{"agent_id":"munsterberg","agent_name":"Hugo Münsterberg","slug":"applied-psychology","label":"Applied psychology: should the findings of the laboratory be carried out into law, work, therapy, education, and art?","topic":"Applied psychology","question":"Should the findings of the laboratory be carried out into law, work, therapy, education, and art?","position":"The psychologists have built, in a single generation, a science of the mind in the laboratory — of attention and memory, of feeling and will, of individual difference and fatigue and learning. And there they have too often left it, as if the knowledge were an ornament for the study rather than a tool for the world. I say the time is ripe to carry the results of the laboratory into the practical life of the world: into the courtroom, where the psychology of testimony bears on justice; into the factory and the office, where the fitting of the man to his work and the study of fatigue and efficiency bear on labor; into the clinic, where the mind may be healed by mental means; into the school and the market and even the picture-house. This is not to cheapen the science but to fulfill it. A science of mind that cannot help the judge, the employer, the physician, and the teacher is a science that has not yet understood its own reach. The laboratory is the source; the world is the field.","paragraphs":[[{"t":"The psychologists have built, in a single generation, a science of the mind in the laboratory — of attention and memory, of feeling and will, of individual difference and fatigue and learning.","n":[]},{"t":"And there they have too often left it, as if the knowledge were an ornament for the study rather than a tool for the world.","n":[]},{"t":"I say the time is ripe to carry the results of the laboratory into the practical life of the world: into the courtroom, where the psychology of testimony bears on justice; into the factory and the office, where the fitting of the man to his work and the study of fatigue and efficiency bear on labor; into the clinic, where the mind may be healed by mental means; into the school and the market and even the picture-house.","n":[1,2,3,4]}],[{"t":"This is not to cheapen the science but to fulfill it.","n":[]},{"t":"A science of mind that cannot help the judge, the employer, the physician, and the teacher is a science that has not yet understood its own reach.","n":[]},{"t":"The laboratory is the source; the world is the field.","n":[5]}]],"texts":"Psychology: General and Applied (1914 — the systematic case for application); Psychology and Industrial Efficiency (1913); On the Witness Stand (1908); Psychotherapy (1909); The Photoplay (1916). Reception: the resistance of laboratory purists (in the Wundtian tradition) who thought application premature; the vast subsequent growth of applied psychology (I-O, forensic, clinical, educational, consumer); the critique that early application outran its evidence.","works":["Psychology: General and Applied (1914 — the systematic case for application)","Psychology and Industrial Efficiency (1913)","On the Witness Stand (1908)","Psychotherapy (1909)","The Photoplay (1916)"],"reception":"the resistance of laboratory purists (in the Wundtian tradition) who thought application premature; the vast subsequent growth of applied psychology (I-O, forensic, clinical, educational, consumer); the critique that early application outran its evidence.","status":"Münsterberg's programmatic case for applied psychology was contested in his day by laboratory purists who thought application premature and a threat to the young science's rigor, but it is overwhelmingly vindicated: applied psychology — industrial-organizational, forensic, clinical, educational, consumer/health — is now one of the largest parts of the discipline, and Münsterberg is a founder of several of its branches. The enduring caution is the one his own career illustrated: early application sometimes outran the evidence, and responsible application requires that the science be solid before it is sold. The principle that laboratory findings should be put to use is now simply the mainstream; the discipline is the caution about doing it rigorously.","era":"1863-1916","discipline":"Psychology","refs":[{"n":1,"work":"American Problems","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"But just that is the situation in the world of mental facts. The laboratories for the study of inner life flourish, ex- periments are made, inventions are tested, new vistas are opened; but practical life goes on without making use of all these psychological discoveries.","label":"American Problems"},{"n":2,"work":"On the Witness Stand","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"No one dreamed of the possibility of carrying such experimental method to the higher problems of inner life which seemed the exclusive region of the philosophising psychol- ogist. But as soon as experimental psychology began to work in its own workshops, it was most natural to carry the new method persistently to new and ever new groups of problems.","label":"On the Witness Stand"},{"n":3,"work":"Psychology General and Applied","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"As soon as the labor has been divided it can develop in both fields with- out restriction. The practical psychologists can then really adjust their questions to their own specific interests instead of being obliged to subordinate them to conceptions of gen- eral psychology and to make them a mere appendix of theoretical studies.","label":"Psychology General and Applied"},{"n":4,"work":"Psychology and Industrial Efficiency","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"Laboratories for experimental psychology have grown up in all civilized countries, and the new method has been applied to one group of mental traits after another. And yet we stand be- fore the surprising fact that all the manifold results of the new science have remained book know- ledge, detached from any practical interests.","label":"Psychology and Industrial Efficiency"},{"n":5,"work":"Psychology and Industrial Efficiency","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"The study of the individual dif- ferences itself is not applied psychology, but it is the presupposition without which applied psy- chology would have remained a phantom.","label":"Psychology and Industrial Efficiency"}],"answer":null,"siblings":[{"slug":"the-witness-on-the-stand","label":"The witness on the stand: is eyewitness testimony psychologically unreliable, and does the psychologist belong in the courtroom?"},{"slug":"fitting-the-worker-to-the-work","label":"Fitting the worker to the work: is the measurement of aptitude and the pursuit of efficiency a benefit, or the servant of managerial control?"},{"slug":"the-photoplay","label":"The photoplay: is film an art whose devices externalize the very operations of the mind?"},{"slug":"the-two-psychologies","label":"The two psychologies: is mind a causal object for natural science, while the free, purposive, valuing self belongs to a philosophy science cannot reach?"}]}