9. Experiments in the Interest of Ship Service

Unlike the previous case study of city trains, in which accidents are frequent enough to apply statistical analysis, accidents in the shipping industry are seldom, but extremely costly. The loss of a ship ends thousands of lives and results in significant financial loss, as a shipping vessel is itself expensive and carries a significant amount of cargo.

Munsterberg was engaged by "one of the largest" companies in shopping to enlist his help in deterring if there were psychological evaluations that could help identify officers who would fail under crisis. To their credit, the company recognized that the greatest danger is in the mental disposition of officers, who have been trained to handle emergency situations, but who may not hold up in a moment of crisis.

In this sense, the company presumed two types of men should be excluded: those who become paralyzed and those who become frantic. They desired men who cold keep their heads under pressure, evaluate the situation, and make a quick ad effective decision.

His experiment consisted of a card-sorting game, in which there were 24 cards that contained a would, and the subject would be instructed to sort them into stacks according to which vowel appeared most frequently in a phrase on each card. The subject's speed and accuracy in sorting the cards would be measured - a score of seconds times mistakes, finding a score of under 400 to be exceptional, under 1000 to be satisfactory, under 2000 to be adequate, under 3000 to be unreliable, and over that amount to be entirely unacceptable.

(EN: Again, the level of detail about the experiment becomes excruciating, and I'm skipping much.)

He notes that subjects who scored well on the test seemed entirely at ease throughout the experiment, and those who scored poorly showed signs of discomfort and duress. He also found that an individual's self-assessment about he way in which they feel they cope with pressure is often correct, particularly when they are asked to recount incidents in their experience in which they acted either too slowly or too rashly under pressure.

(EN: And again, he does not relate the results of any practical application of this experiment, whether it was of any use when, if ever, it was actually used to screen ships officers.)