Selection of army personnel : development of the DSP / Charles S. Myers.

  • Charles Samuel Myers
Date:
1942?]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Selection of army personnel : development of the DSP / Charles S. Myers. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    is less need of the discovery of appropriate mental aptitudes. Apart from adequate intelligence, the essential desiderata for a good officer are qualities of character and temperament, constituting a suitable personality. The vocational psychologist has always regarded tests of personality as far less reliable than those of aptitude. He has depended rather on the interview for the assessment of such characteristics as honesty, industry, cooperativeness and sociability. Moreover, slight degrees of mental instability or other quasi - psychopathic tendencies are much less important among “ other ranks ” than among officers. In the summer of 1941, a War Office selection board (WOSB) was experi¬ mentally set up to improve the methods of assessing officer-candidates and so to reduce the numbers of men rejected from officer cadet training units with consequent waste of time, effort and expense. At this unit, during their two or three days’ stay, they were confronted by military testing officers with professional and other situations in which they had opportunities of displaying their possession or their lack of initiative, ingenuity, capacity for leadership and courage. They were also subjected to psychological tests and to various psychiatric observations, many of them initially of a tentative, experimental character. But such success was achieved, particularly by the situation tests and by the interviews with the psychiatrists, that in the following spring WOSBs were established in every command throughout the country. Their work is largely clinical; psychiatrists, psychologists, and military testing officers live with the candidates during their stay in the unit; they discuss their independently formed verdicts in the presence of the president of the board who regards them as his technical advisers in determining the acceptability of each officer - candidate and his suitability for some particular arm of the Service. * * * The director of the DSP, a professional soldier, has to be in intimate touch with those formulating the ever- changing requirements of the Army. Though seldom given sufficient notice to allow of really thorough preparation, he has had to produce adequate numbers of the best-suited men and women needed in the various arms of the Service, and to select and train an ever- increasing staff. The DSP has received the invariable support and sympathy of the present Adjutant-General. It has had to spend much time in devising or adapting tests so that they are better suited to the Army s needs than any hitherto employed in civil life for vocational guidance and selection. Some of those suggested have been adopted ; others (e.g., tests for drivers and 8hn' layers) have been rejected. The value of these tests had to be experimentally determined within the Army before they could be applied on a wide scale. Their correlations with other tests already in use has needed calculation ; “ factor analysis ” has also usually been carried out. Prom the outset the DSP has established close contact with the corresponding but considerably older depart¬ ment in the American Army, which has generously sent
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