The Story of Psychology (120 page)

In many other ways and on a far larger scale, psychology has been applied in education for several decades. We have already seen most of them and can pass by with a summary note of how things stand today: Throughout the nation some 25,000 school psychologists test and assess students and provide short-term therapy, and several thousand educational psychologists use learning theory and research data to design effective teaching methods and teach them to students in teachers’ colleges.

Human engineering:
Early in the century, engineers who designed machinery, automobiles, appliances, and other mechanical devices occasionally gave thought to making the controls and gauges of the equipment fit natural human perceptual and motor capabilities. Even in early automobiles, for instance, the steering wheel was linked to the front wheels in such a way that to turn left, the driver turned the wheel to the left. This may seem an obvious design, but the very first automobiles were steered by a tiller, which the driver had to push to the right to make the car turn to the left, and vice versa. Similarly, some designers tried, on an intuitive basis, to make the dials and controls of radios, power tools, and factory machinery operate in what felt like a natural way.

But as long as this was left to engineers—as was largely the case until World War II—a great deal of equipment had dials and controls that were hard to interpret or hard to fine-tune. Some required unnatural or needlessly complicated human movements that swelled the likelihood of mistakes and accidents. An example was the British Mosquito, a
World War II fighter-bomber designed before psychologists appeared on the scene. The throttles were on the pilot’s left and the landing-gear control on the right. Consequently, at take-off the pilot had to let go the throttles in order to hold the wheel with his left hand so that he could reach over with his right to raise the landing-gear lever, although the throttles, when he let them go, tended to jiggle back, reducing power just when maximum power was essential.

During the war, when many kinds of new and more complicated military equipment were being developed, the military services and their contractors began hiring psychologists to help make the products compatible with human perceptions and responses; this was the start of what became known as human engineering or engineering psychology. Psychologists redesigned equipment to increase the legibility of instrument dials, the ease with which an operator could make fine adjustments of controls, the naturalness of the movements required, and the like.
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Jack Dunlap, a naval officer in charge of a unit doing research on gunnery training, had been a professor of psychology at Fordham. His firsthand experiences of gunnery equipment and his understanding of the psychological difficulties in using it led him, after the war, to form the first human-engineering firm, Dunlap & Associates. A short, rotund, ebullient man, Dunlap had both the expertise and exactly the right outlook for applied psychology. “Balls of fire!” he genially roared at one visitor in 1951. “I can’t stand all this academic horseshit about pure science. Science isn’t worth a damn unless it makes life better for people.”
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The firm’s growth was phenomenal. Dunlap started it in 1948 with a capital investment of $21,000 and within three years was grossing over $700,000 from work for the Department of Defense, an airplane manufacturer, an office machine company, a maker of heavy electrical equipment, and a flashlight manufacturer, among others.

A typical bit of Dunlap & Associates human engineering solved a pharmaceutical company’s problem of incorrect pill counting (over-counts meant lost income, undercounts violated federal law, and both were far too frequent). A workman counting pills would not actually count them but would slide an aluminum board with, say, a hundred little indentations into a bin of pills. When he slid it back out, pills rested in nearly every hole, and at a glance he could see that he merely had to add four or five by hand to what the board had picked up, then dump the lot into a hopper for automatic bottling. At least, that’s how it should have worked, but the pill counters kept making errors. A Dunlap staffer,
after studying the process, realized that the color of the boards did not contrast sharply with the color of many pills. He added a dab of orange paint to the bottom of each indentation with the result that any hole not filled by a pill showed up like a warning light. Accuracy shot up instantly; problem solved.

Since the 1950s human engineering has been a recognized branch of applied psychology; its practitioners work on everything from jumbo jets and subway control centers to cell phones and home computers. Psychologists in human engineering have researched scores of such questions as whether a rotating calibrated dial that moves past a fixed marker is easier to read than a pointer that rotates around a fixed calibrated dial (the rotating dial is easier), and how to make the handles of controls easier to recognize (one way: by color coding them; another: by giving them shapes that signify their use even without one’s looking at them— for instance, giving a landing-gear handle a round, wheel-like end, a flap handle a flaplike wedge shape).
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Until recently, the most potentially disastrous equipment in America, its nuclear power plants, was designed largely without the benefit of human engineering. After the 1979 accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission belatedly realized that there had been a dearth of human engineering psychologists on the staffs of firms that designed and built America’s nuclear plants. That may have been why the operator-machine system at Three Mile Island had serious flaws. The indicator that should have warned operators of a stuck valve in the automatic shutdown system was not designed to call attention to itself; almost 30 percent of the system displays were too high to be read by operators; colors that signified normal conditions on some control panels signified a problem on others. As a result of these findings, the NRC hired about thirty psychologists and, heeding their recommendations, issued new regulations and guidelines for the nation’s nuclear plants.
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A few other typical findings by specialists in human engineering:

