Chapter 31 Chapter 18 The Use and Misuse of Psychology-1

Whatever the ghost of W. Wundt may think of clinical psychology today, a flesh-and-blood Wundt will certainly be paralyzed when he sees the science he founded put to unseemly practical uses—and by some of his disciples. Ran furious. One of its protégés, Ernest Muumann, did what Wundt considered an apostasy by abandoning pure research in favor of the application of psychological principles to education.To make matters worse, the other two disciples were still selling their professional knowledge in front of the business community and the public. In 1903, Walter Deere Scott of Northwestern University also published a treatise on the psychology of sales and advertising.Wundt's direct disciple Hugo Munsterberg also published a book on the psychology of court presentations in 1908 and another on the psychology of everyday problems in 1915.He was invited by William James to Harvard as director of the psychology laboratory.

Although Munsterberg is a typical German professor, his social outlook is also reactionary (he strongly advocates that the position of women is to stay at home), and his appearance is even more ugly (poor attire, flat nose, pointy chin , with a guard beard), yet he has become a celebrity in American psychology.Still, he seemed hesitant about his identity.Although he preached applied psychology in books and popular magazines, and in front of large audiences, he maintained his identity as a scientist through numerous volumes and lengthy works on psychological theory.He could have done without it: his applied psychology was where he had the greatest impact, and his theoretical work contributed nothing.

Many psychologists have been insulted by Munsterberg's advocacy of applied psychology, but the public loves it.On the more influential side, some adventurous businessmen asked Munsterberg and his students to use their knowledge of psychology to improve worker productivity, make advertisements more appealing, and help select the best candidates for specific jobs. . For example, he developed a test for a telephone company to identify women who were best suited to switchboard operations.To try his hand, the company quietly placed several skilled operators among a field of 30 applicants for him to take the test.Fortunately, Munsterberg gave these experienced operators high marks after all.

Unfortunately, at the beginning of World War I, Munsterberg made several pro-German public speeches, which caused his stature to plummet.When he died in 1916, the American Psychological Association, of which he was president, said nothing about it. Mansterberg's effort to be both an applied psychologist and a theorist is emblematic of a long-running debate about the value of knowledge.Most intellectuals believe that knowledge is worth pursuing in itself, regardless of its practicality; while most social leaders and ordinary people believe that knowledge is only worth pursuing if it can be applied in practice.The latter point of view is particularly pronounced in industrial technological society, for such values ​​are so well attuned to it; it was the dawn of the industrial age, and thus a lesser-known English poet, Gilbert West, wrote: "The advantage is in the use of in, rather than in its sole possession."

It is not surprising, therefore, that applied psychology was quickly noticed and developed rapidly in 20th-century America.We have seen several avenues for biasing basic research and theory toward experimental use, among them: ——Intelligence test, used to eliminate unqualified soldiers in the two world wars; ——Intelligence and ability tests, many schools across the country use this method to divide students with different learning abilities into classes; —The application of the principles of perception to the test of the pilot trainer was conducted by the Army Air Corps in World War II.

-- The Supreme Court in the famous Brown v. Department of Education case cited the findings of psychological research and the resulting reform of public schools. - Parental education by mass media and other methods, inculcating knowledge and methods of normal stages of children's development and of the ways in which parents can best benefit their children at each stage. -- and of course all forms of psychotherapy, and the enormous impact they have had on the mental health and behavior of Americans.And their physical hygiene: A series of studies showed that regular doctor visits fell by a third after mental hygiene treatment.

These are just a few of the areas in which psychological knowledge has been applied over the past eighty-odd years.In recent years, this field has begun to sprout.Clinical and other applied psychologists now make up more than half of the membership of the American Psychological Association, and probably a similar number among non-member psychologists, and American society has been profoundly influenced by psychology, including: -- Every year, the plans of more than a million high school students are determined in large part by their scores on the SAT test (Academic Agility Test), which was designed by educational psychologists and used by many schools Some freshmen with unqualified scores are not considered to be accepted.

