Screening the Psychological Laboratory: Hugo Münsterberg, Psychotechnics, and the Cinema, 1892–1916

Abstract

According to Hugo Münsterberg, the direct application of experimental psychology to the practical problems of education, law, industry, and art belonged by definition to the domain of psychotechnics. Whether in the form of pedagogical prescription, interrogation technique, hiring practice, or aesthetic principle, the psychotechnical method implied bringing the psychological laboratory to bear on everyday life. There were, however, significant pitfalls to leaving behind the putative purity of the early psychological laboratory in pursuit of technological utility. In the Vocation Bureau, for example, psychological instruments were often deemed too intimidating for a public unfamiliar with the inner workings of experimental science. Similarly, when psychotechnical means were employed by big business in screening job candidates, ethical red flags were raised about this new alliance between science and capital. This tension was particularly evident in Münsterberg's collaboration with the Paramount Pictures Corporation in 1916. In translating psychological tests into short experimental films, Münsterberg not only envisioned a new mass medium for the dissemination of psychotechnics, but a means by which to initiate the masses into the culture of experimental psychology.

Mental Association: Testing Individual Differences Before Binet

“…15. For more information on Münsterberg, who would soon after direct the psychological laboratory at Harvard University, see Hale (1980), Blatter (2015), and Spillmann and Spillmann (1993). Analyzing the word types, his results show some individual differences, as can be seen in the table reproduced here as Figure 4.…”

“…For more information on Münsterberg, who would soon after direct the psychological laboratory at Harvard University, see Hale (), Blatter (), and Spillmann and Spillmann ().…”

Disciplining Physiological Psychology: Cinematographs as Epistemic Devices in the Work of Henri Bergson and Charles Scott Sherrington

“…In deploying cinematographs as experimental (rather than conceptual) devices,psychologists were beginning to arrive at an appreciation of them as holding a quite different significance to that ascribed by Bergson. The most significant study to emerge from early twentieth-century experimental psychology as far as the conceptualization of the cinematograph as we understand it today was concerned however was that of Münsterberg. As well as becoming the most significant institutional rival to James at Harvard, Münsterberg embarked on a lengthy series of studies that sought to gauge the psychological significance of cinema as an experiential medium (Blatter 2015;Brain 2012;Bruno, 2009. On Münsterberg and James's rivalry see Bordogna 2008, 224-255).…”

William McDougall, American Psychologist: A Reconsideration of Nature‐nurture Debates in the Interwar United States

“…In 1929, he dismissed Münsterberg's practical psychology as “purely mechanical,” perhaps provoked by years of departmental sparring with Titchener's prize student, Edwin Boring (McDougall, , p. 149; see also Rosenzweig, , pp. 64–65; Blatter, ).…”