experiments also with a class of advanced female university students.
When I started, my aim was not to examine the differences of men and
women, but only to have ampler material, and I confined my work to
students in psychological classes, because I was anxious to get the
best possible scientific analysis of the inner experiences. I had no
prejudice in favour of or against women as members of the jury, any
more than my experiments were guided by a desire to defend or to
attack the jury system. I was only anxious to clear up the facts. The
women students had exactly the same opportunities for seeing the
cards and the votes and for exchanging opinions. The discussions,
while carried on for the same length of time, were on the whole less
animated. There was less desire to convince and more restraint, but
the record, which was taken in shorthand, showed nearly the same
variety of arguments which the men had brought forward. Everything
agreed exactly with the experiments with the men, and the only
difference was in the results. The first vote of all experiments with
the women showed a slightly smaller number of right judgments. The
women had 45 per cent. correct judgments, as against the 52 per cent.
of the men. I should not put any emphasis on this difference. It may
be said that the men had more training in scientific observations and
the task was therefore slightly easier for them than for most of the
women. I should say that, all taken together, men and women showed an
equal ability in immediate judgment, as with both groups about half of
the first judgments were correct. The fact that with the men 2 per
cent. more, with the women 5 per cent. less, than half were right
would not mean much. But the situation is entirely different with the
second figure. We saw that for the men the discussion secured an
increase from 52 per cent. to 78 per cent.; with the women the
increase is not a single per cent. The first votes were 45 per cent.
right, and the last votes were 45 per cent. right. In other words,
they had not learned anything from discussion.
It would not be quite correct if we were to draw from that the
conclusion that the women did not change their minds at all. If we
examine the number of cases in which in the course of the first,
second, and third votes in any of the experiments some change
occurred, we find changes in 40 per cent. of all judgments of the men
and 19 per cent. of all judgments of the women. This does not mean
that a change in a particular case necessarily made the last vote
different from the first; we not seldom had a case where, for
instance, the first vote was larger, the second equal, and the third
again larger. And as a matter of course, where a change between the
first and the last occurred, it was not always a change in the right
direction. Moreover, it must not be forgotten that the votes always
covered three possibilities, and not only two. It was therefore
possible for the first vote to be wrong, and then for a change to
occur to another wrong vote. The 19 per cent. changes in the decisions
of the women contained accordingly as many cases in which right was
turned into wrong as in which wrong was turned into right, while with
the men the changes to the right had an overweight of 26 per cent.
The self-analysis of the women indicated clearly the reason for their
mental stubbornness. They heard the arguments, but they were so fully
under the autosuggestion of their first decision that they fancied
that they had known all that before, and that they had discounted the
arguments of their opponents in the first vote. The cobbler has to
stick to his last; the psychologist has to be satisfied with analyzing
the mental processes, but it is not his concern to mingle in politics.
He must leave it to others to decide whether it will really be a gain
if the jury box is filled with individuals whose minds are unable to
profit from discussion and who return to their first idea, however
much is argued from the other side. It is evident that this tendency
of the female mind must be advantageous for many social purposes. The
woman remains loyal to her instinctive opinion. Hence we have no right
to say that the one type of mind is in general better than the other.
We may say only that they are different, and that this difference
makes the men fit and the women unfit for the particular task which
society requires from the jurymen.
Practical experience seems to affirm this experimental result on many
sides. The public of the east is still too little aware of this new
and yet powerful influence in the far west, where the jury box is
accessible to women. There is no need to point to extreme cases. Any
average trial may illustrate the situation. I have before me the
reports of the latest murder trial at Seattle, the case of Peter
Miller. The case was unusual only in that the defendant had been
studying criminal law during his incarceration in jail, and addressed
the jury himself on his own behalf in an argument that is said to have
lasted nine hours. The jury was out quite a long time. Eleven were for
acquittal, one woman was against it. The next day the papers brought
out long interviews with her in which she explained the situation. She
characterized her general standing in this way: "I am a dressmaker,
and go out every day, six days in the week. I read the classified ads
and glance at the headlines, but I don't have much time to waste on
anything else." But her attitude in the jury room was very similar.
She says: "I was sure of my opinion. I didn't try to change anybody
else's opinion. I just kept my own. They argued a good deal and asked
me if the fact that eleven of twelve had been convinced by the same
evidence of Peter Miller's innocence didn't shake my faith in my own
judgment. Well, it didn't. We were out twenty-four hours. I borrowed a
pair of knitting needles from one of the jurors, and I sat there and
knitted most of the time." The State of Washington will now have to
have a new trial, as the jury could not agree. There will probably
still be many hung juries because some dressmaker borrows a pair of
knitting needles from one of the jurors, knits most of the time, and
lets the others argue, as she is sure of her own opinion. The naïve
epigram of this model juror, "I didn't try to change anybody else's
opinion; I just kept my own," illuminates the whole situation. This is
no contrast to the popular idea that woman easily changes her mind.