— The question of millions of people taking jobs ranging from assembly line to management, largely determined by their scores on intelligence tests, agility tests, and personality tests. —As a people, we spend billions of dollars each year to improve labor performance, athletic performance, and interpersonal relationships through training of all kinds, most of which are based on psychological findings. --The deluge of billions of dollars in television and radio commercials and print advertising is dramatically influencing our tastes, buying behaviour, everyday behavior and voting choices.Much of this communication employs persuasive techniques developed by counselors (or, as they are popularly called in current applied psychology textbooks, "commitment professionals").

All of this raises the question: is applied psychology using scientific knowledge to improve the human condition, or is it misusing it for selfish ends, or at considerable cost to its ends? Of course, it's a bit of both.All scientific knowledge can be used for good as well as for bad, often at the same time.The norms and structures of every society determine which option, or a mix of options, prevails.American society, for example, by greatly rewarding the cure of the sick and the delay of death, has stimulated the development of such measures as artificial respiration and devices for maintaining nourishment and hydration, but, failing to amend its traditions and laws, has left physicians They prolong the lives of patients who have no hope of survival, patients who are permanently unconscious and utterly hopeless struggling in pain.

So it is the same in psychology.Among its many applications, some improve individual and collective lives, while others benefit the practitioner and harm the recipient.Knowledge, this time again, cannot be wiped from our collective consciousness, nor do we want to, yet, as a society, we have not yet learned to both encourage the use of psychology and at the same time see and limit or even prevent its misuse. Many applications of psychology enable humans to begin to use their abilities and responses more effectively and healthily.Including: Health psychology: some of these applications can improve or cure some mental and physical diseases related to psychological factors.Of course, psychotherapy is the prime example.Others include a diagnostic process and situational or social interventions.Here are a few examples:

- Type A Behavior Pattern (TABP) Some people are unusually ambitious and especially aggressive, they are nervous, like to talk quickly, act quickly, get angry easily, are prone to hostility, and seem to have coronary heart disease cause.Preventing this disorder from happening starts with identifying its patterns through personality tests and interviews.Although TABP seems to be an innate personality tendency, stress reduction training can greatly reduce its symptoms.In addition, situational factors that cause the symptoms can be minimized or avoided.For example, parents who know this can consciously relax their emphasis on their children's achievement, and they can choose schools that do not emphasize competition.Adults with the TABP pattern can switch to a less competitive environment, and even a less competitive job if necessary. -Social psychologists and epidemiologists have found a statistical relationship between disruptions in social ties or networks due to something like immigration, divorce, or death, and a range of physical and mental illnesses.For example, depression and the accompanying weakened immune response are more common in divorced and widowed populations.The cure prescribed by psychologists is one form of social support, and fortunately, many kinds of support groups have recently sprung up across the country.There are groups for the elderly, the disabled, families with bad habits, cancer patients (particularly women after mastectomies), and hospice programs for the terminally ill and their families. - The normal decline in memory due to advanced age is often the cause of severe depression, loss of self-confidence, depression, and social withdrawal.In recent years, clinical clinics at many universities and other centers have begun offering mnemonic and other communicative skills training programs to fill this gap.A well-known clinical report stated that after two weeks of training, middle-aged and elderly people can remember people's names when they meet them, even better than when they were young. --Many health care organizations and medical clinics use methods drawn from motivational psychology to get patients to take their recommended medications and perform suggested activities.This approach includes: exposing patients to the evidence of undisputed benefits; acknowledging that they see that reputable authorities support the steps; and rewarding patients, especially those on weight-loss diets, with encouragement , thumbs up, and