Artistic America, Tiffany Glass and Art Nouveau by Samuel Bing (review)

Books 81 tion wherein ‘distinct functions-motor, sensory, perceptual, associative, linguistic and the like-can be assigned to distinct and definite centres or areas within the brain’, with the theory that ‘intelligence, like retentivity, is a general attribute of all cortical tissue’. I am impatient to read in some future collection of Bingham lectures an evaluation of recent reports by the Canadian psychologist, John Ertl, that he can determine general intelligence by measuringthe delay between a flash of light and the subsequent‘evokedpotential’inthe brain, picked up by electrodes fastened to the skull. I wish that along with the search for cognitive talent the National Merit Scholarship Program or some other agency would support artistic talent the way Spain discovered and rewarded Pablo Picasso. Perhaps the National Foundation on the Arts and Humanities will assume this useful function. For the artist Norman H. Mackworth‘s chapter on ‘Originality’and J. P. Guilford’s chapter on the ‘Three Faces of Intellect’may be the most interesting . Mackworth believes that ‘problem finding is more important than problem solving’and that ‘the supreme problem solvers of our day are machines’. While artistic design and musical composition by computer have their advocates, there is, surely, no serious contemporary anticipation that either of these two fields where divergent thinking is at a premium will yield to the computer. In the spirit of reductionism, Guilford presents ‘a cubical model representing the structure of intellect’. Along three mutually perpendicular axes he lists 5 operations (cognition, memory, divergent thinking, convergent thinking and evaluation), 6 products (units, classes, relations, systems, transformations and implications)and 4 contents (figural, symbolic,semanticand social) to produce 120cells. As of 1959, he claimed to have isolated some 50 of these‘factors’but, by 1965,Vernon stilldisputedthe entire concept, saying ‘a large proportion of Guilford ‘s numerous factors of intellect have failed to show any external validity’. Donald G.Paterson and Edward K. Strong consider ‘the perplexing lack of relationship between measured vocational interests on the one hand and achievement and job satisfaction on the other’. After many years in industry, I wonder why anyone should be surprised at this lack of correlation. Job satisfaction, surely, is mainly need satisfaction, such as for a good income, pleasant social relationships , a clean and quiet environment, moderate hours, easy parking and the like. The production of a product ora service,per se,seldomcan be classified as filling one of these needs unless management has somehow learned how to motivate its employees to need the satisfaction of producing many units of high quality. There is another reason why vocational interests and job satisfaction are not correlated. ‘It appears that four-fifthsof our youth aspire to high leveljobs in which only one-fifth of our labor force is employed . ...To a considerable degree, this phenomenon appearsto be dueto falsejob valuespermeat6 ing our society. ...Another important cause of occupational maladjustment is the failure of our educational system to prepare youngsters adequately and, many times, even minimally, for occupational competition upon entering the labor force. Thisresultsin a sort of wholesalenegativevocational guidance program whereby youngsters drop out of school as failures in our characteristicallyacademic types of education.’ In his chapter on ‘Diversity of Talent’, Wolfle brilliantly defends a basic proposition of democracy , ‘it is advantageous to a society to seek the greatest achievable diversity of talent . . . both within and among individuals’. We should resist the ