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Updated: June 28, 2025
The psychologist takes the same interest in the examples of window displays, sample distributions, and similar vehicles of commerce by which the offered articles themselves and not their mere picture or description are to influence the consciousness of the prospective customer. Here, too, every element may be isolated and may be brought under psychotechnical rules.
As long as special psychological experiments in the service of industrial psychology are still so exceptional, it may, indeed, be acknowledged that the practical experiments in the service of scientific management have come nearest to the solution of these special psychotechnical problems.
In order to demonstrate the principle of this kind of psychotechnical help with fuller detail, at least by one illustration, I may discuss the case of the advertisements, the more as this problem has already been taken up in a somewhat systematic way by the psychological laboratories.
The theoretical views of the economists and of the philosophers of value might thus be directly translated into psychotechnical advice. As soon as we look deeper into the situation, we must recognize that this surface impression is entirely misleading.
The physician as such has only to deal with the means which lead toward that goal. We must make the same discrimination in the psychotechnical field. The psychologist may point out the methods by which an involuntary confession can be secured from a defendant, but whether it is justifiable to extort involuntary confessions is a problem which does not concern the psychologist.
But it is evident that every one of these relations also has its psychological aspect, and that a really scientific psychotechnical treatment of these problems can become possible only through the agency of psychological experiments. We have excellent experimental investigations concerning the influence of the loss of sleep on intellectual labor and on simple psychomotor activities.
The questions of color harmony and color contrast, light intensity and mutual support of uniformly colored objects, of irradiation, depth and perspective, are significant for an effective display in the show-window, and the laboratory results can easily be translated into psychotechnical prescriptions.
The psychotechnical scientist cannot be blamed if the results of his experiments are misused for immoral purposes, just as the chemist is not responsible if chemical knowledge is applied to the construction of anarchistic bombs.
In our Harvard laboratory we have now proceeded from such preparatory mass experiments to subtle investigations on a small number of persons well trained in psychological self-observation with whom the conditions of the experiment can be varied in many directions. It would seem probable that such experiments might also win psychotechnical significance.
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