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Screening the Psychological Laboratory: HugoMünsterberg, Psychotechnics, and the Cinema, 1892–1916

Jeremy Blatter

Science in Context / Volume 28 / Issue 01 / March 2015, pp 53 - 76DOI: 10.1017/S0269889714000325, Published online: 09 February 2015

Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0269889714000325

How to cite this article:Jeremy Blatter (2015). Screening the Psychological Laboratory: Hugo Münsterberg,Psychotechnics, and the Cinema, 1892–1916. Science in Context, 28, pp 53-76 doi:10.1017/S0269889714000325

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Science in Context 28(1), 53–76 (2015). C© Cambridge University Press 2015doi:10.1017/S0269889714000325

Screening the Psychological Laboratory: HugoMunsterberg, Psychotechnics, and the Cinema,1892–1916

Jeremy Blatter

Harvard UniversityE-mail: jblatter@fas.harvard.edu

Argument

According to Hugo Munsterberg, the direct application of experimental psychology to thepractical problems of education, law, industry, and art belonged by definition to the domain ofpsychotechnics. Whether in the form of pedagogical prescription, interrogation technique,hiring practice, or aesthetic principle, the psychotechnical method implied bringing thepsychological laboratory to bear on everyday life. There were, however, significant pitfallsto leaving behind the putative purity of the early psychological laboratory in pursuit oftechnological utility. In the Vocation Bureau, for example, psychological instruments wereoften deemed too intimidating for a public unfamiliar with the inner workings of experimentalscience. Similarly, when psychotechnical means were employed by big business in screeningjob candidates, ethical red flags were raised about this new alliance between science andcapital. This tension was particularly evident in Munsterberg’s collaboration with the ParamountPictures Corporation in 1916. In translating psychological tests into short experimental films,Munsterberg not only envisioned a new mass medium for the dissemination of psychotechnics,but a means by which to initiate the masses into the culture of experimental psychology.

Introduction

On 7 November 1914, twenty-seven applicants for the position of traveling salesmanwith the American Tobacco Company arrived at the Harvard Psychological Laboratory.“The tests that will count the most at examination today,” reported the Boston Journal,“will be the facts caught by impersonal instruments and carefully recorded in a strictlyscientific way” (Anon. 1914a). Led into one of five rooms by a student guide, applicantswere asked to stand facing a plate of glass. Over repeated trials, test subjects wereinstructed not to blink while the psychologist, aiming square between their eyes, struckthe glass plate with a rubber-tipped hammer (fig. 1). The goal of this experiment wasto assess the ability to control “instinctive impulses” (Munsterberg 1915a, 286). In

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Fig. 1. Illustration by Lejaren A. Hiller. In “The Man-Screen,” by Richard Washburn Child,Cosmopolitan Magazine (May 1915):647.

another test, subjects peered into a tachistoscope, an instrument for displaying visualstimuli at precise intervals, and observed a pattern of interwoven shapes briefly flashedupon a screen. By recalling each geometric form in its correct orientation, attentionand memory were gauged. After nine hours of testing, Hugo Munsterberg, Directorof the Psychological Laboratory, calculated the results and recommended the topten candidates for the traveling salesman position. In “The Man-Screen,” RichardWashburn Child’s account that appeared in Cosmopolitan the following May, the titularimage evokes a kind of psychotechnical sieve, filtering out vocational misfits likepebbles in a fine-mesh screen (Child 1915). At the same time, in passing through eachpsychological test not only were candidates’ aptitudes and deficiencies disclosed, butself-presentation ostensibly discerned from true self.

One year later, Child’s image of “The Man-Screen” would take on newmeaning when Paramount Pictures announced that famed Harvard psychologist, HugoMunsterberg, would engage moviegoers in a series of psychological tests produced forthe screen. “Nobody should be a manager, a newspaperman, a chauffeur, a farmer, asalesman, a teacher, a physician, who has not the mental traits for it” read one pressrelease. Through “psychological tests upon the screen,” the announcement continued,

Screening the Psychological Laboratory 55

Professor Munsterberg was to show “millions how to find personal mental traits” andavoid becoming another square peg in a round hole (Anon. 1916b, 465). Speaking atthe First National Motion Picture Exposition at Madison Square Garden, Munsterbergexplained that each screen test had been arranged so “that motion picture audiencesmay learn what characteristics equip one for special kinds of work.” Borrowing directlyfrom the battery of psychological tests he had utilized in screening applicants in thepsychological laboratory, one experimental film, for example, presented an animatedword jumble as a test of mental dexterity. Such tests, he asserted, were “for the executivetype of mind, which must be able to grasp the meaning of a situation as soon as itpresents itself ” (ibid.) Work requiring attention to detail called for a different scenario;by showing images with missing elements not immediately apparent, the power ofobservation was tested. In short, there was “no type of mind,” Munsterberg concluded,which could not “be classified through this series, which may do a wonderful workin making the necessary connection between talent and the occupation for which it isbest suited.”1 More than mere movies, these were psycho-cinematic experiments forguiding the vocationally uprooted, displaced, or dissatisfied worker in search of theirtrue calling amidst the cacophony of an increasingly complex socio-economic order(Wiebe 1967; Baritz 1960).

In recent decades there has been a marked revival of scholarly interest inMunsterberg’s life and work. This is particularly pronounced in film and media studieswhere Munsterberg’s The Photoplay: A Psychological Study (1916) is often creditedas the first major contribution to film theory. Giuliana Bruno, for example, hasdescribed The Photoplay in relation to the material culture and experimental practicesat home in the Harvard Psychological Laboratory. Robert Brain, emphasizing thephilosophical framework underpinning The Photoplay, has provided much neededintellectual context for understanding and interpreting Munsterberg’s work. WhileBrain (2012), Bruno (2009), and Schweinitz (1996), to name a few recent examples,have situated The Photoplay in its proper experimental, philosophical, and materialcontext, remarkably little attention has been paid to Munsterberg’s contribution tothe Paramount Pictographs and its relationship to psychotechnics and vocationalpsychology.2

By moving away from The Photoplay and towards Munsterberg’s psychological testsfor the screen, the present study suggests new points of contact between early cinemaand film theory and the history of psychological tests (Sokal 1990) and early-appliedpsychology (Capshew 1999; O’Donnell 1985). For example, as Daniel Kevles has noted

1 The most substantive accounts of Munsterberg’s film series can be found in more works by Fredericksen,Curtis, and Winter, and earlier in essays by Pegge and Krows.2 Alison Winter (2012) and Scott Curtis (1996) have provided accounts of Munsterberg’s Paramount films,which have undoubtedly influenced my own thinking. I also owe Robert Brain a particular intellectual debtfor encouraging me in this direction and even pointing out important evidence that I initially missed in thearchives.