graph their progress. Educational Psychology: By the 1960s, psychologists and educators alike had amassed a wealth of evidence that underachievers were less cognitively and culturally prepared than normal school-age children, a reason why they were consistently left behind year after year s reason. "From Scratch" is a large-scale experimental campaign that began in the 1960s as part of "President Johnson's War on Poverty."It aims to overcome the learning difficulties of disadvantaged children by providing them with special education to equip them with the skills and background knowledge necessary to succeed in school. However, for political reasons, the "start from scratch" campaign started hastily without developing a suitable method for evaluating its results.It took several years for the campaign to be reviewed by Congress.The researchers then compared first-, second-, and third-grade students who participated in the project with those who did not, and found that, disappointingly, the students who participated in the "start from scratch" activity did not perform better in school than those who did not. People are strong.The discovery sparked a heated debate.Those in favor of the program say the two groups aren't really equals — the From Scratch program attracts those who need it most, and who would probably do worse without the program's help.Those who disapprove of the program say the activities prove that compensatory special education does not have long-term effects, and that the dire circumstances of these children do little to improve them. Later, however, other programs designed by researchers rather than activists and using appropriate control groups yielded more promising data. In 1975, the results of 11 well-designed studies of early reinforcement activities were pooled, and the researchers collectively conducted a longitudinal follow-up study.Over several years, they identified, tested, and followed students ages 8-18 who had participated in an intensive program for preschoolers in the 1960s and collected data on their school conduct. In 1982, the Society of Researchers reported that children who took part in the program performed better academically than a comparable control group of students, had higher IQ and achievement test scores many years later, and talked about themselves because of their grades. proud (such as achievements at work or school activities). Psychology has been used in education in many other ways, on a much larger scale, for decades.We’ve seen most of the examples, so skip this one and look at today’s results: Across the country, thousands of school psychologists test, assess, and provide short-term therapy for students, and more than 2,000 educational Psychologists use learning theories and research data to design effective instructional methods and to instill these theories in teachers' college students. Human engineering: In the early 2000s, engineers designing machines, automobiles, appliances, and other mechanical devices occasionally had the whim to make controls and dials better suited to natural human perception and motor abilities.For example, even in early cars, the steering wheel was already connected to the front wheels in such a way that if the driver wanted to turn left, the driver turned the steering wheel to the left.This might seem like the most obvious thing to do, but the earliest cars were steered by a tiller, and to turn left, the driver had to turn the tiller to the right, and vice versa.Likewise, some designers try to manipulate the dials on radios, power tools, and factory machines in natural ways based on intuition. While these were the preoccupations of engineers—and this was the case until World War II—a great deal of equipment has dials and controls that are difficult to explain and fine-tune.Some require unnatural or unnecessarily complex human movements, which often lead to errors and even accidents.One example is the "British Mosquito," a fighter-bomber aircraft built during World War II before psychologists were involved.The throttle is on the pilot's left and the landing control is on the right.As a result, when taking off, the pilot had to free his hand from the damper to hold the steering wheel with his left hand, so that he could use his right hand to raise the landing stick, but when he let go, the damper would retract by itself. The power is thus reduced, just when the greatest power is needed. During the war, with so much new and complex military equipment being developed, military services and their contractors began to employ psychologists to help make products more human-like in perception and response.This is the beginning of the so-called human nature engineering, later also called engineering psychology.Psychologists redesign some devices to improve the legibility of their dashboards, to ease the fine-tuning of controls, to make the movements that must be performed naturally