EMPLOYMENT  PSYCHOLOGY  DEFINED  I9
of  the  work  as  it  is  actually  being  done.  Its  laboratory
is  the  shop  and  the  office.  The  conditions  under  which
it  conducts  its  experiments  are  the  actual  conditions  and
not  the  highly  artificial  and  theoretical  conditions  entailed
by  the  stereotyped  psychological  laboratory.  The  employment ­
  psychologist  must  find  and  apply  mental  tests  to
employees  on  the  basis  of  a  study  of  the  work  which  they
are  doing.  In  fact,  he  must  become  an  employee  himself,
in  order  that  he  may  understand  the  kind  of  mental  action
for  which  he  is  trying  to  find  tests  or  measures.  Only  the
most  temerarious  psychologist  would  attempt  to  devise
or  apply  tests  to  employees  whose  work  he  understood  in
only  a  superficial  fashion.
There  is  a  very  decided  tendency  to-day  to  make  a  widespread ­
  and  wholesale  use  of  tests  for  employment  purposes.
Newspapers  and  periodicals  have  given  much  space  to  the
description  of  tests  and  have  made  many  sensational  and
extravagant  claims  for  their  usefulness.  There  is  great
danger  in  a  sudden  and  extensive  application  of  tests.
Indeed,  ridicule  has  already  been  provoked  by  their  indiscriminate ­
  use;  for  anyone  with  a  little  ingenuity,  whether
he  be  a  psychologist  or  not,  can  take  a  ready-made  psychological ­
  test  and  apply  it,  after  a  fashion.  But,  having
applied  it,  the  chief  difficulty  remains,  namely,  how  shall
it  be  interpreted?  What  does  it  mean?  No  test  has  any
significance  for  employment  purposes  until  it  has  been
tried  out  (by  the  scientific  process  to  be  described  later)
on  employees  doing  exactly  the  same  kind  of  work  as
that  for  which  new  applicants  are  to  be  tested  later  on.
If,  for  instance,  an  employment  manager  receives  a  set
of  trade  tests  or  clerical  tests  for  use  in  connection  with
the  selection  of  workers,  he  can  not  use  those  tests  effectually ­
  until  a  trained  psychologist  has  tried  them  out  on