110 



studies of urban problems and noted that wliile the Government 

 ^^'as ah-ead}^ engaged in a ^^ide range of social science studies, tlie 

 question was as to how well these would be done ^\"ithout the assurance 

 of a progressive improvement in tlie quality of trained personnel and 

 basic information. There was a disposition to overh)ok the social 

 sciences because their useful inventions and products did not ajipear 

 in recognizable form. Leaders in the physical sciences were identified 

 by their scientific products, but no comparable eminence was con- 

 ferred by social inventions or jiroducts such as budget programs, 

 jjersonnel classification, public administration, regional planning, 

 and many others. 



Dr. Robert \l. Yerkes, emeritus professor of psychobiology, Yale 

 University, called the subcommittee's attention to the social im- 

 portance of psychology which tended to link the physical to the human 

 science invohdng the engineering contributions of human factors, the 

 economic aspects of labor-management relations, the broader contri- 

 bution to education, the matching of i)ersonnel to job classification, 

 and the many contributions of the discipline to military operations. 

 The social sciences, he said, were capable of contributing to the 

 effectiveness of Government itself — 



In Government it would seem that social science research should be of first-rate 

 importance, for Government itself is a social science and most of the problems 

 that cost jNIembers of the Congress laborious days and sleepless nights are either 

 partially or wholly psychological. For clearly enough they involve such Inunan 

 factors as desires, prejudices, beliefs, opinions, convictions, practical judgments. 

 Major contributions of psychological research and of psychotechiiological develop- 

 ments to Government appear in the methods of individual psychobiological ap- 

 praisal and description which enable us to understand oiu'selves and others better, 

 and in procedures for public opinion polling, which have vast potentialities of 

 usefulness and abuse. ^° 



Dr. Edwin G. Nom-se, vice ])resident of the Brookings Institution 

 (and later to become Chairman of the President's Coimcil of Economic 

 Advisers), observed that "Every problem of utilizing the resources of 

 nattu'e for man's safety or material satisfaction has two halves, one 

 technological, the other economic." But the values that were ulti- 

 mately determined in the marketplace were evolved outside of his 

 discipline — 



While scientific analysis of comparative costs and returns and investigations 

 into the nature of the economic process occupies a pivotal place in man's effort to 

 make a good life for himself out of the rich but reticent resources of nature, the 

 values which come to expression in the marketplace, the preferences for certain 

 types of goods or services, the esteem in which leisure is held, and the capacity of 

 men to combine their productive efforts in one pattern of organization or another 

 and in response to various kinds of incentive or motivation are matters which lie 

 outside the field of economics as such. These contributory factors must be explored 

 by otlier sciences such as psychology, anthropology, political science, sociology, 

 and their handmaiden, history. We must understand the subtle complexities of 

 human nature as well as the precise mechanistic relations of physical nature if we 

 are to develop the national strength that grows out of productive cooperation 

 and avoid the disruptive struggles of group, class, racial, or nationalistic warfare."*' 



There was a tendencj^, he said later, to "exaggerate the amount of 

 exactness that there is in the phj^sical and biological sciences" and to 

 "underestimate the amount of evidential value that social science 

 techniques can get out of raw data from the economic and social 

 fields. 



}> 



3«rbid., pp. 751-753. 

 3' Ibid., p. 758. 