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(Kevles 1968), Munsterberg exerted a strong influence on his student and colleagueRobert M. Yerkes, who would go on to direct the U.S. Army intelligence testingprogram during World War I (Carson 1993; Reed 1990; Von Mayrhauser 1990). AsYerkes himself reflected in his unpublished autobiography, the “intimate associationwith that pioneer advocate of the application of psychology, Hugo Munsterberg . . .had gone far to prepare me for this unexpected chance to apply psychological methodsto military problems and needs.”3 Placed in this context, Munsterberg’s “Testing theMind” film series, was not merely an outlier experiment in the commercializationof psychological techniques, but marked a novel method of group testing amidst agrowing array of individual and group testing practices developed before, during, andafter the war.

Still, a crucial difference distinguishes screening candidates in the laboratory from thescreening of vocational tests in the cinema. In Munsterberg’s laboratory, psychologicaltests were deployed as scientific means to an end;4 an employer like the AmericanTobacco Company brought applicants in to the laboratory, and Munsterberg, withthe help of his students, psychotechnically separated the wheat from the chaff. In thissense, the “man-screen” was wielded by employers as an instrument of selection and ashield of scientific authority against workers’ claims to autonomy and self-definition.In the movie theater, on the other hand, the screening of psychological tests wasconstrued as a form of empowerment from below. By opening up the cloisteredlaboratory to the world and inviting audiences into the experiment, the cinema becamea new method to “know thyself,” not simply be known. Moreover, as Munsterbergbelieved that employers and employees alike, in the absence of psychological training,would be deceived by naive methods of introspection and observation, “Testing theMind” was promoted as a democratic means of disseminating proper experimentalprotocols to the average person.5 By replacing the psychologist with instructionaltitle cards, experimental stimuli with moving pictures, and subjects with spectators,

3 A similar parallel can be drawn to Walter Dill Scott, the applied psychologist during WWI in charge of the U.S.Army Committee on Classification of Personnel. In this role Scott developed “trade tests” to assess vocationalaptitudes (Von Mayrhauser 1990; Napoli 1981).4 In Psychology and Industrial Efficiency Munsterberg writes: “Applied psychology is evidently to be classed withthe technical sciences. It may be considered as psychotechnics, since we must recognize any science as technicalif it teaches us to apply theoretical knowledge for the furtherance of human purposes. Like all technical science,applied psychology tells us what we ought to do if we want to reach certain ends” (Munsterberg 1913a, 17).This definition of psychotechnics as the systemic application of scientific means to practical ends, is particularlyinteresting in light of Paul Forman’s recent work (Forman 2007). In line with Forman’s thesis, Munsterberg,despite focusing his energy on the technical applications of psychology, nevertheless upheld the primacy of“pure” psychological means as the epistemological and ethical anchor of psychotechnics.5 Munsterberg’s vision for “testing the mind” might then best be described as psycho-technocratic. Whileinitially working in collaboration with business managers and vocational counselors, Munsterberg distrusted theadministration of psychological screening and guidance carried out in the absence of laboratory trained experts.The movies, in this way, offered audiences a form of direct access to the laboratory itself and the screen a proxypsychological instrument controlled by Munsterberg, the editor. As I show, however, transforming the movietheater into a proper experimental space posed significant challenges.

Screening the Psychological Laboratory 57

Munsterberg’s experimental films aimed to transform hidden aptitudes and deficienciesinto observable behavior for the edification and vocational enlightenment of themovie-going masses. For in Munsterberg’s idealist vision, society had a place foreveryone, and through psychological self-analysis each individual would be capableof discovering their unique piece in the increasingly specialized puzzle of industrialsociety (Hale 1980).6 In summary, from screening candidates in the psychologicallaboratory to psychological tests upon the silver screen, this article interrogates theconnection between Munsterberg’s “Testing the Mind” film series and the origins ofvocational psychology and psychotechnics.

From Psychophysics to Psychotechnics: Hugo Munsterberg and theHarvard Psychological Laboratory

“What has Psychology to do in a laboratory? What part has she in instrumentsand experiments?” (Munsterberg 1893, 201). When Hugo Munsterberg arrived atHarvard in 1892, to take the reins from William James as Director of the PsychologicalLaboratory, these were the two questions he most frequently faced. After all, psychologywas but a new discipline, somewhere between moral philosophy and metaphysics in thepopular mind (Burnham 1987, 85–94; Coon 1992), and the psychological laboratoryhe had inherited was not yet the established institution it would become.

In answering these questions Munsterberg explained to the readers of HarvardGraduates’ Magazine that psychology as a laboratory science had begun to developwhen armchair speculations about mind-body relations were traded in for experimentalmethods adapted from physics and physiology. Sparking this transformation,Munsterberg, like many practitioner historians (Boring 1929), cited Fechner’s Elementsof Psychophysics (1860), in which mathematical laws for human sensation weredeveloped from simple stimulus-response experiments. Connected to psychophysicsMunsterberg also pointed to the discovery of the “personal equation” in the context ofastronomy as a catalyst for scientific psychology. If multiple astronomers simultaneouslyobserving a phenomena differed in their recorded values, how, they probed, might thispsycho-physiological error be calculated and controlled? Testament to the stabilityof disciplinary narratives, E. G. Boring, thirty-six years later, would similarly traceexperimental psychology back to astronomy, which as he put it, “furnished it witha problem, some facts, a method and some apparatus,” and Fechner’s psychophysics,

6 In Munsterberg’s own words, “There is room for every mind in this social fabric of ours. Every one can findthe place where he can enjoy his work and grow into a truly useful personality” (Munsterberg 1913b). Deeplyinfluenced by Fichte and Kant (Brain 2012), Munsterberg’s idealism was also evidently in line with a moregeneral Progressive Era optimism in science and technology as an instrument to mend the body politic tornasunder by the Civil War, industrialization, and the Gilded Age (Wiebe 1967).

