Part 11 (1/2)

THE DETERMINANTS OF VOCATIONAL APt.i.tUDE

Without attempting to distinguish between the different detailed occupations, either on the basis of materials dealt with, the social or individual purposes realized, or the special qualifications demanded, we can still divide vocations broadly into five general types, depending on the degree to which they are likely to call for complete and normal psychological equipment. Such a cla.s.sification is of little service in the concrete guidance of individuals, since the general types include work of the most diverse sorts; but it may be useful in suggesting the various types of qualities that are of vital importance in determining apt.i.tude for any work at all, and may in this way aid in outlining the work of further investigation.

1. In the first place there are many useful and remunerative types of labor which can be performed by a domesticated animal or an imbecile, when working under constant or close supervision. Hauling loads, mowing gra.s.s, felling timber, sawing wood, digging holes, breaking stone, weaving doormats, and the simple types of work commonly performed in inst.i.tutions for the mentally deficient are instances. The detection of individuals thus poorly equipped, their congregation and segregation under supervision, and their useful employment, are at once psychologically easy and economically desirable, as has already been indicated in detail in Chapter III.

2. Somewhat more abundant and diversified are those forms of employment for the unspecialized mental competent. This requires only a sufficient degree of intelligence to enable the individual to escape cla.s.sification as a mental incompetent. One who is capable of earning a living under favorable circ.u.mstances, in the absence of aggressive compet.i.tion and without close supervision, can find his or her level in the ”blind alley” occupations.

These offer no prospects of promotion to positions of responsibility and skill, and by definition, this group of individuals afford suitable workers for these occupations. They fill the gap between the feeble-minded and that degree of intelligence which the most moderately endowed _average_ individual typifies. Rough clerking and attending, simple personal and domestic service, delivering goods of small value, laundry work of the mechanical sort, supervised manual and agricultural labor, waiting on domesticated animals, standardized and mechanical factory operations, wrapping, cleaning, polis.h.i.+ng, petty shop-keeping, running errands and freight elevators, street cleaning, janitorial a.s.sistance, etc., are forms of work about equally difficult and satisfying. They do not involve the acquisition of special skill or technical knowledge and they are capable of performance, in the main, by almost any physically able person above the status of feeble-mindedness. We may expect that in the very near future there will be provided standardized scales for the determination of general intelligence of this degree. Even now it is fairly easy to select from a group of children those who, while not positively mentally defective, are nevertheless slow of comprehension, stupid, unable to acquire new knowledge and skill with facility, and perhaps disinclined or unable to form the moral and social habits of honesty, cleanliness, promptness, truthfulness and economy. Since these can fill the ”blind alley” occupations with fair satisfaction they should be ”guided” into the first available positions of this kind.

Thorndike has advocated a series of tests, experience with which leads him to say:

”Suppose that the general intellectual ability of the dullest men who are able to support and look after themselves (men who though temperate and strong earn say $400 a year in good times in New York City) be represented by a and that of Aristotle or Goethe by _a_+_b_, the difference, _b_, being 100. Then the amount of such ability a.s.signed by the tests alone would not, on the average, vary from the individual's true amount by more than 5; and would not vary therefrom by more than 14 in one case out of a hundred. The 5 and 14 are very cautious estimates, 4 and 11 being probably nearer what such an experiment would in fact reveal.”

He further remarks, ”There is excellent reason to believe that it is literally true that the result of two hours' tests properly chosen from those already tested gives a better diagnosis of an educated adult's general intellectual ability than the result of the judgments of two teachers or friends who have observed him in the ordinary course of life each for a thousand hours.”[14] Interesting applications of tests of this general character have been reported by Scott. Workers of various kinds, such as salesmen and clerks, were graded by their employers or supervisors on the basis of their actual ability at their task. It was possible in some cases to get very accurate objective measures of ability to sell goods, etc., by keeping records of achievement over a considerable period of time. These objective measures have been compared with the results of psychological tests administered at the time the men were employed.

Positive correlations ranging in several instances as high as .80 to .90 were secured. This means that ability in the performance of the particular mental tests used was a very reliable sign of ability in the field. Various instances similar to these have already been described in Chapter 5.

