corporate spirit, efficiency in government work, examinations to determine temperament and administrative ability of applicants, tests for measuring honesty, and many others which psychology will have an opportunity to assist in solving whenever it has anything worth while to offer. So far, the most conspicuous contributions of psychology have been in the field of examination technique and these have been very considerable and well received.

THE BUREAU OF PUBLIC PERSONNEL ADMINISTRATION

The Bureau of Public Personnel Administration was established October 1, 1922, as the result of a movement originating at the meeting of the Assembly of Civil Service Commissions held at Rochester in 1919. Exchanges of experiences at meetings of civil service administrators and others had developed the fact that civil service commissions, acting independently, often attacked de novo some problem worked out successfully in other jurisdictions, that no individual commission had any adequate facilities for finding out what other commissions were doing, and that a vast improvement in civil service administration might be expected to result if the best practices developed independently by the commissions with facilities for study and experiment were put into effect generally. It was recognized, however, that if an organization were established it should not merely assemble and disseminate information regarding current civil service practice, but should also make studies for the purpose of improving existing methods, particularly of testing applicants for positions in the public service.

Before the Bureau of Public Personnel Administration was finally established, its purposes, by common con

sent of those interested, were formulated as follows:

1. To serve as a clearing house for existing information relating to personnel administration in the public service, national, state, county, and local.

2. To develop and improve methods of personnel administration through the conduct of original investigations and experiments.

3. To publish the results of its work in such form as experience may demonstrate to be most effective for the improvement of the personnel administration of the public service. The Bureau of Public Personnel Administration is administered by the Institute for Government Research with the advice and coöperation of an Advisory Board representing the various groups most interested in public personnel administration. The membership of the Advisory Board includes two members representative of the Assembly of Civil Service Commissions, one of the United States Civil Service Commission, one of the National Civil Service Reform League and one of the National Research Council. The Director of the Institute for Government Research also serves as Director of the Bureau. The offices of the Bureau are in the quarters of the Institute at 26 Jackson Place, Washington, D. C.

Both the Bureau and the Institute are privately, though separately, supported. A private citizen interested in civic progress has contributed to the Bureau $25,000 a year for a period of three years with no conditions as to its expenditure except that it be used in the study and solution of public personnel problems under the form of organization described above. Neither the Bureau nor the Institute has any official connection with any federal, state, county, municipal, or other government body.

Among the proposed and current projects of the Bureau are the following: Compilation of civil service laws and practice, the classification of positions in the public service, tests and training courses for patrolmen and firemen, tests for skilled trade positions, clerical tests, tests for stenographers and typists, tests for library positions, the application of intelligence tests to civil service needs, objective examination methods and the short-answer methods. The Bureau has in preparation a series of bulletins summarizing its studies. These bulletins will be called “Public Personnel Studies" and they will be issued as rapidly as the Bureau studies become available for distribution.

The main psychological contribution of the Bureau is probably in assisting civil service commissions to adopt the scientific or experimental methods in studying personnel problems. Instead of writing an examination for patrolmen, for example, on the basis of informal experience, the attempt is now being made to compare the scores that applicants attain in different kinds of examinations with the estimates of the police departments about the proficiency of those who are appointed as patrolmen. In this way experimental

evidence will be accumulating by which a quantitative evaluation may be made of the different types of examination for a particular type of position. As a result of such work it will be possible to recommend certain types of examinations as superior in discriminating value, and the recommendations will be based on an impartial study of the experimental facts instead of on somebody's personal opinion. Several such studies are at present being carried out.

The value of an examination cannot be settled finally by merely talking about it. Problems in physics and chemistry are not settled by discussion. Neither can problems in personnel be settled by mere talk and opinion. The main object of the new Bureau is to contribute something toward the solution of public personnel problems by the experimental or scientific methods. This contribution can be made best at the present time on the examination problems because they are rather specific and the scientific methods are already available. When the technique of the social sciences has developed farther, it will be possible also to use an experimental attack in solving problems of organization and leadership which are still being met by rough conjectural methods.

THE

HE basic aim of education is so to equip the youth that he may solve with a greater degree of success the problems which he will encounter in life. As the world adds to its store of knowledge, acquired through arduous and painstaking endeavor, this information is passed on, through the process of education, for the benefit of those who are to follow. A generation ago, the underlying principles of commerce and finance could be apprehended only as the result of a long and difficult apprenticeship in the business world. Today the school of business administration provides the youth at the outset of his career with a wealth of scientific knowledge regarding the theory and practice of commerce. It is no longer necessary for each individual to seek out for himself the problems of supply and demand, the principles of accounting and advertising, the practices of banking and brokerage. And yet, although business is essentially a process involving human relations and reactions, there are many business schools which have not yet included the fundamental science of human behavior as a part of the curriculum.

Popularly it is still thought that psychology is a branch of mental philosophy, requiring no other equipment than a comfortable arm-chair and a desire to cerebrate indefinitely over abstruse and impractical problems. On the contrary, the psychology of today has its well-equipped laboratories and machine-shops, its complicated apparatus and delicate instruments, its well-established methods and standards. Psychology is no longer chiefly con

cerned with a subjective reflection on conscious processes. The mind is too elusive and intangible a subject for scientific examination. But human actions and reactions can be observed and measured and compared. Psychology today is interested not so much in what the individual thinks as in what he does. It concerns itself with human activity of every kindfrom the reflex winking of the eye to the skilled performance of the aviator, from the simple cry of the babe to the complex behavior involved in selling wild-cat oil stock to a canny Scot. Psychology analyzes human reactions from every angle, it studies the mechanism and the motives which underlie human conduct, it investigates the relative rôles of heredity and experience, the part played by instinct and by habit. And on the basis of the present performances of an individual or a group, psychology has developed methods for predicting future behavior. Contrary to the more generally accepted doctrines of human behavior, psychology formulates principles only when they can be based upon scientifically demonstrable facts.