coordinated, and so on. Jack Dunlap, a naval officer in charge of marksmanship training research, was a former professor of psychology at Fulham University.His first-hand experience with shooting equipment, and his understanding of the psychological difficulties of using them, led him to found the first ergonomics company after the war, the Dunlap Company.Dunlap is an energetic dumpy fellow who has both expertise and just the right big-picture vision of applied psychology. "Fireball!" he yelled so friendlyly to a visitor in 1951. "Pure science, I can't stand this academic shit. If science doesn't make people's lives better, it will never Not worth the money." The development of his company can be described as thriving.Dunlap started with an investment of 21,000 U.S. dollars in 1948. Three years later, the turnover was nearly 700,000 U.S. dollars. The customers were the U.S. Department of Defense, an aircraft manufacturing plant, an office machinery company, a heavy electrical equipment manufacturing plant, a Flash light manufacturers, and other customers. A prime example of Dunlap's Humanity Engineering is that it helped a pharmaceutical factory solve the problem of correctly dosing pills (counting too much reduces revenue, and undercounting violates federal law, both of which happen frequently) .The counting worker can't actually count, he just uses an aluminum plate with, let's say, 100 grooves to insert into the box containing the pills.When he pulls out the aluminum plate, the pills will fall into almost every groove, and he will know at a glance that he only needs to grab 4-5 more pills by hand and put them into the aluminum plate for automatic bottling.At least, that's how the approach works.However, this method of counting pills is often problematic.A Dunlap employee studied the counting process and figured out that the aluminum plate didn't contrast sharply with the colors of many of the pills.He brushed a little orange on the bottom of each groove, and as a result, any groove that didn't fall into the pill would light up like a warning light.In this way, the accuracy immediately rises, and the problem is solved. Ergonomics has been a fairly well-known branch of applied psychology since the 1950s, practiced by people working on everything from jumbo jets to subway control centers, bedside radios to home computers .Psychologists working in human engineering have studied dozens of questions, including whether it is easier to read a graduated rotating disk with a fixed mark, or a pointer around a fixed graduated disk. (Rotating the disc is a better design), how to make the handle of the control knob easier to find (one way: marked by different colors; another way: made into different shapes according to its use, so that you can see Know which one it is - e.g. make the landing stick's joystick head round, like a wheel, and make the aileron control stick a wedge like a sheet). Until recently, the most catastrophic piece of equipment in the United States, the nuclear power plant, was designed without the benefit of ergonomics. After the Three Mile Island accident in 1979, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission realized that the companies that designed and built America's nuclear power plants lacked psychologists who could do human engineering research.This may also be why the human-operated portion of the Three Mile Island machine system was so severely flawed.The sign that could have alerted operators to a stuck valve in an automated parking system was less prominent; almost 30 percent of system signs were hung too high for operators to see; Some colors that indicate a normal condition on some panels may indicate faults on others.As a result of these findings, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission employed some 30 psychologists, whose recommendations led to new regulations and guidelines for nuclear plants across the country. Some recent findings by ergonomics experts include: - Equipment users can read data faster and make fewer mistakes from some analog display, such as the pointer on a watch, or an aircraft altitude indicator, than some displays that appear in the control window The numbers in are displayed much better. - They understand the effect of column charts, pie charts, and other visual display methods better than some alphanumeric displays. - If the data is displayed on a display device in a single symbolic shape, such as a polygon with different side lengths, they can grasp at a glance the information that must be read at the same time and the interrelationship of several kinds of data . Environmental Psychology: This modern professional study deals with the ways in which humans use their physical environments and are affected by them.There are three examples: Right to personal space: Like most animals, humans have a strong urge to control the space around them.When a group of people feels that an area belongs to them collectively, they tend to act together and for each other's benefit, rather than as they would alone. In 1972, Oscar Newman, the famous urban planner, analyzed patterns of crime in public housing projects and identified the location of buildings—what points of interest they face, what spaces they semi-enclose or control, etc.