could secure
the selection of the fit workmen and the complaint of monotony would
disappear. The same selection could be useful in the opposite
direction, as many economic occupations, especially in our time of
automatic machines, demand a quick and often rhythmical transition
from one activity to another. It is evident that those whose natural
dispositions make every mental excitement a preparation not for the
identical but for the contrasting stimulation will be naturally
equipped for this kind of economic tasks.
XVII
ATTENTION AND FATIGUE
The problem of monotony may lead us on to other conditions through
which attention is hindered and the product of labor thereby
decreased. The psychologist naturally first thinks of external
distractions of attention. If he turns to practical studies of the
actual economic life, he is often decidedly surprised to find how
little regard is given to this psychophysical factor. In industrial
establishments in which the smallest disturbance in the machine is at
once remedied by a mechanic in order that the greatest possible
economic effect may be secured, frequently nobody takes any interest
in the most destructive disturbances which unnecessarily occur in the
subtlest part of the factory mechanism, namely, the attention
apparatus of the laborers. Such an interference with attention must,
for instance, be recognized when the workingman, instead of devoting
himself to one complex function, has to carry out secondary movements
which appear to be quite easily performed and not to hinder him in his
chief task. Often his own feeling may endorse this impression. Of
course the individual differences in this direction are very great.
The faculty of carrying on at the same time various independent
functions is unequally distributed and the experiment can show this
clearly. It is also well known from practical life that some men can
easily go on dictating to a stenographer while they are affixing their
signature to several hundred circular letters, or can continue their
fluent lecture while they are performing experimental demonstrations.
With others such a side activity continually interrupts the chief
function. Then some succeed better than others in securing a certain
automatism of the accessory function to such a point that its special
acts do not come to consciousness at all. For example, I watched a
laborer who was constantly engaged in a complicated technical
performance, and he seemed to give to it his full attention.
Nevertheless he succeeded in moving a lever on an automatic machine
which stood near by whenever a certain wheel had made fifty
revolutions. During all his work he kept counting the revolutions
without being conscious of any idea of number. A system of motor
reactions had become organized which remained below the threshold of
consciousness and which produced only at the fiftieth recurrence the
conscious psychical impulse to perform the lever movement. Yet whether
the talent for such simultaneous mastery of independent functions be
greater or smaller and the demand more or less complex, in every case
the principal action must be hampered by the side issue. To be sure,
it may sometimes be economically more profitable to allow the
hindrance to the chief work in order to save the expense of an extra
man to do the side work. In most cases, however, such a consideration
is not involved; it is simply an ignoring of the psychological
situation. As the accessory work seems easy, its hindering influence
on other functions is practically overlooked. Psychological laboratory
experiments have shown in many different directions that simultaneous
independent activities always disturb and inhibit one another.
We must not forget that even the conversations of the laborers belong
in this psychophysical class. Where a continuous strain of attention
has produced a state of fatigue, a short conversation will bring a
certain relief and relaxation, and the words which the speaker hears
in reply will produce a general stimulation of psychical energy for
the moment. Moreover, the mere existence of the social conversational
intercourse will raise the general emotional mood, and this feeling of
social pleasure may be the source from which may spring new
psychophysical powers. Nevertheless the fundamental fact, after all,
is that any talking during the labor, so far as it is not necessary
for the work itself, surely involves a distraction of attention. Here,
too, the individual is not conscious of the effect. He feels certain
that he can perform his task just as well, and even the piece-worker,
who is anxious to earn as much as possible, is convinced that he does
not retard himself by conversation. But the experiments which have
been carried on in establishments with scientific management speak
decidedly against such a supposition. A tyrannical demand for silence
would, of course, be felt as cruelty, and no suggestion of a jail-like
discipline would be wise in the case of industrial labor, for evident
psychological reasons. But various factories in rearranging their
establishments according to the principles of scientific management
have changed the positions of the workmen so that conversations become
more difficult or impossible. The result reported seems to be
everywhere a significant increase of production. The individual
concentrates his mind on the task with an intensity which seems beyond
his reach as long as the inner attitude is adjusted to social contact.
The help which is rendered by the feeling of social coöperation, on
the other hand, is not removed by the mere abstaining from speaking.
