ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the controversies associated with two well-known investigations: the Hawthorne study and the Pygmalion, or the IQ expectation, study. There are strong parallels for the improvement of society with the investigations of intelligence in the Pygmalion research. Pygmalion was used to social objectives and progressive public policies in spite of its academic shortcomings. One of the areas to receive detailed attention in social psychology since the 1960s has been the supposedly deleterious influence of violent mass media on human behavior. The potential for improving society by the social engineering ideas of psychology overshadowed the evidence on which they were based. The task for the industrial psychologists was about maintaining social integrity in an industrial system prone to destroying it, or prone to undermining productivity by failing to account for the human factor. The illumination experiments were designed to determine whether increases in artificial lighting on the factory floor could result in fewer accidents, less eyestrain, and higher productivity.