— — what sense of community and responsibility would be precipitated among its inhabitants, and thus associated with a low crime rate.Since then, a string of environmental psychologists has ramped up research into which housing arrangements stimulate collective feelings of spatial entitlement and interrelationships. Privacy: People have different needs for privacy in different societies and in different parts of our society, but, on the whole, some level of privacy is desirable for almost everyone.Environmental psychologists try to meet this need through architecture.For example, in large office environments, the use of cubicles or walls rather than open designs so that supervisors cannot directly see employees has been found to result in greater job satisfaction and higher rather than lower operating Level. Crowding: Living and working in an environment where population density is often high can be very depressing.When population density cannot be reduced, environmental psychologists mitigate its impact through architectural style and visual manipulation.A team of environmental psychologists tested three different architectural styles of a college dormitory to see how crowded they felt.One is a long corridor with 40 students living in the room; the second is two shorter corridors with 20 students living in the rooms on both sides of the corridor; the third is a long corridor with 40 students in the room students, but there is a living room in the middle where students can meet, with doors that divide the aisles.Although the last arrangement has the same density as the other two, it is perceived by the pupils as less cramped, less crowded, and therefore more suitable and more social. Psychology of Performance: This major is concerned primarily with the expansion of mental and motor skills involved in learning and many skill-based activities, including sports. In recent years, a number of reputable psychologists (and some not so famous) have promoted certain performance-enhancing training methods, many of which are "New Age" methods outside the mainstream of scientific psychology.These include sleep learning, accelerated learning, neurolinguistic programs, biofeedback, mental rehearsal of motor skills, extrasensory perception, telekinesis (causing physical things to move or change through mental effort alone), and more. Because the development of human potential is so valuable in combat, in 1984 the U.S. Army Research Institute asked the National Academy of Sciences to evaluate a series of such unorthodox skills training.A "Committee on Human Effectiveness Enhancement Methods" was therefore formed, consisting of 14 members, mostly psychologists (distinguished), chaired by Robert A. Bujock of the University of California, Los Angeles.The committee and its affiliates visited 10 laboratories to observe these techniques, hear from advocates and independent consultants of these new approaches, and review the extensive literature.The conclusions, some predictable and some surprising, were published in two reports, one in 1988 and the second in 1991.Some of the more salient discoveries, listed below, explain various unorthodox approaches to expanding human potential. (Later, we'll see conclusions about more unorthodox methods.) Training approach: Many strength and conditioning practitioners and coaches emphasize "volume exercises"—broad and sustained practice of a skill.One example is training at a tennis "camp" where students practice for many hours a day, non-stop for a week or two.The committee reported that such methods did increase performance to a high level for a short period of time, but that the benefits quickly faded: In general, high-volume exercises that require learning the components of a certain skill can indeed achieve good results in the short term (such as during the training period), but in the long run, the effect is not as good as that of interval training. The training came solid.In some cases, high-volume training resulted in long-term recall performance at half the level of interval training results, and two high-volume training sessions were often not as effective as a single pilot study. The effect of interval practice is not only in motor skills training, but also in language training, especially in the process of language learning.Although psychologists have known this for decades, the short-term effects of high-volume training have haunted some coaches and instructors and mystified students.The committee's findings and the advice of sports psychologists may also outweigh the sales pitches