58 Jeremy Blatter

which “set experimental quantitive psychology off upon the course which it hasfollowed” (Boring 1929, 142, 286).7

Psychophysical quantification, more importantly, was predicated on instrumentalmethods: methods and apparatus that made psychology more credible in the eyesof the scientific community (Capshew 1992; Gundlach 2007, 218–220; Sturm andAsh 2005). Like the biologist’s microscope or the anatomist’s scalpel, psychologicalinstruments sharpened and standardized the scientific gaze. The tachistoscope coupledwith the chronoscope, for example, allowed psychologists to control the exposure ofvisual stimuli down to the millisecond while automatically recording test subjects’physiological responses upon the rotating drum of a kymograph. By transmutingmental sensation into objective traces, and reaction times into data sets, psychologicalinstruments not only provided psychologists with the material means for carrying outexperiments, but also with the hard currency of “mechanical objectivity” (Daston andGalison 2007; Latour and Woolgar 1979).

The great value invested in apparatuses has led some historians to refer to the latenineteenth and early twentieth century as the age of “brass-instrument psychology”(Davis 1970; Coon 1993; Ash 2003). Instrumentation, however, did not replaceintrospection. Like William James and E. B. Titchener, Munsterberg maintained thatabove all else, introspection, or for Munsterberg, “self-observation,” lay at the heart ofthe psychological experiment (Green 2010; James 1890, 185).8 “All the equipment ofour institutes and all the instruments for our investigations” he asserted, “would be justas useless without self-observation as a microscope without an eye to look through it”(Munsterberg 1895). To be trustworthy, however, self-observation had to be harnessedto a social technology. Psychological training was key, as well as restricting the pool oftest subjects to graduate students and professors. Kurt Danziger has suggested that thiskind of artisanal technique regulating early psychological laboratories represents the“socially constructed nature of psychological knowledge” (Danziger 1990; Morawski2007). For Deborah Coon, however, “standardizing the subject” in psychology was aproduct of industrialization and “cancomitant technological ideal.” Psychologists at theturn of the century, according to Coon sought to “rationalize the production of thispsychological knowledge by standardizing their methods and instruments in conformitywith the ideals of an industrializing society” (Coon 1993). Reliable introspection, inother words, was achieved when the experimental subject acted like a well-calibratedmachine capable of producing credible knowledge out of subjective experience.

More than a site for validating psychological knowledge or a screen from the noiseand vibrations of the outside world (Schmidgenn 2003), the laboratory itself was a

7 Simon Schaffer famously critiqued the teleology of Boring’s narrative (Schaffer 1988), yet important linksbetween astronomy and psychology have received renewed interest by Henning Schmidgen (2003) and JimenaCanales (2001).8 For clarification on the difference between “introspection” and “self-observation” (selbstbeobachtung) in relationto their translation and use in early anglophone experimental psychology, see Danziger 1980.

Screening the Psychological Laboratory 59

powerful symbol of psychology’s entry into the “fraternity of science” (Benjamin2000; Capshew 1992; O’Donnell 1985; Poppleston and McPherson 1984). And nopsychological laboratory held greater symbolic weight than that of Munsterberg’steacher Wilhelm Wundt, founder of the first psychological institute in 1879 at theUniversity of Leipzig (Bringmann et al. 1980). After taking his Ph.D. under Wundtin Leipzig and M.D. in Heidelberg in 1888, Munsterberg moved to the Universityof Freiburg where, building on the Leipzig model, he founded his own laboratory,only the fourth in Germany at the time (Hale 1980; Spillmann and Spillmann 1993).Largely self-financed and constrained to two rooms in his home, as director of hisown laboratory Munsterberg nevertheless managed to establish himself as a leadingexperimentalist in Germany attracting students from across Europe as well as overseas.Among his first American students was a young man from Harvard by the name ofEdmund Delabarre who would go on to write his dissertation at Freiburg on the“Sensation of Movement” (1891), which he dedicated to his teachers Munsterbergand William James.

Parallel to German developments, William James was among the first in NorthAmerica to establish a psychological laboratory and to proclaim psychology a new, orat least nascent, natural science. There was, however, one small problem. In a letter toMunsterberg, dated 21 February 1892, James explained “I, at the age of 50, dislikinglaboratory work naturally . . . could, tant bien que mal, make the laboratory run, yetam certainly not the kind of stuff to make a first-rate director thereof.” After courtingMunsterberg for several months, on 3 May 1892, James emerged victorious. “It is anenormous relief to me” he told Munsterberg, “to see the responsibility for experimentalpsychology in Harvard transferred from my feeble and unworthy shoulders to those ofa man as competent as you.” After a three-year trial period at Harvard, Munsterbergwas reappointed as Director of the Psychological Laboratory, a position he would holduntil his death on 16 December 1916.

According to Munsterberg, in the first decade of his tenure his “experimental laborshad been devoted to strictly theoretical interests” (Munsterberg 1917, 46). “Just as thechemist examines his materials theoretically without asking whether they are poisons ormeans of nourishment for the body,” Munsterberg maintained that the psychologist,too, “has to investigate the phenomena of consciousness without considering sideissues” (Munsterberg 1893, 208).9 This commitment to “pure science,” however,was more than just an epistemic priority, it was a safeguard to the young discipline’sscientific credibility. Like many of his contemporaries, Munsterberg subscribed to theidea that experimental psychology had first to reach a certain stage of developmentbefore its application would be feasible. While instruction in general psychology hadeducative and indeed practical value in and of itself, direct application to practicalproblems in pedagogy, for example, was still out of the question for Munsterberg in

9 Wundt had similarly maintained that psychology in this period was not ready for application and ought not toget distracted by prematurely turning to practical endeavors (Kusch 1999).

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the 1890s. “Call me conservative, call me reactionary, call me ignorant,” he exclaimedin an 1895 speech before the Massachusetts Schoolmasters’ Club, “but I adhere tomy belief, that the individual teacher, for his teaching methods, does not need anyscientific psychology, and that tact and sympathy and interest are more important forhim than all the twenty-seven psychological laboratories of this country.” The logic ofthe laboratory and the real world were not governed by the same rules, he contested;therefore, translating experimental science into practical prescription was an ill-fatedambition.