Interesting psychopedagogical experiments have, indeed, demonstrated
that working in a common room produces better results than isolated
activity. This is not true of the most brilliant, somewhat nervous
school children, who achieve in their own room at home more than in
the classroom. But for the average, which almost alone is in question
for life in the factory, the consciousness of common effort is a
source of psychophysical reinforcement. This evidently remains
effective when the workingmen can see one another, even if the
arrangement of the seats precludes the possibility of chatting during
the work.
However, by far the more important cause of distraction of attention
lies in those disturbances which come from without. Here again the
chief interest ought to be attached to those interferences which the
workman himself no longer feels as such. In a great printing-shop a
woman who was occupied with work which demanded her fullest attention
was seated at her task in an aisle where trucking was done. Removing
this operator to a quiet corner caused an increase of 25 per cent in
her work.[40] To be sure there are many such disturbances in factory
life which can hardly be eliminated with the technical means of
to-day. For instance, the noise of the machines, which in many
factories makes it impossible to communicate except by shouting, must
be classed among the real psychological interferences in spite of the
fact that the laborers themselves usually feel convinced that they no
longer notice it at all. Still more disturbing are strong rhythmical
sounds, such as heavy hammer blows which dominate the continuous
noises, as they force on every individual consciousness a
psychophysical rhythm of reaction which may stand in strong contrast
to that of a man's own work. From the incessant inner struggle of the
two rhythms, the one suggested by the labor, the other by the external
intrusion, quick exhaustion becomes unavoidable.
If it were our purpose to elaborate a real system of psychological
economics, we should have to proceed here to a careful study of the
influences of fatigue on the industrial achievement. We should have to
discuss the various kinds of fatigue and exhaustion, the conditions of
restoration, and the whole group of related problems of psychophysics.
But this is the one field which has been thoroughly ploughed over by
science and by practical life in the course of the last decades. No
new suggestion and no new hint of the importance of the problem is
needed here. Our short discussion was planned to be confined to those
regions which have not been worked up in systematic investigations
and for which new devices seemed desirable. Hence we do not reproduce
here the rich material of facts which the physiologists and
psychophysicists have brought together in the last half-century, the
importance of which for industrial labor is perfectly evident.
Moreover, the practical applications and the insight into the social
needs have transformed the factories themselves into one big
laboratory in which the problem of fatigue has been studied by
practical experiments. The problem of the dependence of fatigue and
output upon the length of the working day has been tested in
numberless places with the methods of really exact research, as it was
easy to find out how the achievement of the laborers became
quantitatively and qualitatively changed by the shortening of the
working hours.
When in one civilized country after another the exhaustingly long
working days of the industrial wage-earner were shortened more and
more, the theoretical discussions of the legislators and of the social
reformers were soon supplemented by careful statistical inquiries in
the factories. It was found that everywhere, even abstracting from all
other cultural and social interests, a moderate shortening of the
working day did not involve loss, but brought a direct gain. The
German pioneer in the movement for the shortening of the workingman's
day, Ernst Abbé, the head of one of the greatest German factories,
wrote many years ago that the shortening from nine to eight hours,
that is, a cutting-down of more than 10 per cent, did not involve a
reduction of the day's product, but an increase, and that this
increase did not result from any supplementary efforts by which the
intensity of the work would be reinforced in an unhygienic way.[41]
This conviction of Abbé still seems to hold true after millions of
experiments over the whole globe. But the problem of fatigue has
forced itself on the consideration of the men of affairs from still
another side. It has been well known for a long while how intimate the
relations are between fatigue and industrial accidents. The statistics
of the various countries and of the various industries do not
harmonize exactly, but a close connection between the number of
accidents and the hours of the day can be recognized everywhere.
Usually the greatest number of injuries occurs between ten and eleven
o'clock in the forenoon and between three and four o'clock in the
afternoon. The different distribution of the working hours, and of the
pauses for the meals, make the various statistical tables somewhat
incomparable. But it can be traced everywhere that in the first
working hours in which fatigue does not play any considerable rôle,
the number of accidents is small, and that this number sinks again
after the long pauses. It is true that the number also becomes
somewhat smaller at the end of the forenoon and of the afternoon
period, but this seems to have its cause in the fact that with growing
fatigue and with the feeling that the end of the working period is
near, the rhythm of the activity becomes much slower, and with such
slower movements the danger of accidents is greatly reduced. In a
similar way the factories have had to give the fullest attention to
the fatigue problem in its relation to the distribution of pauses, and
above all in its relation to the advisable speed of the machines, the
limits of which are set by the fatigue of the workingmen, and still
more of the working-women.
