Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 27, 2025
Applied psychology is evidently to be classed with the technical sciences. It may be considered as psychotechnics, since we must recognize any science as technical if it teaches us to apply theoretical knowledge for the furtherance of human purposes.
The economic psychotechnics of the future will surely study with similar methods the effects of the living commercial agencies. Experiments will trace the exact effects which the salesman or customer may produce. But here not even a modest beginning can be discovered, and it would be difficult to mention a single example of experimental research.
Many patient investigations, with every independent group of apparatus and machines, may be necessary before psychotechnics will be able to supply industry with reliable advice for teaching and learning. Nor have we the least right hastily to carry over the results from one group of movements to another.
They are accordingly inaccessible to the point of view of experimental psychology, and nothing can be expected from such interpretative discussions of the economists for the psychotechnics at which the psychologist is aiming.
Whoever is to examine the psychotechnics of displays and exhibitions must therefore study the psychology of æsthetic stimulation, of suggestion, of the effects of light, color, form and movement, of apperception and attention, and ought not to forget the psychology of humor and curiosity, of instincts and emotions.
For instance, the sportsman who climbs a glacier also performs such a fatiguing activity which demands the greatest effort of attention and will; and yet the psychotechnics of sport do not belong in economic psychology, because this mountain climbing does not satisfy economic desires.
But when the hundreds of millions of customers in the civilized world want to satisfy their economic demands in the stores, the whole dissolves into a flood of talk, because no one has taken the trouble to examine scientifically the psychotechnics of selling and to put it on a firm psychological foundation.
This is necessary limitation, but in this limitation lies the strength of the new science. The psychologist may show how a special commodity can be advertised; but whether from a social point of view it is desirable to reinforce the sale of these goods is no problem for psychotechnics.
As all the examples which we selected were chosen only in order to make clear the characteristic point of view of psychotechnics, it is unimportant whether the particular results will stand the test of further experimental investigations, or will have to be modified by new researches.
These little illustrations of advertisement experiments may suffice to indicate how much haphazard methods are still prevalent in the whole field of economic psychotechnics, methods which would not be tolerated in the sphere of physical and chemical technology.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking