EXPERIMENTS ON THE PROBLEM OF MONOTONY
The systematic organization of movements
with most careful regard to the psychophysical conditions
appeared to us the most momentous aid toward the heightening
of efficiency. But even if the superfluous, unfit,
and interfering movement impulses were eliminated and
the conditions of work completely adjusted to the
demands of psychology, there would still remain a
large number of possibilities through which productiveness
might be greatly decreased, or at least kept far below
the possible maximum of efficiency. For instance,
even the best adapted labor might be repeated to the
point of exhaustion, at which the workman and the
work would be ruined. Fatigue and restoration
accordingly demand especial consideration. In
a similar way emotions may be conditions of stimulation
or interference, and no one ought to underestimate
the importance of higher motives, intellectual, aesthetic,
and moral motives, in their bearing on the psychophysical
impulses of the laborer. If these higher demands
are satisfied, the whole system gains a new tonus,
and if they are disappointed, the irritation of the
mental machinery may do more harm than any break in
the physical machine at which the man is working.
In short, we must still look in various directions
to become aware of all the relations between the psychological
factors and the economic output. We may begin
with one question which plays a large, perhaps too
large, rôle in the economic and especially in the
popular economic literature. I refer to the problem
of monotony of labor.
In the discourses of our time on the
lights and shades of our modern industrial life, all
seem to agree that the monotony of industrial labor
ought to be entered on the debit side of the ledger
of civilization. Since the days when factories
began to spring up, the accusation that through the
process of division of labor the industrial workingman
no longer has any chance to see a whole product, but
that he has to devote himself to the minutest part
of a part, has remained one of the matter-of-course
arguments. The part of a part which he has to
cut or polish or shape in endless repetition without
alteration cannot awake any real interest. This
complete division of labor has to-day certainly gone
far beyond anything which Adam Smith described, and
therefore it now appears undeniable that the method
must create a mental starvation which presses down
the whole life of the laborer, deprives it of all
joy in work, and makes the factory scheme a necessary
but from the standpoint of psychology decidedly regrettable
evil. I have become more and more convinced that
the scientific psychologist is not obliged to endorse
this judgment of popular psychology.
To be sure the problem of division
of labor, as it appears in the subdivision of manufacture,
is intimately connected with many other related questions.
It quickly leads to the much larger question of division
of labor in our general social structure, which is
necessary for our social life with its vocational
and professional demands, and which undoubtedly narrows
to a certain degree every individual in the completeness
of his human desires. No man in modern society
can devote himself to everything for which his mind
may long. But as a matter of course these large
general problems of civilization lie outside of the
realm of our present inquiry. In another direction
the problem of monotony comes very near to the question
of fatigue. But we must see clearly that these
two questions are not identical and that we may discuss
monotony here without arguing the problem of fatigue.
The frequent repetition of the same movement or of
the same mental activity certainly may condition an
objective fatigue, which may interfere with the economic
output, but this is not the real meaning of the problem
of monotony. About fatigue we shall speak later.
Here we are concerned exclusively with that particular
psychological attitude which we know as subjective
dislike of uniformity and lack of change in the work.
Within these limits the question of monotony is, indeed,
frequently misunderstood in its economic significance.
Let us not forget that the outsider
can hardly ever judge when work offers or does not
offer inner manifoldness. If we do not know and
really understand the subject, we are entirely unable
to discriminate the subtler inner differences.
The shepherd knows every sheep, though the passer-by
has the impression that they all look alike. This
inability to recognize the differences which the man
at work feels distinctly shows itself even in the
most complicated activities. The naturalist is
inclined to fancy that the study of a philologist must
be endlessly monotonous, and the philologist is convinced
that it must be utterly tiresome to devote one’s
self a life lone to some minute questions of natural
science. Only when one stands in the midst of
the work is he aware of its unlimited manifoldness,
and feels how every single case is somehow different
from every other.
In the situation of the industrial
workman, the attention may be directed toward some
small differences which can only be recognized after
long familiarity with the particular field. Certainly
this field is small, as every workman must specialize,
but whether he manufactures a whole machine, or only
a little wheel, makes no essential difference in the
attitude. The attraction of newness is quickly
lost also in the case of the most complicated machine.
On the other hand, the fact that such a machine has
an independent function does not give an independent
attraction to the work. Or we might rather say,
as far as the work on a whole machine is of independent
value, the work of perfecting the little wheel is an
independent task also and offers equal value by its
own possibilities. Whoever has recognized the
finest variations among the single little wheels and
has become aware of how they are produced sometimes
better, sometimes worse, sometimes more quickly, sometimes
more slowly, becomes as much interested in the perfecting
of the minute part as another man in the manufacture
of the complex machine. It is true that the laborer
does not feel interest in the little wheel itself,
but in the production of the wheel. Every new
movement necessary for it has a perfectly new chance
and stands in new relations, which have nothing to
do with the repetition. As a matter of course
this interest in the always new best possible method
of production is still strongly increased where piece-wages
are introduced. The laborer knows that the amount
of his earning depends upon the rapidity with which
he finishes faultless products. Under this stimulus
he is in a continuous race with himself, and thus
has every reason to prefer the externally uniform and
therefore perfectly familiar work to another kind which
may bring alternation, but which also brings ever
new demands.
For a long while I have tried to discover
in every large factory which I have visited the particular
job which from the standpoint of the outsider presents
itself as the most tiresome possible. As soon
as I found it, I had a full frank talk with the man
or woman who performed it and earnestly tried to get
self-observational comment. My chief aim was
to bring out how far the mere repetition, especially
when it is continued through years, is felt as a source
of discomfort. I may again point to a few chance
illustrations. In an electrical factory with
many thousands of employees I gained the impression
that the prize for monotonous work belonged to a woman
who packs incandescent lamps in tissue paper.
She wraps them from morning until night, from the
first day of the year to the last, and has been doing
that for the last 12 years. She performs this
packing process at an average rate of 13,000 lamps
a day. The woman has reached about 50,000,000
times for the next lamp with one hand and with the
other to the little pile of tissue sheets and then
performed the packing. Each lamp demands about
20 finger movements. As long as I watched her,
she was able to pack 25 lamps in 42 seconds, and only
a few times did she need as many as 44 seconds.
Every 25 lamps filled a box, and the closing of the
box required a short time for itself. She evidently
took pleasure in expressing herself fully about her
occupation. She assured me that she found the
work really interesting, and that she constantly felt
an inner tension, thinking how many boxes she would
be able to fill before the next pause. Above
all, she told me that there is continuous variation.
Sometimes she grasps the lamp or paper in a different
way, sometimes the packing itself does not run smoothly,
sometimes she feels fresher, sometimes less in the
mood for the work, and there is always something to
observe and something to think about.
This was the trend which I usually
found. In some large machine works I sought for
a long time before I found the type of labor which
seemed to me the most monotonous. I finally settled
on a man who was feeding an automatic machine which
was cutting holes in metal strips and who simply had
to push the strips slowly forward; only when the strip
did not reach exactly the right place, he could stop
the automatic machine by a lever. He made about
34,000 uniform movements daily and had been doing
that for the past 14 years. But he gave me the
same account, that the work was interesting and stimulating,
while he himself made the impression of an intelligent
workingman. At the beginning, he reported, the
work had sometimes been quite fatiguing, but later
he began to like it more and more. I imagined
that this meant that at first he had to do the work
with full attention and that the complex movement
had slowly become automatic, allowing him to perform
it like a reflex movement and to turn his thoughts
to other things. But he explained to me in full
detail that this was not the case, that he still feels
obliged to devote his thoughts entirely to the work
at hand, and that he is able only under these conditions
to bring in the daily wage which he needs for his
family, as he is paid for every thousand holes.
But he added especially that it is not only the wage
which satisfies him, but that he takes decided pleasure
in the activity itself.