The legislatures, the labor unions, and the manufacturers have then
had this problem of fatigue constantly before their eyes.[42] On the
other hand, the psychologists and physiologists have continuously
studied the fatigue and restoration of the muscle system and of the
central nervous system, and have analyzed the facts with the subtlest
methods. Yet, in spite of this, it cannot be denied that a real mutual
enrichment has so far hardly been in question. On the contrary, the
whole situation has again demonstrated the old experience. The mere
trying and trying again in practical life can never reach the maximum
effects which may be secured by systematic, scientifically conducted
efforts. On the other side the studies of the theoretical scholars can
never yield the highest values for civilization if the problems which
offer themselves in practical life are ignored. The theorists have to
prepare the ground, and in this preparatory work they must, indeed,
remain utterly regardless of any practical situations. But after that
a second stage must be reached at which on the foundation of this
neutral research special theoretical investigations are undertaken
which originate from practical conditions. As long as industrial
managers have no contact with the experiments of the laboratory and
the experimentalists are shy of any contact with the industrial
reality, humanity will pass through social suffering. The hope of
mankind will be realized by the mutual fertilization of knowing and
doing.
The practical efforts of the factories have, indeed, not yet reached
the point at which the greatest possible achievement which can be
reached without over-fatigue may be secured. We called the
abbreviation of the working day an experimental scheme. The question
of reducing the working hours is so simple that no further special
experiments are needed. But when we come to the questions of the
pauses at work, the speed of work and similar factors related to
fatigue, the situation is by far more complicated, and the often
capricious changes in the plant have very little in common with a
systematic experiment. Some well-known studies of the efficiency
engineers clearly demonstrate the possibility of such systematic
efforts. The best-known case is probably Taylor's study of the
pig-iron handlers of the Bethlehem Steel Company. He found that the
gang of 75 men was loading on the average about 12-1/2 tons per man
per day. When he discussed with various managers the question of what
output would be the possible maximum, they agreed that under premium
work, piecework, or any of the ordinary plans for stimulating the men,
an output of 18 to 25 tons would be the extreme possibility. Then he
proceeded to a systematic study of the fatigue in its relation to the
burden and of the best possible relation between working time and
resting time. His first efforts to find formulas were unsuccessful,
because he calculated only the actual mechanical energy exerted and
found that some men were tired after exerting energy of 1/8 hp., while
others seemed to be able to produce the energy of 1/2 hp. without
greater fatigue. But soon he discovered the mistake in his figures.
He had considered only the actual movements, and had neglected the
period in which the laborer was not moving and was not exerting
energy, but in which a weight was pulling his arms and demanding a
corresponding muscular effort. As soon as this muscular achievement
was taken into account, too, he found that for each particular weight
a definite relation exists between the time that a man is under a
heavy load and the time of rest. For the usual loads of 90 pounds, he
found that a first-class laborer must not work more than 43 per cent
of time working day and must be entirely without load 57 per cent. If
the load becomes lighter, the relation is changed. If the workman is
handling a half pig weighing 46 pounds, he can be under load 58 per
cent of the day and only has to rest during 42 per cent.[43]
As soon as these figures were experimentally secured, Taylor selected
fit men, and did not allow them to lift and to carry the loads as they
pleased, but every movement was exactly prescribed by foremen who
timed exactly the periods of work and rest. If he had simply promised
his men a high premium in case they should carry more than the usual
12 tons a day, they would have burdened themselves as heavily as
possible and would have carried the load as quickly as possible, thus
completely exhausting themselves after three or four hours of labor.
