May 1, 1915.] 



THE INDIA RUBBER WORLD 



423 



least in the germ of discovery — and had done their work 

 with their hands carefully covered by surgeons' rubber 

 gloves. 



BUSINESS PSYCHOLOGY IN FCR A TROUNCING. 



THE CONSUMER WANTS TO KNOW. 



ArHOROUGHLY absorbing and highly valuable 

 study is psychology, and it i- applicable to many 

 phases of life where mental alertness is a prime factor, 

 but when the psychologists tell us that the foreman of 

 a grinding room cannot properly discharge his duties or 

 a salesman on the road adequately find a market for a 

 gross of raincoats unless the) have both steeped them- 

 selves m psychological literature, they are going rather 

 loo far. They have been much too insistent upon their 

 claims for attention, and the business man. who has so 

 often been told that be can get no proper grasp of his 

 business problems without the assistance of some expert 

 trained in the charts, diagrams and formulae of the books, 

 will feel a certain sinister joy in the fine trouncing that 

 Professor Boris Sidis, of Boston — one of the greatest of 

 p-\chologists — administers to his fellow experts who have 

 been so fond of declaring that their particular science was 

 the sine qua non of commercial success. Here are a few 

 refreshing excerpts from Professor Sidis' book recently 

 issued, entitled "Foundations of Normal and Abnormal 

 Psychology": 



"Any intelligent business man knows infinitely more 

 about business and bow to obtain the best results out of 

 certain conditions than all the psychologists with their 

 laboratory experiments, their artificial statistics and 

 puerile, trivial experimental arrangements, giving results 

 no less trivial and meaningless." 



He goes on to observe further: "We may as well ex- 

 pect the comparative psychologist to offer practical points 

 on the efficiency of cows to give milk, or on the efficiency 

 of hens to lay eggs. . . . Psychological business 

 claims are illusory. The sooner the practical business 

 man learns this fact the better for him. and also for the 

 earnest psychological investigator." 



Of course, no one questions the efficiency of certain 

 psychological tests to meet certain specific conditions — 

 like, for instance, Professor Munsterberg's bi-colored 

 charts to discover the engineer's quickness of eye and 

 rapidity of mental action — but in the great majority of 

 cases the claims of the psychological advocates as applied 

 to business efficiency have certainly been grossly exag- 

 gerated, and it is accordingly quite agreeable to hear one 

 of them make this admission in such vigorous 

 fashion. 



WHEN prices go down the consumer pockets the dif- 

 ference and goes unquestioningly on his way, but 

 when price- go up he alwa\s wants to know why. The 

 reason he usually u--ii;ns, himself, is the one nearest at 

 baud, namely, that the iniquitous dealer is giving the 

 -i rcw another turn. ( ienerall) the dealer is blameless, 

 or at least only partiall) responsible for advancing prices. 

 Usually the cause is quite remote from the retail store 

 where the public makes its purchases. This being the case, 

 it is always desirable for the retail dealer to point out the 

 true fact- to the consumer, so as not to have the burden 

 rest too heavily on bis own -boulder-. 



()ne would imagine that it should be fairly clear to 

 people in Germany win price- of commodities — includ- 

 ing those made of rubber — have advanced during the 

 la-t eight months. The reasons appear t>> lie patent 

 enough. But, according to reports, the German con- 

 sumer, exercising the privilege of his class, is complain- 

 ing very bitterly that he has to pay so much more for 

 articles of rubber than he did formerly, lie has made 

 such a protest that a general circular — reproduced on an- 

 other page — has been prepared for the retail dealers 

 to distribute, calling the attention of the public generally 

 to the fact that when a country is at war and its supplies 

 of materials shut oft", its skilled laborers taken from their 

 work and sent to the front, its factories partially or wholh 

 incapacitated — when, in short, all the machinery of manu- 

 facture and distribution is quite out of gear and generally 

 dislocated, the upward shoot of commodity prices is a 

 fairly logical consequence and reasonably to be expected. 



WHY NOT THE R. C. A.? 



r T'MK short cut has always been supposed to make a 

 * strong appeal to the American mind. Vet some- 

 times we go all the way around when we might quite as 

 well make a quick leap across. For instance, — abroad, all 

 the important rubber clubs are almost invariably referred 

 to simply by their initials. When our English friends 

 want to speak of the Rubber Growers' Association or the 

 Rubber Trade Association they don't take the time and 

 space to round these titles out in full, but simply call them 

 the R. G. A. and R. T. A. and let it go at that. 



Some American societies have adopted this convenient 

 habit of abbreviation. The Society of Automobile En- 

 gineers, for instance, is almost always referred to as the 

 S. \. E., and the National Automobile Association is 

 commonly known as the X. A. A. So why should not the 

 rubber trade follow these excellent precedents and use 

 R. C. A. for the Rubber Club of America and R. T. A. 

 for the Rubber Trade Association of New York ? 



President Hodgmax of The Rubber Club of Amer- 

 ica, Inc., is deserving of the thanks of the whole 

 American rubber trade for his work during the past 

 winter. It was due to his initiative, bis organizing ability 

 and his untiring effort that the embargo problem was 

 solved. Not only that, but the rearrangement of the 

 Rubber Club in respect to its constitution, its scope and 

 its opportunity for future usefulness is largely the result 

 of his constructive genius. 



