If such an advance is to be a steady one, the economic psychologist will emancipate himself from the chance question of what problems are at this moment important for commerce and industry and will proceed systematically step by step from those results which the psychological laboratory has yielded under the non-economic points of view.  Many previous psychological or psychophysical inquiries almost touch the problems of industrial achievement.  For instance, the experiments on imitation, which psychophysicists have carried on in purely theoretical or pedagogical interests, move parallel to industrial experiences.  It is well known that the pacemaker plays his role not only in the field of sport but also in the factory.  The rhythm of one laborer gains controlling importance for the others, who instinctively imitate him.  Some plants even have automatically working machines with the special intention that the sharp rhythm of these lifeless forerunners shall produce an involuntary imitation in the psychophysical system.  In a similar way many laboratory investigations on suggestion and suggestibility point to such economic processes, and it seems to me that especially the studies on the influence of the ideas of purpose which are being undertaken nowadays in many psychological laboratories may easily be connected with the problems of economic life.  We know how the consciousness of the task to be performed has an organizing influence on the system of those psychophysical acts which lead to the goal.  The experiment has shown under which conditions this effect can be reinforced and under which reduced.  Pedagogical experiments have also shown exactly what influence belongs to the consciousness of the approach to the end of work; the feeling of the nearness of the close heightens the achievement, even of the fatigued subject.  It would not be difficult to connect psychophysical experiments of this kind with the problems of the task and bonus system, which is nowadays so much discussed in industrial life.  The practical successes seem to prove that the individual can do more with equal effort if he does not stand before an unlimited mass of work of which he has to do as much as possible in the course of the day, but if he is before a definitely determined, limited task with the demand that he complete it in an exactly calculated time.  Scientific management has made far-reaching use of this principle, but whether constant results for the various industries can be hoped for from such methods must again be ascertained by the psychological experiment.

These hopes surely will not weaken the interest of the psychologist for those many psychological methods which lie outside of the experimental research.  A sociologist, who himself had been a laborer in his earlier life, undertook in Germany last year an inquiry into the psychological status of the laborers’ achievement by the questionnaire method.[49] He sent to 8000 workingmen in the mining industries, textile