In spite of such senseless exaggeration of effort in the first hours,
the total output for the day would have been relatively small. Now the
foremen determined exactly when every individual should lift and move
the load and when he should sit quietly. The result was that the men,
without greater fatigue, were able to carry 47-1/2 tons a day instead
of the 12-1/2 tons. Their wages were increased 60 per cent. Such a
trivial illustration demonstrates very clearly the extreme difference
between an increase of the economic achievement by scientific,
experimental investigation and a mere enforcing of more work by
artificially whipping-up the mind with promises of extraordinary
wages. Yet even such rules as the scientific management engineers have
formed, may be elaborated to more lasting prescriptions as soon as the
purely psychological factors are brought more into the foreground and
are approached with the careful analysis of the experimental
psychologist.
Such a systematic psychological inquiry is the more important for
questions of fatigue, as we know that the subjective feeling of
displeasure in fatigue is no reliable measure for the objective
fatigue, that is, for the real reduction of the ability for work.
Daily experience teaches us how easily some people overstep the limits
of normal fatigue, and in extreme cases even come to a nervous
breakdown because nature did not protect them by the timely appearance
of strong fatigue feelings. On the other hand, we find many men and
still more women who feel tired even after a small exertion, because
they did not learn early to inhibit the superficial feelings of
fatigue, or because the sensations of fatigue have in fact a certain
abnormal intensity in their case. The question how far the
psychophysical apparatus has really been exhausted by a certain effort
must be answered with the help of objective research and not on the
basis of mere subjective feelings. But such objective measurements
demand systematic experiments in the laboratory.
The experiments which really have been carried on in the laboratory as
yet, as far as they were not merely physiological, have on the whole
been confined to so-called mental labor, and were essentially devoted
to problems of school instruction or medical diagnosis. We have no
doubt excellent experiments which are devoted to the study of the
individual differences of exhaustion, fatigue, exhaustibility, ability
to recover the lost energy, ability to learn from practice, and so on,
but they are still exclusively adjusted to the needs of the
school-teacher and of the nerve specialist and would hardly be
immediately useful to the manager of a factory. We shall need a long
careful series of investigations in order to determine how far those
manifold results from experiments with memory work, thought work,
writing work, and so on can be applied to the work which the
industrial laborer is expected to perform.
XVIII
PHYSICAL AND SOCIAL INFLUENCES ON THE WORKING POWER
The increase and decrease of the ability to do good work depends of
course not only upon the direct fatigue from labor and the pauses for
rest; a large variety of other factors may lead to fluctuations which
are economically important. The various hours of the day, the seasons
of the year, the atmospheric conditions of weather and climate, may
have such influence. Some elements of this interplay have been cleared
up in recent years. Just as the experiments of pedagogical psychology
have determined the exact curve of efficiency during the period of an
hour in school, so other investigations have traced the typical curve
of psychical efficiency throughout the day and the year. Sociological
and criminological statistics concerning the fluctuations in the
behavior of the masses, common-sense experience of practical life, and
finally, economic statistics concerning the quantity and quality of
industrial output in various parts of the day and of the year, have
supplemented one another. The systematic assistance of the
psychological laboratory, however, has been confined to the
educational aspect of the problem. Psychological experiments have
determined how the achievement of the youth in the schoolroom changes
with the months of the year and the hours of the day. It seems as if
it could not be difficult to secure here, too, a connection between
exact experiment and economic work. Much will have to be reduced to
individual variations. The laboratory has already confirmed the
experience of daily life that there are morning workers whose
strongest psychophysical efficiency comes immediately after the
night's rest, while the day's work fatigues them more and more; and
that there are evening workers who in the morning still remain under
the after effects of the night's sleep, and who slowly become fresher
and fresher from the stimuli of the day. It would seem not impossible
to undertake a systematic selection of various individuals under this
point of view, as different industrial tasks demand a different
distribution of efficiency between morning and night.
Such a selection and adjustment may be economically still more
important with reference to the fluctuations during the course of the
year. Economic inquiries, for instance, have suggested that younger
and older workingmen who ordinarily show the same efficiency become
unequal in their ability to do good work in the spring months, and the
economists have connected this inequality with sexual conditions. But
other factors as well, especially the blood circulation of the
organism and the resulting reactions to external temperature,
different gland activities, and so on, cause great personal
differences in efficiency during the various seasons of the year.