She changes it, but others cannot change it.
In order to make quite sure that the discussion and not the seeing of
the vote is responsible for the marked improvement in the case of men,
I carried on some further experiments in which the voting alone was
involved. To bring this mental process to strongest expression, I went
far beyond the small circle which was needed for the informal exchange
of opinion, and operated instead with my large class of psychological
students in Harvard. I have there four hundred and sixty students, and
accordingly had to use much larger cards with large dots. I showed to
them any two cards twice. There was an interval of twenty seconds
between the first and the second exposures, and each time they looked
at the cards for three seconds. In one half of the experiments that
interval was not filled at all; in the other half a quick show of
hands was arranged so that every one could see how many on the first
impression judged the upper card as having more or an equal number or
fewer dots than the lower. After the second exposure every one had to
write down his final result. The pairs of cards which were exposed
when the show of hands was made were the same as those which were
shown without any one knowing how the other men judged. We calculated
the results on the basis of four hundred reports. They showed that the
total number of right judgments in the cases without showing hands was
60 per cent. correct; in those with show of hands about 65 per cent. A
hundred and twenty men had turned from the right to the wrong--that
is, had more incorrect judgments when they saw how the other men voted
than when they were left to themselves.
It is true that those who turned from worse to better by seeing the
vote of the others were in a slight majority, bringing the total vote
5 per cent. upward, but this difference is so small that it could just
as well be explained by the mere fact that this act of public voting
reënforced the attention and improved a little the total vote through
this stimulation of the social consciousness. It is not surprising
that the mere seeing of the votes in such cases has such a small
effect, incomparable with that of a real discussion in which new
vistas are opened, inasmuch as in 40 per cent. of the cases the
majority was evidently on the wrong side from the start. Those who are
swept away by the majority would therefore in 40 per cent. of the
cases be carried to the wrong side. I went still further and examined
by psychological methods the degree of suggestibility of those four
hundred participants in the experiment, and the results showed that
the fifty most suggestible men profited from the seeing of the vote of
the majority no more than the fifty least suggestible ones. In both
cases there was an increase of about 5 per cent. correct judgments. I
drew also from this the conclusion that the show of hands was
ineffective as a direct influence toward correctness, and that it had
only the slight indirect value of forcing the men to concentrate their
attention better on those cards. All results, therefore, point in the
same direction: it is really the argument which brings a coöperating
group nearer to the truth, and not the seeing how the other men vote.
Hence the psychologist has every reason to be satisfied with the jury
system as long as the women are kept out of it.
VI
EFFICIENCY ON THE FARM
We city people who are feeding on city-made public opinion forget that
we are in the minority, and that the interests of the fifty millions
of the rural population are fundamental for the welfare of the whole
nation. Moreover, the life of the city itself is most intimately
intertwined with the work on the farm; banking and railroading,
industrial enterprises and commercial life, are dependent upon the
farmers' credit and the farmers' prosperity. The nation is beginning
to understand that it would be a calamity indeed if the tempting
attractiveness of the city should drain off still more the human
material from the village and from the field. The cry "back to the
land" goes through the whole world, and this means more than a camping
tour in the holidays and some magazine numbers of _Country Life in
America_ by the fireplace. Its meaning ought to be that every nation
which wants to remain healthy and strong must take care that the
obvious advantages of metropolitan life are balanced by the joys and
gains of the villager who lacks the shop windows and the exciting
turmoil.
Certainly the devices of the city inventor, the telephone and the
motor car and a thousand other gifts of the last generation, have
overcome much of the loneliness, and the persistent efforts of the
states to secure better roads and better schools in the country have
enriched and multiplied the values of rural life. Yet the most direct
aid is, after all, that which increases the efficiency of farming
itself. In this respect, too, we feel the rapid progress throughout
the country. The improvements in method which the scientific efforts
of all nations have secured are eagerly distributed to the remotest
corners. The agents of the governmental Bureau of Agriculture, the
agricultural county demonstrators, the rapidly spreading agricultural
schools, take care that the farmer's "commonsense" with its
backwardness and narrowness be replaced by an insight which results
from scientific experiment and exact calculation. Agricultural
science, based on physics and chemistry, on botany and zoölogy, has
made wonderful strides during the last few decades. It must be
confessed that the self-complaisance of the farmer and the power of
tradition have offered not a little resistance to the practical
application of the knowledge which the agricultural experiments
establish, and the blending of the well-known conservative attitude of
the farmer with a certain carelessness and deficiency in education has
kept the production of the American farm still far below the yielding
power which the present status of knowledge would allow. Other
nations, more trained in hard labour and painstaking economy and
accustomed to most careful rotation of crops, obtain a much richer
harvest from the acre, even where the nature of the soil is poor. But
the longing of the farmer for the best methods is rapidly growing,
too, and in many a state he shows a splendid eagerness to try new
ways, to develop new plans, and to progress with the advance of
science.
