Mental Testing and Society — II: Individual Psychology, Industry and Education

Abstract

Earlier, it was suggested that the psychometric movement can be seen as responding to an interrelated group of problems concerning race and empire, industry and human efficiency. Before 1914, British psychometrics had scarcely touched the second part of this problematic, although on the eve of the First World War Münsterberg’s classic text Psychology and Industrial Efficiency became available. The war proved decisive in the development of applied psychology, because of both the immediate needs of the ‘warfare’ state and the longer-term effects of the war on capitalism. In all the belligerent countries, the war brought into being a powerful industrial-military complex charged with expediting production, most commonly by the use of machine-tool technology and ‘flow’ techniques, and securing the maximum efficiency of labour. In Britain, this complex was centred on the war-time Ministry of Munitions whose officers spread the gospel of scientific management, recruited scientific, professional and business expertise to the service of the state and enforced the ‘dilution’ of labour (that is the more frugal use of skill in production).