Inasmuch as we know many economic occupations in which the chief
demand is made in one or another period of the year, a systematic
study of these individual variations might be of high economic value,
where large numbers are involved, and might contribute much to the
individual comfort of the workers. But a constant relation to day and
year also seems to exist independent of all personal variations. When
the sun stands at its meridian, a minimum of efficiency is to be
expected and a similar minimum is to be found at the height of summer.
Correspondingly we have an increase of the total psychical efficiency
in winter-time. During the spring-time the behavior seems, as far as
the investigations go, to be different in the intellectual and in the
psychomotor activities. It is claimed that the efficiency of the
intellectual functions decreases as the winter recedes, but that the
efficiency of psychomotor impulses increases.[44]
The influences of the daily temperature, of the weather and of the
seasons may be classed among the physical conditions of efficiency. We
may group with them the effects of nourishment, of stimulants, of
sleep, and so on. As far as the relations between these external
factors and purely bodily muscle work are involved, the interests of
the psychologists are not engaged. But it is evident that every one of
these relations also has its psychological aspect, and that a really
scientific psychotechnical treatment of these problems can become
possible only through the agency of psychological experiments. We have
excellent experimental investigations concerning the influence of the
loss of sleep on intellectual labor and on simple psychomotor
activities. But it would be rather arbitrary to deduce from the
results of those researches anything as to the effect of reduction of
sleep on special economic occupations. Yet such knowledge would be of
high importance. We have in the literature concerned with accidents in
transportation numerous popular discussions about the destructive
influence of loss of sleep on the attention of the locomotive engineer
or of the helmsman or of the chauffeur, but an analysis of the
particular psychophysical processes does not as yet exist and can be
expected only from systematic experiments. Nor has the influence of
hunger on psychotechnical activities been studied in a satisfactory
way.
A number of psychological investigations have been devoted to the
study of the influence of alcohol on various psychical functions and
in this field at least the strictly economic problem of industrial
labor has sometimes been touched. We have the much quoted and much
misinterpreted experiments [45] which were carried on in Germany with
typesetters. The workmen received definite quantities of heavy wine at
a particular point in the work and the number of letters which they
were able to set during the following quarter-hours were measured and
compared with their normal achievement in fifteen minutes. The
reduction of efficiency amounted on the average to 15 per cent of the
output. It may be mentioned that the loss referred only to the
quantity of the work and not at all to the quality. The well-known
subjective illusory feeling of the subjects was not lacking; they
themselves believed that the wine had reinforced their working power.
As soon as such experiments are put into the service of economic life,
they will have to be carried on with much more accurate adjustment to
the special conditions, with subtler gradation of the stimuli, and
especially with careful study of individual factors. But at first it
seems more in the interest of the practical task that the extremely
complicated problem of the influence of alcohol be followed up by
purely theoretical research in the laboratory in order that the effect
may be resolved into its various components. We must first find the
exact facts concerning the influence of alcohol on elementary
processes of mental life, such as perception, attention, memory, and
so on, and this will slowly prepare the way for the complete economic
experiment.
At present the greatest significance for the economic field may be
attached to those alcohol experiments which dealt with the
apprehension of the outer world. They proved a reduction in the
ability to grasp the impressions and a narrowing of the span of
consciousness. The indubitable decrease of certain memory powers, of
the acuity in measuring distance, of the time estimation, and similar
psychical disturbances after alcohol, must evidently be of high
importance for industry and transportation, while the well-known
increase of the purely sensory sensibility, especially of the visual
acuity after small closes of alcohol, hardly plays an important rôle
in practical life. The best-known and experimentally most studied
effect of alcohol, the increase of motor excitability, also evidently
has its importance for industrial achievements. It cannot be denied
that this facility of the motor impulses after small doses of alcohol
is not a real gain, which might be utilized economically, but is
ultimately an injury to the apparatus, even if we abstract from the
retardation of the reaction which comes as an after-effect. The
alcoholic facilitation, after all, reduces the certainty and the
perfection of the reaction and creates conditions under which wrong,
and this in economic life means often dangerous, motor responses
arise. The energy of the motor discharge suffers throughout from the
alcohol.