In such an age it seems fair to ask whether the circle of sciences
which are made contributory to the efficiency of the agriculturist has
been drawn large enough. It is, of course, most important for every
farmer to know the soil and whatever may grow on it and feed on it.
All the new discoveries as to the power of phosphates to increase the
crop or as to the part which protozoa play in the inhibition of
fertility, or the influence of parasites on the enemies of the crops
and the numberless naturalistic details of this type, are certainly
most important. Yet does it not look as if in all the operations which
the worker on the land has to perform everything is carefully
considered by science, and only the chief thing left out, the worker
and his work? He is earnestly advised as to every detail in the order
of nature: he learns by what chemical substances to improve the soil,
what seeds are to be used, and when they are to be planted, what
breeds of animals to raise and how to feed them. But no scientific
interest has thrown light on his own activity in planting the seed and
gathering the harvest, in picking the fruit and caring for the stock.
No doubt, the agent of some trust has recommended to him the newest
machines; but their help still belongs, after all, to the part of
outer nature. They are physical apparatus, and even if the farmer uses
nowadays dynamite to loosen the soil, all this new-fashioned power yet
remains scientific usage of the knowledge of nature. But behind all
this physical and chemical material in which and through which the
farmer and his men are working stand the farmer himself with his
intelligence, and his men themselves with their lack of intelligence.
This human factor, this bundle of ideas and volitions and feelings and
judgments, must ultimately be the centre of the whole process. There
is no machine which can do its best if it is wrongly used, no tool
which can be effective if it is not set to work by an industrious
will. The human mind has to keep in motion that whole great mechanism
of farm life. It is the farmer's foresight and insight which plough
and plant and fill the barns. For a long while the average farmer
thought about nature, too, that he could know all he needed, if he
applied his homemade knowledge. That time has passed, and even he
relies on the meteorology telegram of the scientific bureaus rather
than on the weather rules of his grandfather. But when it comes to the
mental processes which enter into the agricultural work, he would
think it queer to consult science. He would not even be aware that
there is anything to know. The soil and the seed and even the plough
and the harvester are objects about which you can learn. But the
attention with which the man is to do his work, the memory, the
perception, the ideas which make themselves felt, the emotions and the
will which control the whole work, would never be objects about which
he would seek new knowledge; they are no problems for him, they are
taken for granted.
Yet we have to-day a full-fledged science which does deal with these
mental processes. Psychology speaks about real things as much as
chemistry, and the laws of mental life may be relied on now more
safely than the laws of meteorology. It seems unnatural that those
who have the interests of agriculture at heart should turn the
attention of the farmer exclusively to the results of the material
sciences and ignore completely the thorough, scientific interest in
the processes of the mind. To be sure, until recently we had the same
shortcoming in industrial enterprises of the factories. Manufacturer
and workingman looked as if hypnotized at the machines, forgetting
that those wheels of steel were not the only working powers under the
factory roof. A tremendous effort was devoted to the study and
improvement of the industrial apparatus and of the raw material, while
the mental fitness and the mental method of the army of workingmen was
dealt with unscientifically and high-handedly. But within the last few
years the attention of the industrial world has been seriously turned
to the matter-of-course fact that the workman's mind is more important
than the machine and the material, if the highest economic output is
to be secured. The great movement for scientific management, however
much or little its original plans may survive, has certainly once for
all convinced the world that the study of the man and his functions
ought to be the chief interest of the market, even in our electrical
age; and the more modest movement for vocational guidance has
emphasized this personal factor from sociological motives. At last
the psychologists themselves approached the problem of the worker in
the factory, began to examine his individual fitness for his work, and
to devise tests in order to select quickly those whose inborn mental
capacity makes them particularly adjusted to special lines of work.