On the other hand, I not seldom found
wage-earners, both men and women, who seemed to have
really interesting and varied activities and who nevertheless
complained bitterly over the monotonous, tiresome
factory labor. I became more and more convinced
that the feeling of monotony depends much less upon
the particular kind of work than upon the special
disposition of the individual. It cannot be denied
that the same contrast exists in the higher classes
of work. We find school-teachers who constantly
complain that it is intolerably monotonous to go on
teaching immature children the rudiments of knowledge,
while other teachers with exactly the same task before
them are daily inspired anew by the manifoldness of
life in the classroom. We find physicians who
complain that one case in their practice is like another,
and judges who despair because they always have to
deal with the same petty cases, while other judges
and physicians feel clearly that every case offers
something new and that the repetition as such is neither
conspicuous nor disagreeable. We find actors who
feel it a torture to play the same rôle every evening
for several weeks, and there are actors who, as one
of the most famous actresses assured me after the
four hundredth performance of her star rôle, repeat
their parts many hundred times with undiminished interest,
because they feel that they are always speaking to
new audiences. It seems not impossible that this
individual difference might be connected with deeper-lying
psychophysical conditions. I approached the question,
to be sure, with a preconceived theory. I fancied
that certain persons had a finer, subtler sense for
differences than others and that they would recognize
a manifoldness of variations where the others would
see only uniformity. In that I silently presupposed
that the perception of the uniformity must be something
disturbing and disagreeable and the recognition of
variations something which stimulates the mind pleasantly.
But when I came to examine the question experimentally,
I became convinced that such a hypothesis is erroneous,
and if I interpret the results correctly, I should
say that practically the opposite relation exists.
Those who recognize the uniformities readily are not
the ones who are disturbed by them.
I proceeded in the following way.
To make use of a large number of subjects accustomed
to intelligent self-observation, I made the first
series of experiments with the regular students in
my psychology lecture course in Harvard University.
Last winter I had more than four hundred men students
in psychology who all took part in that introductory
series. The task which I put before them in a
number of variations was this: I used lists of
words of which half, or one more or less than half,
belonged to one single conceptional group. There
were names of flowers, or cities, or poets, or parts
of the body, or wild animals, and so on. The
remaining words of the list, on the other hand, were
without inner connection and without similarity.
The similar and the dissimilar words were mixed.
The subjects listened to such a list of words and
then had to decide without counting from the mere
impression whether the similar words were more or equally
or less numerous than the dissimilar words. In
other experiments the arrangement was that two different
lists were read and that in the two lists a larger
or smaller number of words were repeated from the first
list. Here, too, the subjects had to decide from
the mere impression whether the repeated words were
in the majority or not. In every experiment the
judgment referred to those words which belonged to
the same group and which were in this sense uniform,
or to the repeated words, and it had to be stated
with reference to them whether their number was larger,
equal to, or smaller than the different words.
If all replies had been correct, the judgment would
have been 40 per cent equal, 30 per cent smaller,
and 30 per cent larger, as they were arranged in perfect
symmetry. As soon as I had the results from the
students, we figured out for every one what number
he judged equal, smaller, or greater. Then we
divided the equal judgments by 2 and added half of
them to the larger and half to the smaller judgments.
In this way we were enabled by one figure to characterize
the whole tendency of the individual. We found
that in the whole student body there was a tendency
to underestimate the number of the similar or of the
repeated words. The majority of my students had
a stronger impression from the varying objects than
from those which were in a certain sense equal.
Yet this tendency appeared in very different degrees
and for about a fourth of the participants the opposite
tendency prevailed. They received a stronger impression
from the uniform ideas.
I had coupled with these experimental
tests a series of questions, and had asked every subject
to express with fullest possible self-analysis his
practical attitude to monotony in life. Every
one had to give an account whether in the small habits
of life he liked variety or uniform repetition.
He was asked especially as to his preferences for
or against uniformity in the daily meals, daily walks,
and so on. Furthermore he had to report how far
he is inclined to stick to one kind of work or to
alternate his work, how far he welcomes the idea that
vocational work may bring repetition, and so on.