Some experiments which were recently carried on with reference to the
influence of alcohol on the power of will seem to have especial
significance for the field of economic activity. The method applied in
the experiment was the artificial creation of an exactly measurable
resistance to the will-impulse directed toward a purpose. The
experiment had to determine what power of resistance could be overcome
by the will and how far this energy changes under the influence of
alcohol. For this end combinations of meaningless syllables were
learned and repeated until they formed a close connection in memory.
If one syllable was given, the mechanical tendency of the mind was to
reproduce the next syllable in the memorized series. The
will-intention was then directed toward breaking this memory type. For
instance, it was demanded, when a syllable was called, that the
subject should not answer with the next following syllable, but with a
rhyming syllable. This will-impulse easily succeeded when the
syllables to be learned had been repeated only a few times, while
after a very frequent repetition the memory connection offered a
resistance which the simple will-intention could not break. The
syllable which followed in the series rushed to the mind before the
intention to seek a rhyming syllable could be realized. The number of
repetitions thus became a measure for the power of the will. After
carrying out these experiments at first under normal conditions, they
were repeated while the subjects were under the influence of exactly
graded doses of alcohol.[46] From such simple tasks the experiment was
turned to more and more complex ones of similar structure. All
together they showed clearly that the alcohol did not influence the
ability to make the will effective and that the actual decrease of
achievement results from a decrease in the ability to grasp the
material. As long as the alcohol doses are small, this feeling of
decreased ability stirs up a reinforcement in the tension of the
will-impulse. This may go to such an extent that the increased
will-effort not only compensates for the reduced understanding, but
even over-compensates for it, producing an improvement in the mental
work. But as soon as the alcohol doses amount to about 100 cubic
centimeters, the increased tension of the will is no longer sufficient
to balance the paralyzing effect in the understanding. Yet it must not
be overlooked that in all these experiments only isolated will acts
were in question which were separated from one another by pauses of
rest. Evidently, however, the technical laborer is more often in a
situation in which not isolated impulses, but a continuous tension of
the will is demanded. How far such an uninterrupted will-function is
affected by alcohol has not as yet been studied with the exact means
of the experiment.
To be sure an obvious suggestion would be that the whole problem, as
far as economics, and especially industry, are concerned, might be
solved in a simpler way than by the performance of special
psychological experiments, namely, by the complete elimination of
alcohol itself from the life of the wage-earner. The laboratory
experiment which seems to demonstrate a reduction of objective
achievement in the case of every important mental function merely
supplements in exact language the appalling results indicated by
criminal statistics, disease statistics, and inheritance statistics.
It seems as if the time had come when scientists could not with a good
conscience suggest any other remedy than the merciless suppression of
alcohol. Indeed, there can be no doubt that alcohol is one of the
worst enemies of civilized life, and it is therefore almost with
regret that the scientist must acknowledge that all the psychological
investigations, which have so often been misused in the partisan
writings of prohibitionists, are not a sufficient basis to justify the
demand for complete abstinence.
First, newer experiments make it very clear that many of the so-called
effects of alcohol which the experiment has demonstrated are produced
or at least heightened by influences of suggestion. Experiments which
have been carried on in England for the study of that point show
clearly that certain psychical disturbances which seem to result from
small doses of alcohol fail to appear as soon as the subject does not
know that he has taken alcohol. For that purpose it was necessary to
eliminate the odor, and this was accomplished by introducing the
beverages into the organism by a stomach pump. When by this method
sometimes water and sometimes diluted alcohol was given without the
knowledge of the subject, the usual effects of small doses of alcohol
did not arise. But another point is far more important. We may take it
for granted that alcohol reduces the ability for achievement as soon
as such very small doses are exceeded. But from the standpoint of
economic life we have no right to consider a reduction of the
psychical ability to produce work as identical with a decrease in the
economic value of the personality. Such a view would be right if the
influence necessarily set in at the beginning of the working period.