PSYCHOLOGICAL ASSUMPTIONS IN
ECONOMIC THEORIES

Even though only a few of the more progressive schools of business administration have included psychology as a regular subject in the curriculum, it is by no means overlooked in the classroom. Writers and lecturers in economics have come to recognize that man is never solely an economic man. Human desires and aversions, instincts

and emotions, must be written into the equation of supply and demand. The economist today is talking psychology to a student body which knows nothing of the basic principles of the subject. The same situation is true with regard to sociology and political science. Experts in these fields recognize that it is impossible to understand man in his complex social and political relationships without the underlying knowledge of man as an individual. And so the lecturer in sociology and the lecturer in political science preach psychology to the bewildered undergraduate, and sometimes it is a very unscientific brand of psychology. It would therefore seem advisable, on both logical and practical grounds, to include psychology in the business curriculum.

However, there is another group of subjects, usually included in the course of study, to which a knowledge of the fundamental principles of psychology is even more indispensable. Salesmanship, advertising, personnel work in its phases of selection and job analysis, these are essentially applied psychology and in the text-books and courses in these subjects frequent reference is made to the psychological factors involved. It is the course of events, then, that the student graduates from the school of business administration with some knowledge of the psychological aspects of economics, sociology, and political science, and with various psychological formulae to be applied in merchandising and management, but with no organized or crystallized ideas as to psychology itself. The present situation in many of our foremost business schools is quite analogous to a medical education which includes only a study of the particular dosage for each type of disease, without wasting time on the fundamental studies of anatomy and physiology. No one

would care to be treated by a graduate of such a school.

PSYCHOLOGY AS THE SCIENCE OF
HUMAN BEHAVIOR

It is not intended to give the impression that psychology should be inIcluded in the business curriculum

merely as an adjunct to the courses already taught. Psychology, as the science of human behavior, has developed a technique and amassed a fund of knowledge which richly merits inclusion in the course of study in its own right. It may be stated that every science has a two-fold function. Its first duty is to classify the various phenomena which comprise its field of investigation, and descriptive psychology can now present a satisfactory classification of the various types of human behavior and of the mental processes which are at the basis of such behavior. But science has a second and more important function, it must explain as well as classify, it must be dynamic as well as descriptive. It is the comparatively recent developments in dynamic psychology which are of primary interest to the business man. The psychologist of today works much after the fashion of the analytic chemist, who examines some complex substance with various kinds of reagents in order to determine the kind and relative amount of the different elements which compose it. The chemist is then able to predict the manner in which the complex substance will react to different types of stimulation. Although it is not claimed that psychology has attained the accuracy of chemical analysis, remarkable advances in the prediction of human behavior have unquestionably been made. Kingsbury has shown in a recent article

1 Forrest A. Kingsbury, "Business Judgment and the Business Curriculum," Journal of Political Economy, June, 1922.

that such a seemingly indefinable thing as business judgment is subject to psychological analysis, and is the function of certain innate characteristics acted upon by environmental factors of training and experience. The first step in applied psychology, then, has been to analyze human competency into its component abilities, both inherited and acquired, and then to develop a battery of mental tests for the purpose of measuring the relative importance of these abilities in the individual makeup. In other words, human behavior is elicited under standard and carefully controlled conditions of stimulation which are so designed as to call into play only certain definitely determined mental processes.

In answer to the objection that the procedure outlined above is ideal and visionary in character and not susceptible of practical application, it is only necessary to refer to some of the outstanding illustrations of the application of scientific principles in the prediction of human behavior. No one today questions the value of the army psychological tests which so efficiently stratified an unclassified mass of almost two million men. Millions of dollars were saved and untold confusion avoided by eliminating at the outset those so mentally inferior as to be unable to respond to military training. Contrasted with the army tests are the psychological entrance examinations which have supplanted the content examinations in a number of our leading universities. Here the purpose is to select those of superior intelligence from an already highly selected group. The use of selective tests in many leading industries, and the examination of suspected mental defectives in juvenile courts and psychological clinics, provide other important illustrations of the prediction of human behavior through the analysis

and measurement of various human abilities.

It must not be supposed that psychology is primarily a science of individual examination and testing, although this is one of its most important phases in its industrial application. Much of value can be learned through the examination of the group rather than the individual. The kinds and relative importance of human instincts, the laws of habit formation and interference, the characteristics of memory and the learning process, the relative attraction of various types of external stimulation, these merely typify a great group of psychological principles which are of the utmost importance in the prediction of human behavior and which can be arrived at by a scientific experimental procedure.

LEARNING TO UNDERSTAND
ONESELF

In addition to training the student to evaluate the competency and predict the behavior of his fellows, the course in psychology may serve another and perhaps equally important function. While analyzing the behavior of the other man, the student necessarily learns something of the mechanism and motives which underlie his own behavior. While learning to evaluate the abilities of the other man, the student cannot but learn something of his own resources. While learning how to select the right man for a particular job, the student may discover the particular job for which he himself is best equipped. The program in psychology herein proposed will then have two essential aims: first, to enable the student to predict more accurately the behavior of those with whom he comes into contact, and second, to enable the student better to understand himself. If a course in psychology can accomplish either of these ends to any appre