BIOLOGY IN HUMAN AFFAIRS 



the Paris tramways and the German railways. These 

 methods have proved valuable in reducing accidents chiefly 

 in those companies where the major executives have seen 

 that such selection procedures are properly integrated in a 

 well-considered program of training and individual super- 

 vision, as has been done among the delivery drivers of 

 R. H. Macy and Company. 



The Western Electric Company, the Atlantic Refining 

 Company, and many other firms have extended into the 

 supervisory and executive levels their investigations of the 

 usefulness of psychological tests. Considerable effort was 

 devoted to the search for dependable aids in predicting 

 ability to sell, both in retail stores and on the road. But 

 the widest use of tests has been in the selection of typists, 

 stenographers, file clerks, comptometer operators, and 

 other office workers, following the pioneer work of 

 Thorndike for the Metropolitan Life, and of Scott for 

 Cheney Brothers. 



The expectations of the uninformed that recourse to psy- 

 chological tests could somehow relieve the employment 

 manager of the necessity of using also the more familiar 

 ways of sifting and placing applicants, were early dispelled. 

 It was also recognized that vocational adjustment is a 

 continuing process. It begins in the schools. Initial place- 

 ment and replacement are incidents along the road of self- 

 discovery and advancement. The industrial psychologist's 

 interest, then, reaches back into the period of early voca- 

 tional guidance, and continues throughout the worker's 

 occupational career. If, historically, this interest seemed 

 to find a locus first in the employment office, it almost 

 immediately reached out into the plant. The processes of 

 training on the job, bristling with problems essentially 

 psychological, early engaged the attention of pioneers like 

 Link, who had first entered industry to improve the 

 procedures of hiring. The mere necessity of knowing the 



[138] 



