Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [401]
Many psychologists were affronted by Münsterberg’s advocacy of applied psychology, but the public liked it. Of greater consequence, a few adventurous businessmen asked Münsterberg and his students to use their psychological knowledge to improve workers’ efficiency, make advertising more persuasive, and help select the job applicants best able to perform specific tasks.
On behalf of a telephone company, for instance, Münsterberg developed a test to identify women with the aptitudes needed for competent switchboard operation. To check up on him, the company secretly included several skilled operators among the thirty job applicants it sent him; happily for Münsterberg, the skilled operators scored at the top of the list.
Less happily, at the outset of World War I Münsterberg made a number of pro-German public statements that destroyed his prestige; when he died in 1916 the American Psychological Association, of which he had once been president, published not one word of eulogy.1
Münsterberg’s efforts to be both an applied and pure psychologist symbolizes an age-old debate about the value of knowledge. Most intellectuals have held that it is worth pursuing for its own sake, without any thought of possible utility; many if not most scientists have prided themselves on conducting research without thought of its potential business applications, and considered applied research less prestigious, more commercial, and soiled by the goals of sales and profit. But most leaders of society and most ordinary people have felt that scientific research— including psychological research—is worthwhile only if it has some practical use. This view has been particularly dominant in the pragmatic, industrial-technological society of America, with whose values it is in harmony.
Not surprisingly, therefore, as basic psychology blossomed during the past century, applied psychology soon caught on and flourished. Today it is manifest in a myriad of university departments, a number of applied psychology journals, textbooks, and several societies and annual conferences.
Moreover, the long-dominant view that research moved in one direction—from basic to applied—has recently been challenged in various ways. In 1997 Donald Stokes, a political scientist, made a convincing case in Pasteur’s Quadrant that, rather than a single straight line of development from basic to applied research, the two are different dimensions between which there is an area of multidirectional interaction; Pasteur’s great work, he pointed out, was applied, practical, and basic all at the same time.
Not long afterward, Rodney Nichols, president of the New York Academy of Sciences, proclaimed, “Revolutionary advances also come out of mission-oriented research. It is possible—indeed, often natural—to fulfill a social goal and create even richer scientific results than pure curiosity engenders.”2 A current textbook of applied cognitive psychology says, “When a product or service is especially compelling, researchers seek to derive the basic principles that made the product or service useful in the first place.”3 Significantly, a number of recent government research grants have backed the concept that applied research can lead to new basic knowledge.4
And some basic researchers who have switched to applied research find it intellectually (as well as economically) rewarding. Donald Norman, for years a leading figure in cognitive science, left academia for applied research in 1993 (but now holds positions in both camps); what intrigues him about applied cognitive psychology, he says, is that “technology expands the human mind, its perceptions, its interactions with the world. Consider the screwdriver: It