laboratory workers really to
come nearer to each other from the start and undertake the work in
common, not in the sense that the laboratory is to emigrate to the
factory, but in the better sense that definite questions which grow
out of the industrial life be submitted to the scientific
investigation of the psychologists.

XVI

EXPERIMENTS ON THE PROBLEM OF MONOTONY

The systematic organization of movements with most careful regard to
the psychophysical conditions appeared to us the most momentous aid
toward the heightening of efficiency. But even if the superfluous,
unfit, and interfering movement impulses were eliminated and the
conditions of work completely adjusted to the demands of psychology,
there would still remain a large number of possibilities through which
productiveness might be greatly decreased, or at least kept far below
the possible maximum of efficiency. For instance, even the best
adapted labor might be repeated to the point of exhaustion, at which
the workman and the work would be ruined. Fatigue and restoration
accordingly demand especial consideration. In a similar way emotions
may be conditions of stimulation or interference, and no one ought to
underestimate the importance of higher motives, intellectual,
aesthetic, and moral motives, in their bearing on the psychophysical
impulses of the laborer. If these higher demands are satisfied, the
whole system gains a new tonus, and if they are disappointed, the
irritation of the mental machinery may do more harm than any break in
the physical machine at which the man is working. In short, we must
still look in various directions to become aware of all the relations
between the psychological factors and the economic output. We may
begin with one question which plays a large, perhaps too large, role
in the economic and especially in the popular economic literature. I
refer to the problem of monotony of labor.

In the discourses of our time on the lights and shades of our modern
industrial life, all seem to agree that the monotony of industrial
labor ought to be entered on the debit side of the ledger of
civilization. Since the days when factories began to spring up, the
accusation that through the process of division of labor the
industrial workingman no longer has any chance to see a whole product,
but that he has to devote himself to the minutest part of a part, has
remained one of the matter-of-course arguments. The part of a part
which