BIOLOGY IN HUMAN AFFAIRS 



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 conse- 

 quences 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. 



An apparently simpler problem in ascertaining the rela- 

 tionship between significant variables in the work situation 

 is illustrated by an inquiry into the relation between 

 intensity of illumination on the one hand, and output, 

 accidents, and employee morale on the other, which 

 has been made under the auspices of a committee of the 

 National Research Council, and is soon to be published. 

 This relation is not so clear cut as earlier experiments had 

 seemed to indicate, since personal and social factors as 

 well as physical aspects of the environment have had to be 

 controlled before effects of lighting on industrial behavior 

 could be unambiguously ascertained. 



The variety and complexity of the factors which come 

 within the scope of the industrial psychologist's inquiry 

 are seen at a glance in the accompanying partial list of 

 variables, in which managers and workers are chiefly 

 interested. 



[126] 