And finally I tried to bring the results of these
self-observations into relation with the results of
those experiments. It was here that the opposite
of the hypothesis which I had presupposed suggested
itself to me with surprising force. I found that
just the ones who perceive the repetition least hate
it most, and that those who have a strong perception
of the uniform impressions and who overestimate their
number are the ones who on the whole welcome repetition
in life.
As soon as I had reached this first
experimental result, I began to see how it might harmonize
with known psychological facts. Some years ago
a Hungarian psychologist showed by interesting
experiments that if a series of figures is exposed
to the eye for a short fraction of a second, equal
digits are seen only once, and he came to the conclusion
that equal impressions in such a series inhibit each
other. In the Harvard laboratory we varied these
experiments by eliminating the spatial separation
of those numbers. In our experiments the digits
did not stand side by side, but followed one another
very quickly in the same place. Similar experiments
we made with colors and so on. Here, too, we
found that quickly succeeding equal or very similar
impressions have a tendency to inhibit each other or
to fuse with each other. Where such an inhibition
occurs, we probably ought to suppose that the perception
of the first impression exhausts the psychical disposition
for this particular mental experience. The psychophysical
apparatus becomes for a moment unable to arouse the
same impression once more.
The above described new experiments
suggest to me that this inhibition of equal or similar
impressions is found unequally developed in different
individuals. They possess a different tendency
to temporary exhaustion of psychophysical dispositions.
There are evidently persons who after they have received
an impression are unable immediately to seize the
same impression again. Their attention and their
whole inner attitude fails. But there are evidently
other persons for whom, on the contrary, the experience
of an impression is a kind of inner preparation for
arousing the same or a similar impression. In
their case the psychophysical dispositions become
stimulated and excited, and therefore favor the repetition.
If, as in our experiments, the task is simply to judge
the existence of equal or similar impressions without
any strain of attention, the one group of persons must
underestimate the number of the equal impressions because
many words are simply inhibited in their minds and
remain neglected, the other groups of persons must
from their mental dispositions overestimate the number
of similar words. From here we have to take one
step more. If these two groups of persons have
to perform a task in which it is necessary that not
a single member of a series of repetitions be overlooked,
it is clear that the two groups must react in a very
different way. Now a perfect perception of every
single member is forced on them. Those who grasp
equal impressions easily, and who are prepared beforehand
for every new repetition by their inner dispositions,
will follow the series without strain and will experience
the repetition itself with true satisfaction.
On the other hand, those in whom every impression
inhibits the readiness to receive a repetition, and
whose inner energy for the same experience is exhausted,
must feel it as a painful and fatiguing effort if they
are obliged to turn their attention to one member
after another in a uniform series. This mental
torture is evidently the displeasure which such individuals
call the dislike of monotony in their work. Whether
this theoretical view is correct, we have to determine
by future studies. In our Harvard laboratory
we have now proceeded from such preparatory mass experiments
to subtle investigations on a small number of persons
well trained in psychological self-observation with
whom the conditions of the experiment can be varied
in many directions.
It would seem probable that such experiments
might also win psychotechnical significance.
A short series of tests which would have to be adapted
to the special situations, and which for the simple
wage-earner would have to be much easier than those
sketched above, would allow it to be determined beforehand
whether an individual will suffer from repetition
in work. Even if we abstract from arguments of
social reform and consider exclusively the economic
significance, it must seem important that labor which
involves much repetition be performed by men and women
whose mental dispositions favor an easy grasp of successive
uniform impressions. Experimentation could secure
the selection of the fit workmen and the complaint
of monotony would disappear. The same selection
could be useful in the opposite direction, as many
economic occupations, especially in our time of automatic
machines, demand a quick and often rhythmical transition
from one activity to another. It is evident that
those whose natural dispositions make every mental
excitement a preparation not for the identical but
for the contrasting stimulation will be naturally
equipped for this kind of economic tasks.