But if, for instance, a moderate quantity of beer is introduced into
the organism after the closing of the working day, it would certainly
produce an artificial reduction of the psychical ability, and yet this
decrease of psychophysical activity might be advantageous to the total
economic achievement of the workingman in the course of the week or
the year. To be sure the glass of beer in the evening paralyzes
certain inhibitory centres of the brain and therefore puts the mind
out of gear, but such a way of expressing it may easily be misleading,
as it suggests too much that a real injury is done. From the point of
view of scientific psychology, we must acknowledge that such a
paralyzing effect in certain parts of the psychophysical system sets
in with every act of attention and reaches its climax in sleep, which
surely does no harm to the mind. It may be thoroughly advantageous for
the total work of the normal, healthy, average workingman if the after
effects of the motor excitement of the day are eliminated by a mild,
short alcoholic poisoning in the evening. It may produce that
narrowing and dulling of consciousness which extinguishes the cares
and sorrows of the day and secures the night's sleep, and through it
increased efficiency the next morning. Systematic experiments with
exact relation to the various technical demands must slowly bring real
insight into this complex situation. The usual hasty generalization
from a few experiments with alcohol for partisan interests is surely
not justified in the present unsatisfactory state of knowledge.[47]
Perhaps we know still less of the influences which coffee, tea,
tobacco, sweets, and so on exert on the life of the industrial worker.
It will be wise to resolve these stimuli in daily use into their
elements and to study the effects of each element in isolated form. To
know, for instance, the effects of caffein on the psychophysical
activities does not mean to know the effects of tea or coffee, which
contain a variety of other substances besides the caffein, substances
which may be supposed to modify the effect of the caffein. Yet the
first step must in this case be the study of the effects of the
isolated caffein, before the total influences of the familiar
beverages can be followed up. An excellent investigation of this
caffein effect on various psychological and psychomotor functions has
recently been completed.[48] When the caffein effect on tapping
movements was studied, it was found that it works as a stimulation,
sometimes preceded by a slight initial retardation. It persists from
one to two hours after doses of from one to three grains and as long
as four hours after doses of six grains. The steadiness test showed a
slight nervousness after several hours after doses of from one to four
grains. After six grains there is pronounced unsteadiness. A complex
test in coördination indicated that the effect of small, amounts of
caffein is a stimulation and that of large amounts a retardation.
Correspondingly the speed of performance in typewriting is heightened
by small doses of caffein and retarded by larger doses. In both cases
the quality of the performance as measured by the number of errors is
superior to the normal result.
The influences of the physiological stimulants have many points of
contact with the effects of social entertainment, the significance of
which for the economic life is still rather unknown in any exact
detail. Many factories in which the labor is noiseless, as in the
making of cigars, have introduced gramophone music or reading aloud,
and it is easy to understand theoretically that a certain animating
effect results, which stimulates the whole psychophysical activity But
only the experiment would be able to decide how this stimulation is
related, for instance, to the distraction of attention, which is
necessarily involved, or how it influences various periods of the work
and various types of work, how far it is true that the musical key
exerts an exciting or relaxing influence, what intensity and what
local position, what rhythm and what duration of such æsthetic
stimuli, would bring the best possible economic results. We all have
read of the favorable effects which were secured in a factory when a
cat was brought into every working-room in which women laborers were
engaged in especially fatiguing work. The cat became a living toy for
the employees, which stimulated their social consciousness. In not a
few plants the reinforced achievement is explained by the social means
of entertainment, which have been introduced under the pressure of
modern philanthropic ideas. The lounging-rooms with the newspapers and
periodicals the clubrooms with libraries, the excursions and dances
and patriotic festivities, fill up the reservoir of psychophysical
energies. As a matter of course all the social movements which enhance
the consciousness of solidarity among the laborers and the feeling of
security as to their future development in their career have a similar
effect of reinforcing the normal psychical achievement.
