The
psychological pioneer, therefore, aims not only toward an exchange of
ledger accounts, but toward a real psychological diagnosis and
prognosis. If a member of a firm is personally known to some scores of
business men who have had commercial dealings with him, and each one
of them, without disclosing his identity to any one but the central
bureau, sends to it a statement of personal impressions, a composite
picture of the mental physiognomy can be worked out. Of course all
this has been often done in the terms of popular psychology and in a
haphazard, amateurish way. The new plan is to arrange the questions
systematically under the point of view of scientific descriptive
psychology. Regular psychograms, in which the probability of a
particular kind of behavior is to be determined in an exact percentage
calculation, are to replace the traditional vagueness, as soon as a
sufficient number of reliable answers have been tabulated.
Commercial life as a whole finds its contact with psychology, of
course, not only in the problem of how to secure the best mental
effect. Those other questions which we have discussed essentially with
reference to factory life and industrial concerns, namely, how the
best man and the best work are to be secured, recur in the circle of
commercial endeavors. It seems, indeed, most desirable to devise
psychological tests by which the ability to be a successful salesman
or saleswoman may be determined at an early stage.
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