The Story of Psychology (121 page)

Anecdotes, of course, do not prove a hypothesis. The committee therefore examined a mass of research data and found that in controlled studies of motor skills, people who mentally rehearsed did perform distinctly better than people who did not. But physical practice alone yielded better results than mental practice alone, and a combination of the two yielded still better results in those skills where physical practice
is difficult or costly and in those requiring planning and decision making rather than automatic responses. The committee concluded that the claims of sports psychologists as to the benefits of mental practice are exaggerated.
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While some sports psychologists continue to use these methods, the current emphasis seems to be more in the therapeutic mode: helping athletes think of themselves as winners, maintain focus during competition, heighten their own motivation, and cope with their intense feelings. Bob Rotella, well-known sports psychologist and author, is an exemplar, according to Gazzaniga and Heatherton: “He helps athletes train their minds to focus on their goals and teaches them to deal with their doubts, worries, and frustrations…For Rotella, this means that how athletes view themselves, their beliefs, and their performance expectations shape how they actually perform.”
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We have already seen two ways in which psychologists have improved the compatibility of humans and machines: through testing individuals for specific machine-handling aptitudes, and through designing equipment to suit human perceptions, responses, and movements. Two other approaches to heightening workers’ effectiveness consist of adapting their movements and modifying the work environment.

Early in the century, “efficiency experts” armed with stopwatches and tape measures analyzed and modified the actions needed for each task. They studied an employee’s movements to determine whether, say, he could pack books into a shipping carton faster while seated or standing, using one hand or two, with the books piled to the right, left, or in front of the carton.
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But such modifications, aimed solely at increasing output, often made industrial jobs more stressful and fatiguing, created worker hostility, and caused higher rates of errors and defects in the product.

During and after World War II, the increasing complexity of technology led to a new and larger concept, the “operator-machine system.” This went beyond applying the elements of human engineering; it called for adapting the environment of the workplace to human psychological capacities and needs by modifying lighting, noise, rest periods, communications, and other working conditions in ways that would lessen fatigue, improve job satisfaction and employee commitment, and lower absenteeism and turnover.

From the factory, industrial psychologists gradually moved into the office, testing managerial job applicants for leadership qualities, recommending changes in job requirements to prevent burnout, and suggesting modifications of the chain of command and internal communication to improve team functioning and team problem solving. What had been industrial psychology became, in the post–World War II era, industrial/ organizational (I/O) psychology, the specialty of 7 percent of all today’s psychologists.
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Some of them, trying to look like pure scientists, spend much of their time on research and theory, but most are concerned with understanding those aspects of people’s behavior in the world of work that will enable them to solve employment problems and improve efficiency;
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they act as if they were a hybrid of scientist and manager. A statement made several years ago by an I/O psychologist with United Brands Company is illuminating:

Many of the functions of I/O psychologists, it is apparent, are primarily managerial; accordingly, we pass these by. But other functions, though serving management’s ends, are primarily psychological. A look at two of them will give some notion of how I/O psychologists apply their science to improving the fit between human beings and their jobs.

Fitting the job to the person:
This consists in part of human engineering, but includes much more.

The human engineering aspects include a number of physical features of the workplace and job that I/O psychologists pay attention to. Among them:
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Psychologists can make useful suggestions about these workplace characteristics, but all of them cost money, although the argument has been made that more comfortable and less bored workers actually do more and better work and that employee turnover is reduced.

But human engineering is only one facet of the much larger subject of job satisfaction, a major concern of I/O psychologists. This is a broad and complex subject; we will content ourselves here with merely noting, first, the major
organizational causes
of job satisfaction, as summarized by psychologist Robert Baron of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and two co-authors.
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In addition, there are four
personal causes
of job satisfaction:

Fitting the person to the job:
In large part this consists of assessing the ability of potential employees to perform a particular job. But in the case of managers, it also calls for appraising them after some years on the job
in order to determine who has been moving up and looks like high-level material, and who seems stuck and unlikely ever to contribute much. Companies have good reason to want to know which prospective employees to bet on. One insurance company reckoned in 1974 that it cost $31,600 to replace a salesperson and $185,000 to replace a sales manager; the figures would be roughly four times as large today.
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Employee testing began, as we saw, before World War I. It has grown steadily ever since; nowadays a majority of large organizations and some smaller ones use tests in personnel selection. The evidence is that it pays off. A typical study, made for an artificial ice plant, found that of applicants for maintenance positions whose test scores ranged from 103 to 120, 94 percent were later rated as superior on the job; of those whose scores ranged from 60 to 86, only 25 percent were rated that highly.
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Tests for blue-collar jobs range from paper-and-pencil quizzes measuring knowledge of the job to “work sample tests” in which the applicant performs tasks similar to those of the actual job. White-collar job tests similarly range from written ones measuring verbal fluency, numerical ability, reasoning ability, and other cognitive skills, to those in which the applicant does filing, gives directions based on maps, handles emergency phone calls, and the like.