At the turn of the twentieth century, however, “the time seemed ripe,” accordingto Munsterberg, “for applying science to the practical affairs of life” (Munsterberg1917, 46). While scholars disagree over what exactly brought about this changeof heart, the convergence of several important institutional, social and intellectualfactors goes a long way towards an explanation. Intellectually, the influence of hisacademic friends, William Stern at the University of Breslau and James McKeenCattell at Columbia University, were particularly important. Cattell and Stern hadboth been early promoters of the psychology of individual differences. Citing Stern,Munsterberg would write in Psychology and Industrial Efficiency that while “the studyof individual difference itself is not applied psychology . . . it is the presuppositionwithout which applied psychology would have remained a phantom” (Munsterberg1913a, 10). Nevertheless, like Munsterberg, Stern had initially warned his fellowpsychologists in 1900 against premature application, as practical failures, he feared,threatened to discredit the whole discipline: “If we work restlessly but not in hasteon the theoretical problems, then when the time comes practical success will come asripened fruit falling from the tree: gnosis precedes dia-gnosis and pro-gnosis!” (Stern,quoted in Lamiell 2003, 37).

Evidently for Stern the harvest came in 1903 when he founded the Beitrageder Psychologie der Aussage (Contributions to the Psychology of Testimony).10 Inthe journal’s first article entitled “Angewandte Psychologie” (Applied Psychology),Stern outlined the two sides of applied psychology, Psychotechnik (psychotechnics)and Psychodiagnostik (psychodiagnostics). While psychodiagnostics referred to thepsychological assessment of human personality, psychotechnics he defined in termsof psychological aid in everything from education, to law, medicine, and music.Interestingly, in Stern’s second article in the same volume he outlined various methodsfor testing the reliability of testimony. Notably one test method called for screening ashort film and asking subjects to report upon what they recalled seeing.11 Around the

10 This publication also featured work on the application of psychology to administrative justice, pedagogy, andhistorical studies as well as psychiatry.11 Stern saw the film experiment as ideal but uneconomical as few psychological institutes had access to thenecessary projector and films. The staging of live scenes was suggested as a more practical alternative. “Dererste ist der Kinematograph, der ja in seinem Film samtliche Phasen dargeboten Vorganges fixiert enthalt, unddaher eine Kontrolle jedes Aussageelementes erlaubt. Da keinem der bestehenden psychologischen Institute

Screening the Psychological Laboratory 61

same time Stern coined the term psychotechnics (1903) and co-founded the Institute ofApplied Psychology in Berlin (1906), similar themes began to appear in Munsterberg’sown writing, including a series of articles in 1907 on psychology and the law.12

In addition to the growing institutional legitimacy applied psychology had begunto enjoy through Stern’s Institute of Applied Psychology in Berlin and his Zeitschriftfur angewandte Psychologie (Journal of Applied Psychology), Munsterberg also observedthe beginnings of advertising psychology and the success of Walter Dill Scott inthis new field. Like Scott, advertising managers had reached out to Munsterbergas early as 1901, but at the time he was wary of connecting his name with industry(Friedman 2004, 174; Baritz 1960). Scott’s appointment as director of the psychologicallaboratory at Northwestern University in 1905 and the publication of his Psychologyof Advertising in 1908 may have helped to assuage this anxiety. Meanwhile, at Harvardthere was also growing institutional support for applied science that extended beyondengineering. For example, in 1906 Harvard established a Division of Education thatincluded educational psychology in its curriculum the same year the Graduate School ofApplied Science was formed. The new legitimacy and public recognition of educationaland advertising psychology led to new interactions between psychologists, artists,educators, and businessmen. For example, in 1904 Munsterberg consulted on a seriesof art education textbooks published by the Prang Educational Company and evencontributed his own volume on the subject, The Principles of Art Education, issued bythe same publisher the following year. Although not applied psychology in the modernsense, this book translated experimental aesthetics, a field pioneered by Fechner, into akind of instructional guide for art teachers. Many themes from this book were carriedover into The Photoplay: A Psychological Study (1916), Munsterberg’s final contributionto applied psychology (Brain 2012; Fredericksen 1977).

It was on the back of these developments that in his 1907–1908 annual reportMunsterberg announced the inauguration of a “department in the laboratory devotedto applied psychology” (Munsterberg 1909). Clarifying the vast scope of the new field,Munsterberg explained in his report:

We understand by applied psychology inquiry into the practical help which experimentalpsychology can give to the various professions and industries, especially to the work ofthe teacher, of the lawyer, and of the physician, but hardly less to that of the worker incommerce and industry in art, in social reform, etc. The aim is thus the development ofa science related to psychology as engineering is to physics. (Ibid.)

Beschaffung eines Kinematographen zugemutet werden kann, so wird man vorlaufig darauf angewiesen sein,seine Versuchspersonen in die Varietes zu fuhren, oder sich von den Kinematographen besitzern zeitweiligApparate auszuleihen” (Stern 1903b, 70).12 Munsterberg’s first use of the term “psycho-technical” appears in a 1903 article in the Psychological Reviewentitled, “The Position of Psychology in the System of Knowledge.” His series of articles on psychology appliedto law was published in 1908 under the title On the Witness Stand.

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That science on the horizon Munsterberg called “psychotechnics,” reaffirming theanalogy to engineering and the model of the technical institute.

In Psychology and Industrial Efficiency (1913a), Munsterberg distinguished purepsychology from psychotechnics in terms of means and ends. Pure psychology, putsimply, was science for science’s sake, a means toward no particular end other thanknowledge itself. Psychotechnics, on the other hand, designated the application ofpsychological means (psycho-techniques) toward given ends. Like the engineer hired tobuild a bridge, Munsterberg asserted that the task of the psychotechnical expert wasmerely to reach certain concrete ends, “but whether these ends are the best ones is nota care with which the psychologist is to be burdened” (Munsterberg 1913a, 19).