of advocates of high-volume training programs. Mental Practice of Athletic Skills: In recent years, sports psychologists have been advising athletes, musicians, and other practitioners of athletic skills to mentally rehearse what to expect before actually performing them, saying, This improves actual operation.Some athletes and others have tried this with no success.For example, Jack Nichols once said that before he played golf, he always mentally rehearsed the line of his swing and the direction of the ball.A Chinese pianist was imprisoned for seven years during the "Cultural Revolution", but soon after he got out he played as well as ever.He explained that he was able to do this because he had been playing it in his mind while he was incarcerated. Legends, of course, do not prove any hypothesis.So this committee examined a large body of research data and found that in controlled studies of motor skills, some people who mentally rehearse do better than those who don't.However, physical exercises alone are better than mental exercises alone, and a combination of the two is better in some physical exercises that are difficult or costly, and in some physical exercises that require planning and decision-making rather than automatic response much.The committee concluded that some of the claims made by sports psychologists were exaggerated about the benefits of mental exercise. We have seen two ways in which psychologists can improve the attunement between humans and machines: by testing how sensitive people are to certain specific machine processes, and by designing devices for human perception, response, and movement .There are also two ways to improve work efficiency, one is to adjust their movements, and the other is to improve the working environment. In the early 2000s, "efficiency experts" had stopwatches and tape measures in hand, analyzing and modifying the movements necessary for each task.They study the movements of employees to determine, for example, whether they pack books faster standing or sitting, with one hand or two, with books stacked on the left, right, or in front of the carton quick.But such modifications, aimed only at increasing output, often made factory work busier, more stressful, more prone to fatigue, and made workers hostile, leading to higher error rates and product defects. The increasing complexity of science and technology during and after World War II led to a larger new concept, the "manipulator-machine system".This does not just refer to the application of ergonomic elements, it also calls for adapting the working environment of the workplace to meet the psychological capabilities and needs of human beings, so that it is necessary to improve lighting, eliminate noise, extend rest periods, improve communication and other Working conditions, such that fatigue is reduced, job satisfaction is increased, employee engagement is enhanced, and sabotage and turnover are reduced. Industrial psychologists slowly moved from the factories to the offices, testing managerial job applicants for leadership, recommending changes to working conditions to prevent hiatus, recommending changes to the chain of command and internal communications to improve collaborative function and synergy. Ability to solve problems.What used to be Industrial Psychology is now Industrial/Organizational (I/O) Psychology after World War II, the one-tenth specialty of today's psychologists.Some of them try to look like pure scientists, they spend a lot of time theoretical research and learning, but most of them work like Jack Dunlap, some of them are more like managers, as the United Brands Jean Lapointe recently said: As a "practice," I focus on day-to-day organizational problems and opportunities: opening new plants, organizing, adding staff, selecting and developing managers, improving job morale, and so on.My interest has shifted from a pure love of knowledge to action, from correct methodology to result-oriented action, from doing things perfectly to things that can be improved.I'm more likely to read Harvard Business Week and less often to the Journal of Applied Psychology.My ongoing professional development has included refining my influencing skills and learning the basics of finance, rather than attending conferences of the American Psychological Association, or the Association for Industrial and Organizational Psychology. Clearly, many of the functions of the I/O Psychologist are primarily managerial, and accordingly we will ignore this part.Other parts, however, are primarily psychological, although they also serve management.We'll look at two of these, which will give us an idea of ​​how 1/0 psychologists apply their science to improve the relationship between humans and work. Adapting work to people: This is partly about ergonomics, however, it includes much more. On the one hand, I/O psychologists pay attention to what they call "workspace packaging", they