At many companies, applicants for managerial positions undergo a rigorous evaluation procedure known as assessment. Henry Murray, of TAT fame, and others developed assessment during World War II as a means of selecting intelligence agents for the OSS (Office of Strategic Services, the predecessor of the CIA). OSS assessment, as we saw in an earlier chapter, relies on personality tests and observations of the candidates in several artfully contrived situations. After the war, some of the psychologists who had worked in the OSS assessment project adapted the method to other purposes at the Institute for Personality Assessment and Research in Berkeley. Abandoning the qualifications of spies for more mundane concerns, they developed assessment protocols for dozens of specialties ranging from law school student to Mount Everest climber and from M.B.A. candidate to mathematician.
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But it was Douglas Bray, a psychologist at AT&T, who worked out the method of personnel assessment that became the model for American business and industry. Bray, born in Massachusetts, had made his way as far as graduate school at Clark University, where he earned a master’s in psychology before being drafted in 1941. He was assigned to the Air Corps’s aviation psychology program, where he helped create paper-and-pencil tests, psychomotor skills tests, and simulations to screen candidates
for training as pilots, navigators, bombardiers, and aerial gunners.
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The work gave Bray an abiding interest in assessment. After the war he earned a doctorate in social psychology at Yale and taught for some years, but in 1955 he had the lucky break that started him on the real work of his life. A former professor recommended him to AT&T, which needed a psychologist to conduct a long-term study on selecting people who could become highly effective managers. At the time, AT&T was hiring as many as six thousand college graduates a year and promoting thousands more from vocational jobs to management jobs; knowing how to pick winners would be of immense value.

In Bray, it had picked a winner before having a method for doing so. Within a year he had assembled a staff, devised an assessment protocol, and begun using it in an “assessment center” in the headquarters of Michigan Bell in St. Clair. (Michigan Bell was the first company in the AT&T system to participate in the managerial-career study.) At the assessment center, twelve management candidates at a time would spend three days undergoing interviews, completing a battery of cognitive tests, personality inventories, attitude scales, and projective tests, and taking part in three major behavioral simulations—leaderless group discussion, a business game, and “In-Basket,” an individual exercise in which each participant was handed a sheaf of memos, letters, and requests, and had to make decisions, write replies, and take other appropriate actions. Eight assessors, chiefly psychologists, spent a week observing and evaluating the participants in each group.
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As in all longitudinal research, the hardest part for Bray was waiting to gather evidence that the assessment method was valid. Eight years and again twenty years after each participant’s assessment Bray conducted reassessments. The results strongly validated his method. After twenty years, 43 percent of the college graduates who had been rated the most promising had reached the fourth (of six) level or higher of management, as against only 20 percent of those judged less promising. Of non-college men, 58 percent of those highly rated by the assessment had made it to the third level or higher, but only 22 percent of those not highly rated had risen that far.
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Bray’s assessment center and method did not catch on for some years, but in the expansive economic atmosphere of the 1970s it mushroomed; by 1980 there were about a thousand assessment centers, and by 1990 some two thousand.
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Since then, the number has decreased somewhat
because costs proved too high to be practical for most positions, but Assessment Centers continue to be widely used in the U.S. and almost every industrialized country for identifying or selecting senior-level talent.
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Today, assessment in a center can take as little as one day, and evaluation has been much speeded up by replacing paper-and-pencil tests with computerized Q-and-A programs, and group exercises with computerized and video-aided simulations.

Many of the Bray techniques, in simplified and speeded-up form, are being used by the multitude of assessment organizations now operating on the Web.
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Bray has won six awards for his work as an applied psychologist, including one from the American Psychological Association, which presented him in 1991 with the Gold Medal for Life Achievement in the Application of Psychology.

The testing of job applicants by employers is only a small part of what is now one of psychology’s most extensive influences on American life. Each year scores of millions of Americans take standardized multiple-choice tests published by over a hundred companies, some of which are
multi-
multi-million-dollar enterprises. Thanks to the federal No Child Left Behind Law, in 2006 every student from the third to eighth grade and one high school grade had to take state tests—about 45 million in all. (It was estimated by the Government Accounting Office that states would spend anywhere from $1.9 billion to $5.3 billion from 2002 to 2008 to implement No Child Left Behind–mandated tests.
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) Add to that all the IQ tests given in schools throughout the nation, the standardized tests required for certification in the professions, the tests administered to many would-be employees by companies, the SAT, ACT, and other tests that play a role in college admissions, the personality and other tests given to patients by psychotherapists, and many others, and it is evident that testing is one of psychology’s most successful applications to daily life. It has become a major means by which our society makes decisions about people’s lives in education, employment, physical and mental health treatment, the civil service, and the military. And even love and mating: A number of dating services now use personality and other tests to generate “matches” between people.
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