360 ANXALS NEW YORK ACADEMY OF SCIENCES 



treatises as Dr. Dewey's article, "Interest as Belated to Will" and Dr. 

 Montessori's "Pedagogia Scientifica.*' But interest is a general terin 

 and can not have an absolutely universal value for every individual or 

 every subject of thought or desire. Individual interests are as important 

 in the social world as are individual capacities. They should, therefore, 

 be a fruitful field for scientific investigation. The experimental work 

 done with advertisements has brought to light group differences in the 

 preferences of men and women for various appeals. The investigation 

 to be reported was of a like nature, except that it dealt with children. 



The formal experiment consisted in asking an individual child to 

 arrange nine pictures in the order in which he liked them best. The 

 nine pictures were chosen to represent nine specific appeals : landscape, 

 children, animals, religion, pathos, sentiment, patriotism, heroism, and 

 action. (They were Cosmos prints and therefore of uniform size and 

 finish.) In all, there were three series of these pictures, each parallel 

 so far as possible with the other two in their appeals. The children 

 numbered over 200, 10 girls and 10 boys for each year's age from 6.5 

 to 16.5. They were almost entirely attendants of the public schools of 

 New York City and came from quite varied sections of the city. 



The results were tabulated according to age differences, broad social 

 distinctions, and nationality. In the last-named case the number of 

 subjects was so limited (10 girls and 10 boys to each of the following 

 nationalities : Irish, French, German, and Italian, and only 9 girls and 8 

 boys to the Spanish) that the results are not held as significant. 



The positive data showed a sex difference in the order of preference 

 for these several appeals. The girls' order was: (1) Eeligion, (2) 

 patriotism, (3) children, (4) pathos, (5) animals, (6) sentiment, (7) 

 landscape, (8) the heroic, (9) action. The last two were decidedly lowest 

 in the scale and the first three were quite clearly highest for all ages; 

 but the picture representing these nine curves was one of bewildering 

 intersections as the values changed from year to year. The boys' order 

 was: (1) Eeligion, (2) patriotism, (3) action, (4) the heroic, (5) 

 pathos, (6) animals, (7) sentiment, (8) landscape, (9) children. The 

 boys' chart representing the curves for these appeals showed greater 

 agreement from year to year. Eeligion and patriotism, the heroic and 

 action, and landscape and children kept rather parallel courses all along 

 the age scale, and no very decided tendencies appeared with progressive 

 age differences. Girls seemed to lose interest somewhat in pictures of 

 children and animals and to take greater interest in the heroic and action 

 pictures. The latter change is explained by the fact that, as the girls 

 increased in school knowledge, they read an historical background into 

 these more or less warlike scenes. 