3. If, as seems quite likely, it be ultimately demonstrated that there are some characteristics, apt.i.tudes and capacities that depend directly on congenital endowment, special nervous and sensory characteristics of a valuable kind, we may mark off another group of occupations for which particular individuals are well adapted, though not exclusively so, by original nature. Among the traits which have been said to occur in some such direct hereditary way, or as the result of unexplained mutation or deviation from type, are: mathematical apt.i.tude, ability in drawing, musical composition, singing, poetic reaction, military strategy, chess playing. Maternity, as a vocation, is of course strictly s.e.x limited.

Pitch discrimination seems to depend on structural factors which are not susceptible of improvement by practice. The same may be said of various forms of professional athletic achievement. Color blindness seems to be an instance of the conspicuous absence of such a unit characteristic. ”Poets,”

it is said, ”are born, not made.” Many of these apparent unit characteristics are so relatively independent that they often occur in quite surprising degree in individuals who are otherwise imbecilic.

Mathematical, musical, graphic and decorative apt.i.tudes, mechanical memory, and certain types of manual dexterity and mechanical cunning are frequently exhibited by the _idiot savant_. By the _idiot savant_ is meant an individual who is in most respects mentally defective, who perhaps cannot dress himself, cannot adequately learn to speak or write, but who possesses some particular ability to a surprising degree. Such individuals may be able to perform on various musical instruments, to compose music, to sketch designs and objects in an imitative manner, to remember long lists of disconnected names or numbers, to weave acceptably such articles as rugs and scarfs, or to construct complicated mechanical objects such as furniture, pumps, and sailing vessels.

Cases of rare possession of unit characters const.i.tute the ”genius” of ordinary conversation. These seem to present no problem for vocational psychology. Their marked unusualness renders them sufficiently obvious, even to the individual who does not systematically a.n.a.lyze himself. Such a prodigy requires a generous friend and an opportunity rather than a vocational expert.

4. There remain two further types of work, in which vocational psychology really finds its true task. There are on the one hand a large number of occupations that require neither unusual intelligence, special apt.i.tude, nor technical training, such as those of the small tradesmen, responsible clerks, collectors, watchmen, agents, solicitors, motormen, conductors, soldiers, cas.h.i.+ers, cooks, nursemaids, etc. Above all, these types of work require the moral and social virtues, such as honesty, courtesy, truthfulness, patience, promptness, cleanliness, etc. Their lack of need of special technical knowledge is indicated by the apprentices.h.i.+p method by which most of them are commonly begun. Also, the absence of simple and direct tests of the presence of these moral and social virtues and habits requires that for a long time to come this method of trial, combined with the judgments of a.s.sociates in the form of testimonial, personal recommendation, etc., must be continued. If psychology, in the immediate or remote future, shall ever discover or invent expedient tests for the measurements of these moral characteristics, it will have done a work that is at present equaled only by the formation of the various graded scales for measuring more strictly intellectual capacities. At present no such tests are vouched for by even the most enthusiastic of prophets.

5. Finally, and closely related to these occupations calling mainly for moral habits and social reactions, come the bulk of the world's occupations, those adequately performed by and const.i.tuting the permanent task of the man or woman of average intelligence. By average intelligence we do not of course imply any uniform or standardized h.o.m.ogeneous equipment. We mean those varying degrees of intellectual proficiency, educative docility, social cooperativeness and instinctive adequacy which fill the major section of the curve of distribution, that between the feeble-minded and obviously stupid, on the one hand, and on the other the genius, with special and distinguished traits or capacities.

In these occupations the degree of intelligence is by no means the sole determinant of either successful or satisfactory performance.

