Industrial psychology touches life at many points. Most of us spend a large part of our waking hours at work, rom choice or from necessity, we are employed in one way Fr another, in production, business, or personal service. We naturally want our hours of labor to yield their fullest return, not only of money wage, but of other values as well. To increase the zest of accomplishment, the sense of the worthwhileness of one's efforts, and the approbation of one's fellows for work well done, are aspirations no less universal than the desire for more money. These purposes form some of the main objectives of industrial psychology, a practical science of behavior dedicated to the increase of both working efficiency and satisfactions.

What Industrial Psychology Has Aimed to Do. The aims of industrial psychology may be viewed from both sides of the shield. It has sought removal of sources of nervousness, irritation, and discontent; elimination of needless fatigue; banishment of a sense of inadequacy or futility; and release from occupational fears, whether of wage cuts, unemployment, health hazards, loss of prestige, old-age dependency, arbitrary supervision, or other sources of apprehension connected with the work. And many of these objectives may be stated positively, as efforts to find better methods of occupational training, of supervision, of organization of work, of hiring and placement, and of controlling the working environment in the interest of greater comfort, health, and earning power.

Outposts of progress in industrial psychology are scattered to-day throughout many sectors of this wide area. Our industrialized social order has inevitably faced questions such as: the capacity of mature men and women to learn new skills and to adjust to a fast-changing situation; the relation between ability to do work and interest in that work; the effects of monotony, boredom, and fatigue on the satisfactions and the earning power of industrial workers. Psychobiological as well as economic roots of industrial unrest have been unearthed. The disastrous consequences of anxieties due to feelings of insecurity on the part of wage earners, supervisors, and executives have been emphasized afresh in each recurring business depression. The techniques of personal relationship - between foreman and worker, between groups of employees and of managers - have called for thoughtful study and industrial experimentation, the better to achieve individual competence, as well as integration of purposes and resolution of conflicts, in the common interest. To attack such problems, educational psychology, social psychology, and psychopathology have been called upon, and - most of all - the psychology of individual differences.

To what degree are people better adjusted to their work to-day than heretofore, more genuinely contented, more productive, more resourceful? To what extent are they finding greater satisfaction and self-realization than would be the case if such problems as these had never engaged the attention of industrial psychologists? No one can say. The aggregate results of their efforts to date are admittedly much smaller than they ought to be, for technopsychology is very young, and the psychological problems of work adjustment, like other biological problems, are complicated with numerous variables not easy to control. In the following pages, however, instances will be described in which such problems have been met and mastered, illustrating in this way points of view, methods of investigation, and results of research, but leaving it to the reader to pass upon the practical social value of these investigations, or to project into the future the benefits which may ultimately accrue from a scientifically grounded understanding of man's behavior in relation to his daily work.

First, let us take a hasty glance over the vast field into which, here and there, industrial psychology has been pushing its outposts of discovery. We can then look more closely into the specific aims of recent research, comparing them with the aims of scientific management on the one hand and of mental hygiene on the other. We shall inquire particularly into the ways which have been used to measure attitudes, interests, and abilities, to validate employment tests and other aids in vocational selection and placement, to diagnose and correct occupational shortcomings, such as lack of skill and susceptibility to accident, and to learn the true nature of industrial fatigue; for these are some of the more strategic areas in which industrial psychology has been exploring.

A Glimpse of the Field as a Whole. Research in industrial psychology, as in other branches of scientific inquiry, consists essentially in finding out precise relations between variables. The variables which must be analyzed, described, measured, and related, are:

(a) Significant aspects of industrial behavior, and

(b) Factors conditioning this behavior.

How, for instance, is a worker's productivity best defined and measured? How does the scientist measure the satisfactions men experience in their work? What are the incentives, financial and non-financial, which lead workers to put forth their full efforts? And just what is the relationship between each of these different kinds of incentives, and the accomplishments and satisfactions which follow from their use?

The vast industrial experiment now going forward in Russia is challenging the hypothesis that monetary reward is an indispensable incentive. Was Lenin correct? Another decade may tell.

In America many industrial experiments are in progress, forced upon us by business conditions: experiments in resorting to part-time employment instead of layoff, and in maintaining wage rates instead of reducing hourly pay. Just what is the relation between reduced hours and the feelings and attitudes of employees whose working time is shortened? What are the mental and physical consequences of a feeling of security, or of insecurity? Most of these experiments, unfortunately, are being tried without any thought on the part of management that they furnish precious grist for scientific research, or that their outcome, scientifically measured, might yield conclusions invaluable to industry and to society. But here and there, for example in the mills of the Kimberly-Clark Corporation, serious attempts are being made to assemble scientific data on just such questions as these.