We have no
doubt excellent experiments which are devoted to the study of the
individual differences of exhaustion, fatigue, exhaustibility, ability
to recover the lost energy, ability to learn from practice, and so on,
but they are still exclusively adjusted to the needs of the
school-teacher and of the nerve specialist and would hardly be
immediately useful to the manager of a factory. We shall need a long
careful series of investigations in order to determine how far those
manifold results from experiments with memory work, thought work,
writing work, and so on can be applied to the work which the
industrial laborer is expected to perform.
XVIII
PHYSICAL AND SOCIAL INFLUENCES ON THE WORKING POWER
The increase and decrease of the ability to do good work depends of
course not only upon the direct fatigue from labor and the pauses for
rest; a large variety of other factors may lead to fluctuations which
are economically important. The various hours of the day, the seasons
of the year, the atmospheric conditions of weather and climate, may
have such influence. Some elements of this interplay have been cleared
up in recent years. Just as the experiments of pedagogical psychology
have determined the exact curve of efficiency during the period of an
hour in school, so other investigations have traced the typical curve
of psychical efficiency throughout the day and the year.
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