consider not only privacy and crowding factors, but also lighting, the chairs that are most suitable for various tasks, desk chairs compared to The spatial relationship between drawers, files and doors, the optimal height of the work surface and many similar things. Workplace noise is an oddity factor.In some jobs it creates depression that interferes with cognitive processing, but in others it seems to help.For example, the manager of a clothing store that mainly deals in juvenile clothing, if he can't let these boys who sell clothes have a chance to listen to loud rock music, he will never be able to keep these employees. Another area of ​​concern for I/O is the human impact of assembly line or highly specialized work.Specialization is meant to generate efficiency and high output, but workers who do the same thing all day long, such as welding the corner of a car door, or specializing in skinning chicken breasts, or typing in and out on a keyboard , they will feel that their work is monotonous and tiring, meaningless.Such specialization does not produce satisfaction or fulfillment, but instead alienates workers from their work, making them see both work and their employers as enemies. Accordingly, some I/O psychologists work with managers on "job diversification" and "job enrichment."Diversification refers to allowing workers to perform more than one task, and enrichment refers to giving employees greater responsibility for their own work, greater planning, scheduling and control rights. Each approach has its own administrative headaches, but job diversification has been adopted in recent years by many American companies on the assembly line, at least by the main office of one large insurance agency.It has been found that this approach has improved the quality, though not the quantity of the product.Job enrichment creates more problems and requires a more extensive modification of the roles of management and labor, but where it has been tried it has been found to improve labor enthusiasm and reduce workforce renewal. effect. Making people more fit for work: This refers largely to the assessment of a worker's potential to perform a particular job.However, if it is a manager, after they have been in the job for a few years, they need to evaluate their work to determine who has been improving and looks like a senior person, and who seems to be weak and unlikely to contribute more .One insurance company estimated in 1974 that it would cost $31,600 to replace a salesman and $185,000 to replace a manager—a figure that must have multiplied several times today—and the U.S. Navy estimates that it takes Members, the cost of which is 15 million US dollars. Staff testing, as we know it, began before World War I.It has grown steadily since then, and today more than 60 percent of large institutions and some smaller institutions use the test for staff selection.The evidence is that it works.A typical study of an ice plant found that 94 percent of people who applied for maintenance jobs with a score of 103 to 120 were later determined to be very suitable for the job; -86 people, only 25% of people are suitable for this job. Tests for blue-collar workers range from written, pen-and-paper tests of job knowledge to "hands-on job sample tests."In practice tests, job candidates perform tasks that are similar to actual work.白领工人的工作测试同样包括书面测试，以检测其语言表达能力、数字处理能力、推理能力和其它认知技巧，还有其它诸如处理文档、以图形形式发出指令，以及处理紧急电话等等的测试。 在许多公司里，经理工作的求职者要经过严格的评估过程，这叫做工作能力测评。因为TAT而非常出名的亨利·默里及其它人在二战期间开发出了工作能力测评法，主要是为OSS（战略服务处，中央情报局的前身）选择情报人员用的。OSS测评如我们在前几章看到过的，它依靠的是性格测试和对候选人在好几种人工设定的情形下进行的观察。战后，有些参与过OSS测评的心理学家在贝克莱的性格测评及研究学院对这种方法进行了修改，以使其适应别的目的。他们抛弃了一些只适用于间谍的条件，改为一般的条件，使测评条件适合于几十种专业，测评范围从法律学院的学生到珠穆朗马峰登山队员，从攻读MBA的候选人到获取数学学位的人不等。 可是，编制出个人评估方案，后来成了美国商业及工业用模式的，却是道格拉斯·布雷这位美国电报电话公司的心理学家。步雷出生在麻省，在克拉克大学读完了研究生，并获得了心理学硕士学位，然后于1941年参了军。他分配到航空人员服务处，进行航行心理学培训项目。他参与起草了书面测试题，心理运动技能测试，还进行了模拟活动，以筛选可以接受培训的飞行员、导航员和轰炸机驾驶员及空中炮手。 这项工作使布雷对测评产生了浓厚的兴趣。战后，他在耶鲁大学拿到了博士学位，并教了几年书，可1955年，他突然有了转机，并使他转到了自己终生的事业上面。以前的一位教授推荐他到美国电话电报公司，因为这里需要一名心理学家进行长期的人员选择研究，以选择可以承担高级经理工作的人员。当时，美国电话电报公司每年雇用约6000名大学毕业生，并从职业岗位上提拔好几千人到经理位置，了解如何选择人材当然就具有很重要的意义。 在布雷之前，这家公司挑选合格者是没有什么好办法的。步雷之后，他在一年之内组织了一班人马，设计了一种评估办法，并在圣克莱尔的密西根贝尔总部的“评估中心”进行该项培训工作（密西根贝尔是美国电话电报公司系统中第一个参与经理工作研究的公司）。在评估中心，一次进行12名管理竞选者的筛选工作，他们花3天时间进行面谈、完成一系列的认知测试工作，性格盘点、态度范围和和投影测试，并参与三种主要的行为模拟测试－领导小组讨论，商业游戏和模拟测试。这是一种个人能力测试，他们给候选人发一些记事簿、信件和请求，让他们作出决定，写出答复，并采取其它合适的措施。8位评估人，其中主要是一些心理学家，花一个星期的时间观察并评估每个组的参与者。 如在所有的纵向研究中一样，布雷评估中最困难的一部分是要等着收集证据，证明这些评估办法是正确有效的。在这些参与者评估的8年以及20年后，布雷重新进行了评估。结果说明他的评估方法非常有效。20年后，曾被评为最有希望的一些大学生中，有百分之四十三的人进入了管理层的第四级（总共六级）或者更高级别，而被评为不那么很有希望的人中，只有百分之二十的人做到了这一步。在非大学生中，评分很高的人有百分之五十八都到了第三级或更高，可是，评分不甚高的人中，只有百分之二十二的人升到了这么高的位置。 布雷的评估中心和方法也经有好几年不用了，可是，在七十年代的高速发展经济环境中，它曾风行一时。到1980年，已经出现了约1000多所评估中心；1990年已经出现了2000所。这种方法在几乎每一个工业化国家里使用着，光是日本一处就有150个中心。今天，评估可以短短在一天完成（但更多的是在两天完成），评价可以通过计算机对铅笔答卷评分而大大加快，小级练习还可以通过计算机化的录相模似环境进行模拟。 布雷作为一名应用心理学家已经得到过六项奖项，最近的一次奖项是美国心理学协会颁的，这个协会1991年给他发了“应用心理学终身成就金奖”。