This end is
reached by many characteristic changes in the division of labor; also
by a new division between supervisors and workers, by transformations
of the work itself and of the tools and vehicles. But as a by-product
of these efforts the demand necessarily arose for means by which the
fit individuals could be found for special kinds of labor. The more
scientific management introduced changes, by which the individual
achievement often had to become rather complicated and difficult, the
more it became necessary to study the skill and the endurance and the
intelligence of the individual laborers in order to entrust these new
difficult tasks only to the most appropriate men in the factories and
mills. The problem of individual selection accordingly forced itself
on the new efficiency engineers, and they naturally recognized that
the really essential traits and dispositions were the mental ones. In
the most progressive books of the new movement, this need of
emphasizing the selection of workers with reference to their mental
equipment comes to clear expression.
Yet this is very far from a real application of scientific psychology
to the problem at hand. Wherever the question of the selection of the
fit men after psychological principles is mentioned in the literature
of this movement, the language becomes vague, and the same men, who
use the newest scientific knowledge whenever physics or mathematics or
physiology or chemistry are involved, make hardly any attempts to
introduce the results of science when psychology is in question.
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