Temperamental characteristics, such as those enumerated by Schneider and by Thorndike, the local and wandering inclinations, active and sedentary dispositions, tendencies to compet.i.tiveness, imitation, suggestibility, sympathy, curiosity, and the entire series of instinctive propensities, dominant original or acquired types of satisfaction and annoyance, att.i.tudinal, volitional and emotional differences, and the moral and social traits, such as persistence, frankness, piety, loyalty, zeal, all these may be expected to combine in varying relations of compensation and reenforcement, subst.i.tution and facilitation. What one lacks in quickness it is often possible to make up in persistence; what another lacks in ambition and compet.i.tiveness he may supply in the form of loyalty and zeal; relative intellectual inferiority is often and easily balanced by the display of social charm; persistent, well-directed and enthusiastic effort or even a good vocabulary may enable one to compete successfully with the exceptional genius who does not display these incentives or advantages.

In the proposals to direct individuals into their proper life careers, the advocates have quite commonly failed to make sufficient allowance for the overwhelming importance of incentive, motive, att.i.tude and purpose, and the large role they play in determining the possible achievements of a nervous system. It is well enough to test the memory span, attention type, and reaction time of an applicant for a job as motorman on a street car. It is still more important to learn the strength of his instinctive compet.i.tive reactions, to measure the degree of his belief in h.e.l.l or in socialism, or the firmness of his intention to effect the higher education of his children. By ”more important” I mean better calculated to reveal his fitness for the work. I would rather trust my life and limb to a motorman whose feeble memory span is reenforced by a loyal devotion to the comfort of his grandmother than to a mnemonic prodigy whose chief actuating motive in life is to be a ”good fellow.”

These comments should not be construed as an underestimation of the usefulness of the simple intellectual test as a preliminary precaution in engaging employees or in detecting extreme departures from the mode or average. The use of such tests in discovering such departures and variants as idiocy, imbecility and general stupidity has been amply justified by experience with them. But we are primarily concerned here with the determination of individual differences and qualifications within the large middle range of the curve of distribution. My conviction is that, in the case of the average individual, we must either:

1. Demonstrate that these important non-rational determinants of vocational apt.i.tude and satisfaction correlate very, very closely with more strictly intellectual capacity;

2. Postpone the entire work of vocational guidance in these cases, on the basis of psychological examination, until that distant day when these characteristics can be approached by means of scales and norms; or

3. Otherwise guidance must rest, as it now largely does in democratic communities, on the broad knowledge of opportunity afforded by industrial and pre-vocational training, the encouragement of thorough and systematic self-scrutiny, and the method of repeated trials.

The first of these alternatives has scarcely been attempted; the second will probably not occur in our immediate generation; the third we have had always with us.

It is important to note that the employments here referred to are not ”blind alley” occupations. They all offer possibilities of promotion and advancement which in the main are so open to compet.i.tion that the individual inevitably tends to reach that level of responsibility, independence, opportunity and remuneration which his total equipment merits. It is also important that promotion or advancement by no means implies the continued use of the particular traits which distinguished the individual from his fellows on the lower levels of achievement. Thus the boy who enters business as a responsible clerk may often move on through the work of sales management, buying, general promotion, superintendency, and ultimate partners.h.i.+p. The capable artisan or mechanic may proceed from the work of general helper to that of special expert workman, foreman, superintendent, inspector, contractor, and commissioner of public works or postmaster general. Marked boyhood propensities for wood-work indicate neither that the lad is capable of moving through these very diverse steps of promotion, nor, on the other hand, that he must forever remain a journeyman or an expert workman.

Progress in these vocations does not then imply, in fact almost never does imply, merely increasing the quant.i.ty or quality of the work at which one starts. The promotion of a teacher is often from teaching and disciplining cla.s.ses satisfactorily, to clerical a.s.sistance in the princ.i.p.al's office, the princ.i.p.als.h.i.+p, general school superintendence, administrative counselling and public lecturing, or the college or national presidency.

The case of the teacher of biology who becomes the princ.i.p.al of a commercial high school is not at all unprecedented. For occupations of this character and for this main group of average individuals it is indeed hopeless to seek for vocational psychographs. It is here if anywhere that the general principle holds that one who does anything well could have done almost anything else well if he had cared to try. But the degree to which one _cares_ is not measured by reaction time or cancellation tests. The question of the degree to which ability of one sort implies ability of other sorts is one of the several matters to be considered in a later chapter.