Environmental psychology:
This latter-day specialty deals with the ways in which human beings use and are influenced by their physical environment. Three examples:

Territoriality:
Like most animals, human beings have a strong impulse to control the space around them. When a group of people feel that a certain area belongs to them collectively, they tend to act together and on one another’s behalf rather than as isolated individuals. In 1972 Oscar Newman, a noted urban planner, analyzed patterns of crime in public housing projects and identified the placement of buildings—what views they opened onto, what spaces they half-enclosed or commanded, and so on—that instilled in their inhabitants feelings of community and responsibility, and were thereby associated with lower crime rates.
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Since then, a number of environmental psychologists and architects have amplified the study of what kinds of neighborhood layouts foster collective territoriality and mutuality.
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Privacy:
In different societies and different parts of our own society, people have dissimilar needs for privacy, but in general some degree of privacy is important to nearly everyone. The environmental psychologist tries to meet this need architecturally. In large offices, for instance, the use of partitions or walls providing freedom from direct visibility by supervisors, rather than open-plan design, has been found to yield greater job satisfaction and better, not worse, performance.
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Crowding:
Living and working where the density of human beings is constantly high is stressful. When density cannot be lowered, environmental psychologists offset its effects by architectural and visual manipulation. One team of environmental psychologists tested three minor architectural variations within a college dormitory to see how much they differed in creating the feeling of crowding. One was a long corridor with rooms housing forty students; the second, two short corridors, each with rooms housing twenty students; the third, a long corridor housing forty students but with a lounge in the middle, where students could meet, set off from each half of the corridor by doors. Although the last arrangement had as high a density as the other two, students perceived it as less confining and crowded, more congenial and social.
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Performance psychology:
This specialty is concerned with expanding the mental abilities and motor skills used in learning and in many skilled activities, including sports.

In the past two decades, some reputable psychologists (and some who are less than reputable) have made extraordinary claims for the effectiveness of certain performance-increasing methods of training, many of them New Age techniques outside the mainstream of scientific psychology. These include sleep learning, accelerated learning, neurolinguistic programming, biofeedback, the mental rehearsal of athletic skills, extrasensory perception, psychokinesis (moving or altering physical objects by mental effort alone), and others.

Because extensions of human capabilities would be valuable in combat, in 1984 the Army Research Institute asked the National Academy of Sciences to evaluate a number of these unorthodox techniques. The NAS’s National Research Council created a fourteen-member Committee on Techniques for the Enhancement of Human Performance; it consisted largely of psychologists (reputable) and was headed by Robert A. Bjork of the University of California at Los Angeles. The committee and its subcommittees visited ten laboratories to observe techniques, listened to presentations by advocates of the new methods as well as independent consultants, and reviewed a huge literature. The conclusions, some predictable and others surprising, were published in two reports, the first in 1988 and the second in 1991.
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Here are a few of the salient findings about somewhat unorthodox methods of expanding human capabilities. (Later we will hear the conclusions about the more unorthodox ones.)

Training regimes:
Many physical trainers and coaches stress the value of “massed practice”—intensive, prolonged practice of a skill. An example is the training offered in tennis “camps,” where students work at their tennis many hours a day for a week or two. Such regimens, the committee reported, do boost performance to high levels in a short time, but the gain is evanescent:

The spacing effect holds true not just for motor skills but for verbal ones, particularly language learning. Although this has been known to psychologists for many decades, the short-term gain in skill during massed practice continues to impress coaches and instructors, and to beguile their students. The committee’s findings and the advice of sports psychologists will probably not counteract the sales pitches of the promoters of massed-practice training programs.

Mental practice of motor skills:
For some time, sports psychologists have been counseling athletes, musicians, and other practitioners of motor skills to rehearse mentally what they mean to do physically, claiming that this will improve actual performance. A number of athletes and others have testified to the effectiveness of the method. Jack Nicklaus, for one, has said that he never takes a golf shot without first visualizing the precise trajectory of his swing and the flight of the ball. A Chinese pianist, imprisoned for seven years during the Cultural Revolution, played as well as ever soon after his release, and explained that he could do so because during his captivity he had practiced every day in his mind.