Above all, they examined the methods by which the individual learned
and got his training in the technical activities, they began to
determine the exact conditions which secured the greatest amount of
the best possible work with the greatest saving of human energy. All
this is certainly still at its beginning, but even if the solutions of
the problems are still insufficient, the problems themselves will not
again be lost sight of. The most obvious acknowledgment of the
importance of these demands lies in the fact that already the quack
advice of pseudo-psychologists is offered from many sides. The
up-to-date manufacturer knows, even if he is not interested in the
social duties involved, that the mere economic interest demands a much
more serious study of the workingman's mind than any one thought of
ten years ago.
This change must finally come into the agricultural circles. The
consequences of the usual, or rather invariable neglect, are felt less
in agriculture than in industry, because the work is so much more
scattered. The harmful effects of poor adjustment and improper
training must be noticed more easily where many thousands are crowded
together within the walls of the same mill. But it would be an
illusion to fancy that the damage and the loss of efficiency are
therefore less in the open field than in the narrow factory. On the
contrary, the conditions favour the workshop. There everybody stands
under constant supervision, and what is still more important, always
has the chance for imitation. Every improvement, almost every new
trick and every new hand movement which succeeds with one, is taken up
by his neighbour and spreads over the establishment. The principle of
farm work is isolation. One hardly knows what another is doing, and
where several do coöperate, they are generally engaged in different
functions. Even where the farmhands work in large groups, the attitude
is much less that of team work than of a mere summation of individual
workers. In the country as a whole the man who works on the farm has
to gather his experience for himself, has to secure every advance for
himself, and has to miss the benefit which the social atmosphere of
industrial work everywhere furnishes.
It would be utterly misleading to think that the long history of
mankind's agricultural pursuits ought to have been sufficient to bring
together the necessary experience. The analysis of the vocational
activities has given every evidence that even the oldest functions are
performed in an impractical, inefficient way. The students of
scientific management have demonstrated how the work of the mason, as
old as civilization itself, is carried on every day in every land with
methods which can be improved at once, as soon as a scientific study
of the motions themselves is started. It could hardly be otherwise,
and the principle might be illustrated by any chance case. If a girl
were left to herself to learn typewriting, the best way would seem to
her to be to pick out the letters with her two forefingers. She would
slowly seek the right key for each letter and press it down. In this
way she would be in the pleasant position of producing a little letter
after only half an hour of trial. As soon as she has succeeded with
such a first half page, she will see only the one goal of increasing
the rapidity and accuracy, and by hard training she will indeed gain
steadily in speed and correctness, and after a year she will write
rather quickly. Yet she will never succeed in reaching the ideal
proficiency. In order to attain the highest point, she ought to have
started with an entirely different method. She ought to have begun at
once to use all her fingers, and, moreover, to use them without
looking at the keyboard. If she had started with this difficult method
she would never have succeeded in writing a letter the first day. It
would have taken weeks to reach that achievement which the simpler
method yields almost at once. But in plodding along on this harder
road she would finally outdistance the competitor with the commonsense
method and would finally gain the highest degree of efficiency. This
is exactly the situation everywhere. Commonsense always grasps for
those methods which quickly lead to a modest success, but which can
never lead to maximum achievement. On the other hand, up to the days
of modern experimental psychology the interest was not focussed on the
mental operations involved in industrial life as such. Everything was
left to commonsense, and therefore it is not surprising that the
farmhand like the workingman in the mill has never hit upon the one
method which is best, as all his instincts and natural tendencies had
to lead him to the second or third best method, since these alone give
immediate results.
A highly educated man who spent his youth in a corn-raising community
reports to me the following psychological observation: However
industrious all the boys of the village were, one of them was always
able to husk about a half as much more corn than any one else. He
seemed to have an unusual talent for handling so many more ears than
any one of his rivals could manage. Once my friend had a chance to
inquire of the man with the marvellous skill how he succeeded in
outdoing them so completely, and then he learned that no talent was
involved, but a simple psychological device, almost a trick. The
worker who husks the ear is naturally accustomed to make his hand and
finger movements while his eyes are fixed on them. As soon as one ear
is husked, the attention turns to the next, the eyes look around and
find the one which best offers itself to be handled next. When the
mind, under the control of the eyes, has made its choice, the mental
impulse is given to the arms, and the hands take hold of it. Yet it is
evident that these manipulations can be carried on just as well
without the constant supervision of the eyes. The eye is needed only
to find the corn and to direct the impulse of the hands toward picking
it up. But the eye is no longer necessary for the detailed movements
in husking. Hence it must be possible to perform that act of vision
and that choice of the second ear while the hands are still working on
the first. The initial stage of the work on the second ear then
overlaps the final stages of the work with the first, and this must
mean a considerable saving of time.