Psychotechnics and Vocational Psychology

As psychotechnics was not generative of its own ends, inspiration for applied research inthe Harvard Psychological Laboratory came of necessity from without. For example,Michael Pettit has described Munsterberg’s early contribution to the psychology oftrademark infringement through his connection to the Chicago attorney EdwardS. Rogers. Rogers, whose corporate clients included Coca-Cola, Pabst BrewingCompany, and Quaker Oats, wrote to Munsterberg in early 1909 hoping to interestthe Harvard professor in the practical problem of trademark infringement. FromMunsterberg Rogers hoped some form of psychological test or scale might bedeveloped in his laboratory that could be used to judge lawful similarity from unlawfulimitation (Pettit 2007). Sufficiently intrigued, Munsterberg assigned the problem toseveral students in the hope that it would “lead to results which may, indeed, makesuch a psychotechnical use possible” (Munsterberg 1913a, 292).

The chief outcome of this line of research was a dissertation by Munsterberg’sstudent Gustave A. Feingold entitled “Recognition and Discrimination” (1915). Forhis initial experiments, which focused on the discrimination between words similar inappearance or meaning, Feingold sat each subject before a screen that concealed theexperimenter from view. “In this screen” he described, there was “an oval aperturethrough which the observer looked with both eyes at the printed card, or at the picturepost cards of the later experiments, exposed on a black background” (ibid., 15). Seatedin this darkened enclosure, Feingold then read to each subject the following directions:

In daily life one is occasionally confronted with the phenomenon of mistaking one nameor one word for another, because they have some resemblance either in spelling, sound ormeaning. Now, I am going to expose a group of words for x seconds, and after an intervalof 20 seconds I shall reexpose the same group either intact or with some change. See ifyou can discover that change. . . . Try not to let your mind wander during the interval.Yet be natural . . . In short, do your best, in your own way, to recognize a change if oneoccurs and tell me, if possible, what that change is. (Ibid., 16–17)

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The significance of this arrangement in relation to cinema is revealed in the“epistemological architechtonics,” to borrow Giulian Bruno’s term, or the relationshipbetween space, instrumentality, and the epistemological conditions of the experiment.A subject, seated in a darkened room, faces a screen upon which visual stimuli areflashed through an aperture. By directing test subjects’ attention to such details asproduct names not only is an aspect of everyday life, like browsing at a market,reproduced, but subjective experience is transformed into recorded objective data.Replacing the psychologist with textual directions projected onto the screen, we havethe basic arrangement for “Testing the Mind.”

To understand the vocational orientation of Munsterberg’s films, however, wemust look to the influence of another attorney, Frank Parsons, founder of the firstvocational bureau in Boston in 1908. In Choosing a Vocation, Parsons outlined twophases in guiding advice-seekers towards occupations well suited to their personalityand individual strengths. The first phase entailed scientific analysis of “each person’saptitudes, abilities, ambitions, resources, and limitations” in relation to “the conditionsof success in different industries” (Parsons 1909, 3). This information was gatheredprimarily through interviews with a vocational counselor and self-analysis guided bya questionnaire. Second, it required the collection of information about the diversephysical and mental requirements of potential vocations so that compatibility of workand worker might be more accurately guaged.

Although Munsterberg agreed with Parsons’ general vision and the mission of theBoston Vocation Bureau, he took issue with the lack of psychological expertise involvedin the guidance process. Parsons, in fact, initially expressed great interest in enlistingthe resources of the psychological laboratory in vocational guidance; however, after hissudden death in Septemeber 1908, the potential for collaboration quickly faded. Thiswas, in large part, due to the movement’s new leadership, an issue we will return toshortly.

Munsterberg’s dissatisfaction with the post-Parsons era of vocational guidance wasunambiguously expressed in his essay “Finding a Life Work,” published in McClure’sin 1910. The average person, Munsterberg argued, was fundamentally incapable ofaccurate self-analysis and the vocational counselor, untrained in psychology, was ill-equipped to make scientifically sound observations. “To emancipate one’s self fromthe method of ordinary self-observation” and the counselor’s psychologically naiveinterview, he suggested they be replaced with the “objective experiment in thepsychological laboratory” (Munsterberg 1913a, 45). Towards this end he envisionedin every municipal vocation bureau an in-house psychological laboratory and expertpsychologists on hand.13

13 In the “Psychological Laboratory as an Adjunct to a Vocational Bureau,” Director of the Cincinnati VocationBureau, Helen Thompson Woolley, similarly asserted that the “trained experimental psychologist can make amuch better estimate of a stranger’s abilities by means of an hour or so spent in laboratory tests, than he, or mostother people, could make as a result of an hour’s interview” (Woolley 1913, 88).

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Meyer Bloomfield, the Boston Vocation Bureau’s new director, took Munsterberg’swords to heart. The Vocation Bureau, Bloomfield claimed, could ill-afford to turntheir “consulting-rooms into clinics and psychological laboratory” (quoted in Bruce1913). “You see,” Bloomfield argued in a 1911 interview with H. Addington Bruce,

if we were to attempt to test boys and girls the way Professor Munsterberg suggests, theirparents would at once leap to the conclusion that we thought there was something thematter with them, and that would be the last we should see of them. People, as you know,are extremely suspicious of things they do not understand, and psychology is a sealedbook to most laymen. (Bruce 1911, 35)

Bruce, to be sure, was no impartial reporter. Having relocated to Cambridge in 1906to study psychology and philosophy at Harvard, Bruce, by 1911, had become a leadingadvocate for applied psychology in the popular press. Therefore it is not surprising thathe would follow Bloomfield’s indictment of vocational psychology with the rebuttalthat “Many of the most helpful tests may be made by the use of simple devices . . . andwhatever instruments are required may be concealed behind screens” (Bruce 1913).Foreshadowing later developments, Bruce understood that a screen was all it took tomake laboratory psychology more palatable to the average person.

At the Second National Conference on Vocational Guidance in 1912, Bloomfieldsimilarly critiqued the clinical gaze employed in the time-motion study films ofFrank and Lillian Gilbreth. Following a factory visit in Providence earlier that weekBloomfield said:

I submitted to a moving picture myself, so as to see how it feels to be trying to do somework with a camera reeling off films, while trying to assemble a knitting machine. I didn’tlike the experience. That may be the best thing to do for that industry, but if our childrenare to undergo tests of that sort, we want to have a hand in the outcome; we want to havea hand in their experiences, because they are our children, not the employer’s children.(Bloomfield 1913, 191)

Despite an early openness to psychological testing in vocational guidance, in the handsof Bloomfield and his ilk, Munsterberg felt that the psychologist had become “crowdedout” of the Vocation Bureau (Munsterberg 1915b, 215). However, as the door to thevocation bureau closed, a new alliance with employment managers soon opened.

