ABSTRACT
This chapter traces the entanglements between urban life and psychology into the 1910s. Frederick Winslow Taylor sold “efficiency” to industry to increase productivity in the face of workers’ rising wage demands, creating an opening for psychologists to sell their knowledge and skills by consulting for business and industry. Walter Dill Scott brought psychological understanding to advertising and transformed personnel recruitment by customizing psychological tests to suit particular jobs. Hugo Münsterberg’s first book on industrial psychology persuaded the president of Carnegie Institute for Technology to found America’s first graduate program in applied psychology. Public education was an important site for growth in applied psychology, including the first widespread program of school intelligence testing, by Henry H. Goddard. He translated Alfred Binet’s test and used it first with “feeble-minded” children in Philadelphia and was invited to test new immigrants for “feeble-mindedness” at Ellis Island. Lewis Terman modified the Binet test as well, to focus on the intellectually “gifted.” World War I led Robert M. Yerkes, president of the APA, to spearhead a program to test the intelligence of army recruits and draftees. Psychology’s intellectual core was in transition too, as John B. Watson and others gained attention for insisting that the field focus on “behavior” instead of “consciousness.” As the discipline grew, new associations and journals for applied psychologists emerged to address the rapidly multiplying array of subdisciplines.
