BIOLOGY IN HUMAN AFFAIRS 



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 situa- 

 tion; 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 depres- 

 sion. 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 com- 

 petence, 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 follow- 

 ing 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 



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