Munsterberg’s earliest ally in developing the selection side of his vocationalpsychology was Emil Leopald Boas, Director of the Hamburg-American Line. Boashad learned about Munsterberg’s pioneering work in applied psychology throughthe writing of the above-mentioned H. Addington Bruce and believed he had aproblem that could be taken up in the Harvard Psychological Laboratory. Thereforeon 18 October 1911 he wrote Munsterberg to see if it would be possible to develop apsychological test for screening prospective sailors for work on the Hamburg-Americanfleet. The result, as Munsterberg relates in Psychology and Industrial Efficiency (1913),

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was “a long series of experiments in order to construct artificial conditions underwhich the mental process of decision in a complicated situation, especially the rapidity,correctness, and constancy of the decision, could be made measurable” (Munsterberg1913a, 85). Uncertain what in the end would prove the best method for selectingsailors, Munsterberg once again assigned students in his laboratory to approach theproblem from several different angles. One of these students, James W. Bridges, attackedthe problem by experimenting with various tests to classify individuals accordingto “decision type.” “There is a type of subject who, in simple situations (i.e. easydecisions), is very quick and constant; but who, when the decisions are more difficult,becomes relatively slower and more inconstant”; this observation, he believed, wouldbe “of considerable significance in vocational guidance . . . for such subjects must beeliminated if a selection of unfailingly quick constant workers is to be made” (Bridges1914, 8).

Answering Boas’ plea, Munsterberg eventually presented the Hamburg-AmericanLine with a vocational test in the form of a twenty-four card deck. The test required thatsubject-applicants sort the deck of cards as quickly as possible into four piles accordingto the predominant letter printed on each card. Simplicity of design, Munsterbergpointed out, had the advantage of mobility, reproducibility, and easy administration byexaminers with limitied or no psychological training. As H. C. McComas, anotherstudent working under Munsterberg noted, “It is not practicable . . . in a psychologicallaboratory to examine great numbers and it is impossible in work of the kind in handto go outside for material, as the apparatus is not easily transported” (McComas1911, 2). The movie theater, by contrast, not only came equipped with the necessaryexperimental apparatus (film projector), but also provided a relatively controlled spaceand large group of willing test subjects.

Munsterberg’s next ally in the business community was the American Telephone andTelegraph Company for whom he devised a battery of tests to be used in the selectionof switchboard operators. That same year he came into contact with the BostonElevated Railway by way of the American Association for Labor Legislation’s ad hoccommittee organized to investigate streetcar accidents. Although a handful of appliedpsychologists contributed to the committee’s work, Munsterberg was eventually taskedwith developing psychological tests for the selection of motormen in consultation withthe Boston Elevated Railway,

The final apparatus bore a family resemblance to Edison’s kinetoscope (Brown2005, 49–50; Curtis 1996). By cranking a handle, a gridded card bisected by twodark lines representing tracks passed through a small window to “simulate the quicklychanging panorama of the street” (Munsterberg 1913a, 66). Test subjects controllingthe apparatus then called out potential hazards as they appeared on the grid in theform of color-coded numerals representing pedestrians, horses, and motor vehicles.A similar problem had been undertaken two years earlier in Munsterberg’s laboratoryby his student Charles Sherwood Ricker who tried to develop a test for the selectionof chauffeurs. In this experiment, the test subject was placed in the driver’s seat of

66 Jeremy Blatter

a modified automobile jacked up off the ground so as to allow the test vehicle tooperate while stationary. In place of the windshield there was an “opaque screen” withthree lights – white, green, and red. Following a set of predetermined commands, eachsubject was to respond appropriately to each signal as it appeared (Ricker 1910).

Reports of Ricker’s unusual apparatus for testing chauffeurs in the HarvardPsychological Laboratory quickly snowballed in both trade journals and the popularpress under misleading titles such as “Motion Pictures to Test Auto Drivers.”14 Thevivid description of the imagined experiment is worth quoting at length:

Professor Hugo Munsterberg, the famous member of the psychology department ofHarvard College . . . is greatly interested in the Cinematography, both as a means ofentertainment – and as an aid to the science of which he is a shining light. The professorfinds that moving pictures can determine whether a man is qualified to operate anautomobile; Professor Munsterberg puts the following plan into operation. A man is atthe wheel of an automobile in a darkened room . . . Just in front of the machine thereis a screen upon which pictures are projected. A spotlight is thrown upon the embryochauffeur, and a picture is suddenly flashed upon the screen, showing a child or a dogrunning into the street . . . Now comes the test. The chauffeur must handle his car as ifit were really in motion, and about to reach the child or dog . . . These tests show thatsome men do just the right thing . . . while others take short, but most valuable secondsto decide what must be done. Still others fail absolutely, and go through the operationsthat would make the “auto” smash into the victim on the screen. (Anon. 1912)

In a letter to the New York Times in 1913, Munsterberg adamantly denied thatcinematography of this kind had ever been used in his laboratory. Perhaps he feared thatthe experiment’s resemblance to the then popular amusement Hale’s Tours, a virtualtravel ride where spectators seated in a stationary train were transported to distantplaces through moving images projected onto window-screens (Fielding 1970), wouldinjure the credibility of psychological science. After all, as Munsterberg confessed in1915 he had been “one of those snobbish late-comers” who “should have felt it asundignified for a Harvard Professor to attend a moving-picture show just as I shouldnot have gone to a vaudeville performance or to a museum of wax figures or to aphonograph concert” (Munsterberg 1915b).

Munsterberg and the Paramount Pictographs

That Munsterberg felt the need in 1913 to deny reports of cinematographicexperiments in his laboratory is surprising given the work he would undertake two

14 Other scholars have noted the unusual reports about the chauffeur test and gestured at the cinematic logicbehind motorman test apparatus (Brown 2005; Curtis 1996; Schweinitz 1996). In the case of the chauffeur test,Munsterberg’s involvement was minimal at best as the experiments took place around the time he left for Berlinwhere he spent the year as an exchange professor.

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years later in connection with Paramount Pictures. In late 1914, under the leadershipof W. W. Hodkinson, the recently formed Paramount Pictures Corporation launcheda campaign to attract the “better classes” to the movies (Bowser 1990). One strategyin this multifaceted effort was to lure established talent from the world of theater andliterature to write and produce “high-class” photoplays.15 “Don’t say ‘movie’ unless youmean the kind of pictures shown at nickelodeons” read one Paramount advertisementin The New York Times. “The better class of photoplays shown at the best theaters tothe best people are known as Paramount Pictures.”