As the strongest factor, finally, the direct material interest must
be added to these conditions. The literature of political economy is
full of discussions of the effect of increase of wages, of the payment
of bonuses and premiums, of piece-wages, of promised pensions, and, as
far as Europe is concerned, of state insurance. In short, the whole
individual financial situation in its relation to the psychophysical
achievement of the wage-earner is a favorite topic of economic
inquiry. We cannot participate here in these inexhaustible
discussions, because all these questions are to-day still so endlessly
far from the field of psychological experiments. Nevertheless we ought
not to forget the experience through which general experimental
psychology has gone in the last few decades. When the first
experiments were undertaken in order to deal systematically with the
mental life, the friends of this new science and its opponents agreed,
on the whole, in the belief that certainly only the most elementary
phenomena of consciousness, the sensations and the reactions of
impulses, would be accessible to the new method. The opponents
naturally compared this modest field with the great problems of the
mental totality, and therefore ridiculed the new narrow task as
unimportant. The friends, on the other hand, were eager to follow the
fresh path, because they were content to gain real exactitude by the
experiment at least in these simplest questions. Yet as soon as the
new independent workshops were established for the young science, it
was discovered that the method was able to open fields in which no one
had anticipated its usefulness. The experiments turned to the problems
of attention, of memory, of imagination, of feeling, of judgment, of
character, of æsthetic experience and so on. It is not improbable that
the method of the economic psychological experiment may also quickly
lead beyond the more elementary problems, as soon as it is
systematically applied, and then it, too, may conquer regions of
inquiry in which to-day no exact calculation of the psychological
factors seems possible.
If such an advance is to be a steady one, the economic psychologist
will emancipate himself from the chance question of what problems are
at this moment important for commerce and industry and will proceed
systematically step by step from those results which the psychological
laboratory has yielded under the non-economic points of view. Many
previous psychological or psychophysical inquiries almost touch the
problems of industrial achievement. For instance, the experiments on
imitation, which psychophysicists have carried on in purely
theoretical or pedagogical interests, move parallel to industrial
experiences. It is well known that the pacemaker plays his rôle not
only in the field of sport but also in the factory. The rhythm of one
laborer gains controlling importance for the others, who instinctively
imitate him. Some plants even have automatically working machines with
the special intention that the sharp rhythm of these lifeless
forerunners shall produce an involuntary imitation in the
psychophysical system. In a similar way many laboratory investigations
on suggestion and suggestibility point to such economic processes, and
it seems to me that especially the studies on the influence of the
ideas of purpose which are being undertaken nowadays in many
psychological laboratories may easily be connected with the problems
of economic life. We know how the consciousness of the task to be
performed has an organizing influence on the system of those
psychophysical acts which lead to the goal. The experiment has shown
under which conditions this effect can be reinforced and under which
reduced. Pedagogical experiments have also shown exactly what
influence belongs to the consciousness of the approach to the end of
work; the feeling of the nearness of the close heightens the
achievement, even of the fatigued subject. It would not be difficult
to connect psychophysical experiments of this kind with the problems
of the task and bonus system, which is nowadays so much discussed in
industrial life. The practical successes seem to prove that the
individual can do more with equal effort if he does not stand before
an unlimited mass of work of which he has to do as much as possible in
the course of the day, but if he is before a definitely determined,
limited task with the demand that he complete it in an exactly
calculated time. Scientific management has made far-reaching use of
this principle, but whether constant results for the various
industries can be hoped for from such methods must again be
ascertained by the psychological experiment.
These hopes surely will not weaken the interest of the psychologist
for those many psychological methods which lie outside of the
experimental research. A sociologist, who himself had been a laborer
in his earlier life, undertook in Germany last year an inquiry into
the psychological status of the laborers' achievement by the
questionnaire method.[49] He sent to 8000 workingmen in the mining
industries, textile industries, and metal industries, blanks
containing 26 questions, and received more than 5000 replies. The
questions referred to the pleasure and interest in the work, to
preferences, to fatigue, to the thoughts during the work, to the
means of recreation, to the attitude toward the wages, to the
emotional situation, and so on. The 5000 answers allowed manifold
classifications. The various mental types of men could be examined,
the influence of the machine, the attitude toward monotony, the
changes of pleasure and interest in the work with the age of the
laborer, the time at which fatigue becomes noticeable, and so on. Many
psychological elements of industrial life thus come to a sharp focus
and the strong individual differences could not be brought out in a
more characteristic way. Yet, all taken together, even such a careful
investigation on a psychostatistical basis strongly suggests that a
few careful experimental investigations could lead further than such a
heaping-up of material gathered from men who are untrained in
self-observation and in accurate reports, and above all who are
accessible to any kind of suggestion and preconceived idea. The
experimental method is certainly not the only one which can contribute
to reforms in industrial life and the reinforcement of industrial
efficiency, but all signs indicate that the future will find it the
most productive and most reliable.