BIOLOGY IN HUMAN AFFAIRS 



"The best safety device," my friend Bill Pfouts used to 

 say, "is located above the neck." What has industrial 

 psychology done to improve the efficient operation of this 

 device? 



The story would be long, if all were told. Distinguished 

 psychologists in Germany, Russia, France, Denmark, Italy, 

 and other lands have delved into the mysteries of motive 

 and habit, attention and distraction, visual acuity, reaction 

 time, susceptibility to fatigue, self-control, and other 

 aspects of human nature, in search of obscure causes of 

 proneness to accidents and ways of eradicating them. Our 

 colleagues of the British Industrial Health Research Board 

 have studied large numbers of apprentices and employees 

 in shipyards and factories, to determine the relation of 

 accidents to monotony of work, to proficiency, and to 

 various differences of ability and personality. Their 

 statistical investigations early proved that industrial 

 accidents do not just happen; they are not distributed 

 among the workers according to the laws of chance. In 

 this country also, in studying records of accidents among 

 factory employees, street-car motormen, automobilists and 

 bus drivers, more than half the accidents have been found 

 to occur to a relatively small proportion of the men. 

 These accident-prone workers are, for the most part, as 

 eager to avoid accidents as any of the others. They have 

 had the same training and supervision. They see the 

 same posters and take part in the same safety drives. So the 

 problem of the industrial psychologist is clearly that of 

 developing the most effective ways of studying these 

 accident-prone individuals and helping them to overcome 

 their particular proclivities. 



Accidents have been largely reduced where this psy- 

 chological approach to the problem has been added to the 

 more familiar forms of effective safety effort — on the street 

 railways and bus services of the Boston Elevated Railway, 



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