More inventive, however, than pandering to the cultural pretensions of a growingmiddle class audience was their weekly “magazine on the screen” called the ParamountPictographs, successor to the Paramount Newspictures newsreel. Launched in earlyFebruary 1916, each week Paramount advertised a new issue of its celluloid magazinefeaturing film articles by “leading minds of the country” and “picturized in such amanner as to clearly edit the thought conveyed by the contributor” (The Moving PictureWorld, 19 Feb. 1916). Counted among the motion picture magazine’s impressive listof early contributors were figures no less than Nikola Tesla, Elmer Sperry, WaldemarKaempffert, Theodore Roosevelt, and Hugo Munsterberg. Having had occasion topre-screen the first release of the Pictograph on 25 January 1916, Munsterberg reportedback to Roosevelt:

Yesterday in the office of the Paramount Pictures Corporation in New York I had thepleasure of a private performance showing your fervid preparedness speech on the piazzaof your house. As psychological experiments of mine will appear in the same reel, Ishall be with you before many thousands of audiences, but let me assure you once moreI am with you in a better sense than a mere pictorial companionship on the screen.(Munsterberg to Roosevelt, 26 January 1916, in Munsterberg papers)

The outbreak of the war had created tension between the old friends, and cinema,Munsterberg hoped, might bring them back together.

On 3 December 1915, Munsterberg submitted to George R. Meeker, managingeditor of the Pictographs, his first scenarios. Each film, Munsterberg explained, was toengage the audience in a different “psychological experiment.” The complete series,he suggested, be advertised as “Testing the Mind,” as each experiment was to measurea different mental quality in relation to the psychological requirements of variousvocations. “In submitting to the Paramount Company this course of psychological testpicture,” he told Meeker,

15 The term “photoplay” itself was a feature of this industry-wide effort to make cinema more appealing tothe middle class public (Langdale 2002, 36). It was for precisely this reason that when the Modern Theatre inBoston reopened as a movie theater in 1914, hanging from its arched entrance between two Corinthian pilasterswas a sign advertising “High Class Photo-Plays.” The rise of the feature film also played an important role inuplifting the cultural status of the medium (Bowser 1990).

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I want only to emphasize that they are in a way incomparable with anything else whichthe moving picture companies have as yet undertaken. . . . Here for the first time peoplein the audience are not merely passive spectators, that see there plays or news or otherdemonstrations but are able to do something and are almost playing a game which theyenjoy but are able to do something which at the same time instructs them. (Munsterbergto Meeker, 3 December 1915, in Munsterberg papers)

Munsterberg had made a similar observation about a test he had used screeningcandidates for the American Tobacco Company which required unscrambling a wordjumble, such as “Chicago” from “Cogiach.” The test “appeared to the candidates like apuzzle game,” he remarked in his book Business Psychology (Munsterberg 1915b, 285).Perhaps it was the tested entertainment value of the word jumble which led Paramountto include the film version in their first release.

Indeed vocational tests and simple experiments from the Harvard PsychologicalLaboratory supplied ample fodder for Munsterberg’s scenarios. In “Can You Makea Quick Estimate?” for example, Munsterberg had borrowed almost verbatim theimagery from his student Charles T. Burnett’s published study on “The Estimation ofNumber.” In Munsterberg’s description, the audience would be prompted to estimatethe number of apple trees in an orchard then shown corresponding imagery for a periodof three to five seconds. In the next trial, audiences were shown moving pictures ofa crowded hall and asked to estimate how many people were in the room. Burnett’sstudy, while using more abstract stimuli like white dots on a black board, described thepractical significance of the research in relation to its referent:

There are situations not few in life in which we find ourselves estimating the numberof objects in some group . . . The public speaker finds himself wondering whether thispresent scattering audience is larger than the one that crowded into the front seats. Thefarmer riding between adjoining orchards judges roughly the prospective yield by thecomparative estimate of the fruit in sight. (Burnett 1906)

Munsterberg’s vision, however, was not merely to translate laboratory experiments intointeractive film experiences, but make films into a means of self-analysis and vocationalguidance. In a speech at Madison Square Garden, Munsterberg explained:

I have arranged my mental tests in the Pictograph so that motion picture audiences maylearn what characteristics equip one for special kinds of work, so that each individualmay find his proper setting. There are tests to show whether one has a constructiveimagination, the ability to think quickly – these are for the executive type of mind . . .My scenario shows simply how the constructive mind can build names out of lettersarranged in a totally different order from the original one. For the man who does detailwork there is another kind of test. In this the pictures show how keen is one’s power ofobservation and the scenes have important details missing which may not be apparentat first glance. There is no type of mind which cannot be classified through this series,

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which may do a wonderful work in making the necessary connection between talent andthe occupation for which it is best suited. (Quoted in Anon. 1916a, 1215)

Following his earlier critique of vocational guidance under Parsons, Munsterbergmaintained that the average person was incapable of accurate self-observation. “Testingthe Mind,” however, could intervene in this process by providing an objective means ofself-evaluation. In this way, Munsterberg’s tests were not intended to screen audiencesfor employers, but reveal aptitudes and deficiencies to the spectators themselves towardsthe end of self-selection. However, as he considered the mind plastic he also hopedthat the Pictographs would encourage a spirit of self-improvement (Curtis 1996, 73).

While sympathetic with his bold vision, letters between Munsterberg andParamount between December 1915 and June 1916, reveal a plethora of obstacles,misunderstandings, and competing interests. One notable incident occurred on 11December 1915, shortly after Munsterberg had viewed the first rough cuts at theParamount offices in New York City. So unsettled was Munsterberg by what he hadseen, that upon returning to Cambridge that evening he wired George R. Meeker,managing editor of the Pictographs, demanding they halt production until furthernotice. Two days later Munsterberg wrote Meeker, outlining in painstaking detail,the unique demands of his scenarios and the studio’s failure to meet those specialrequirements.

High on the list of complaints was Munsterberg’s sense that Paramount had failedto live up to their own self-advertised mission of delivering high-class content to themasses. This criticism had been stimulated by the appearance of an animated chicken inone of his experimental films. “I know very well” he told Meeker, “that in your NewYork houses a large part of the audience link the word ‘chicken’ with a girl.” Ever-sensitive to the power of association, Munsterberg did not want to “be the one whostimulates them to do so.” “The more I thought about it” he continued, “the more I feltthat such a rather vulgar effect and especially such use of Broadway slang would lowerthe level of the whole undertaking” (Munsterberg to Meeker, 13 December 1915, inMunsterberg papers). It was, he suggested, perhaps the unconscious yielding “to theless refined taste of your cartoon draughtsman,” which was at fault. His issues with therough cuts, however, were not only on cultural grounds, but experimental as well. In“Have You a Constructive Imagination?” audience members were to be presented witha series of incrementally more difficult word jumbles. In an attempt to make the testsmore entertaining, Paramount handed production over to the animation department.What resulted was a sequence in which each series of letters was brought out on screenby a different cast of animated characters. First, four letters were delivered by four boys,next five letters hauled on screen by a donkey cart, and with each subsequent seriesa different delivery system. Such inconsistencies in presentational form, Munsterberginsisted were outright “dangerous,” threatening to “spoil the psychological conditionsof the experiment.”

70 Jeremy Blatter

Fig. 2. Image from Munsterberg’s film, “Have You a Constructive Imagination?” In“Munsterberg in the Movies,” Evening Ledger, Philadelphia: February 26, 1916.

In dissecting the issue as a problem in experimental design, he explained that theaudience would become “distracted” if forced “to orientate itself anew for every newexperiment.” What he wanted was for the first trials to function as a sample questionwhereby the audience would “learn to understand the plan for the experiment withsimple four letter words,” and then for the scheme “to remain the same for all thefollowing ones in the scene.” The critical thing was that “the scheme remain the samethrough the scene in order to have the adjusted attention of the spectators” (fig. 2)(Munsterberg to Meeker, 13 December 1915, in Munsterberg papers).

Munsterberg, in short, was invoking standards of experimental practice from thelaboratory, insisting on standardization and that subjects “master the rules of the game”before beginning the actual experiment. The latter was intended to diminish the effectof practice, and the former involuntary attention. Whether in the laboratory, vocationbureau, or movie theater, experimental control was necessary in any testing situation.After all, should a spectator be distracted by the donkey cart or other silly animationand fail to solve the puzzle as quickly as they would otherwise, he or she may be ledto mismeasure their own mental powers. If the movie theater was to be Munsterberg’slaboratory, then the animator was to be his instrument maker, crafting and calibratingthe apparatus for the experiment. Therefore any unwanted flourish in Munsterberg’sscreen tests threatened the objectivity of the experiment.

Later in the same letter to Meeker, Munsterberg would suggest replacing animationwith proper cinematography. Live-action, he reasoned, would be altogether “moreconvincing, because the audience would be less suspicious that they are tricked by thedraughtsman.” For the tests to be received as scientific Munsterberg understood thattrust was everything, and the magic of animation, he feared, would cast the psychologistmore as a prestidigitator than an experimentalist. For applied psychologists in thisperiod this was all the more important given the resurgent interest in phrenology and

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physiognomy particularly around the question of vocational guidance and selection(Brown 2005).

Shortly after the Paramount Pictographs premiered, Meeker wrote Munsterbergto allay the professor’s anxieties over certain editorial decisions. “The psychologicalexperiments” he reported, “are making good in every way,” adding, “perhaps after all,the suggestion which the editor made will in turn work out, and we shall be the meansof seeing that officials are fitted to their jobs” (Meeker to Munsterberg, 19 February1916, in Munsterberg papers). In subsequent months, Munsterberg continued to makecompromises and win an occasional battle, however, big changes at Paramount soonmade such progress a moot point On 20 June, Munsterberg received word that thenew leadership at Paramount would be taking a new course and soon after he was toldthey would no longer need his contributions.

In just six short months, Munsterberg received from Paramount Pictures two-thousand six-hundred dollars in remuneration, almost a third of his annual salary.However, the abrupt end to the venture had left him wanting more. On 28 September1916, Munsterberg sent off a proposal to Samuel McClintock, Educational Directorat the La Salle Extension University in Chicago. McClintock had been responsiblefor publishing Munsterberg’s book Business Psychology in 1915.16 Making his pitch,Munsterberg explained that when most people think of “mental tests” they thinkof Binet’s or Yerkes’ system of rating the intelligence of children. However, farmore important, he claimed, were tests like those he had produced for Paramount,which helped all people in the kind of self-analysis so important in finding one’s lifework. “The subtle study of the mental capacities with experimental methods” hetold McClintock “must replace that superficial slipshod analysis of the past.” Towardsthis end, Munsterberg proposed the establishment of an adjunct institution to thecorrespondence school to distribute a booklet of mental tests as well as process testresults. As the “moving picture scenarios went under the title ‘Testing the Mind,’”Munsterberg suggested the same title for the booklet, in which he also hoped to “givethe story of those moving pictures” (Munsterberg to McClintock, 28 September 1916,in Munsterberg papers).

Shared between these two projects was more than just overlapping source material,it was a vision of bringing psychotechnics to the masses. In “Testing the Mind”the screen was the medium of dissemination and the movie theater the makeshiftlaboratory for administering the experiments. In the proposed booklet, paper took theplace of celluloid and virtually any site, from living room to lecture hall, was openedup to experimental use. The critical issue was to take the kinds of testing techniquesdeveloped in the seclusion of the psychological laboratory, and transform them intoopen psychotechnologies, available to anyone in search of objective psychologicalinsight. Moreover, by looking back at early experimental psychology, we see that

16 Business Psychology had been published as both a book and a series of pamphlets in connection with acorrespondence course on business administration.

72 Jeremy Blatter

the same methodological concerns over experimental controls and the standardizationof self-observation were projected onto the very production of Munsterberg’s filmsthemselves, thus screening to the masses not only the means of self-analysis but theepistemic norms of the psychological laboratory.

Archives

Hugo Munsterberg papers, 1890–1916. Boston Public Library, Rare Books andManuscripts Department.Records of the President of Harvard University, Abbott Lawrence Lowell, 1909–1933,UAI 5.160x. Harvard University Archives, Harvard University.

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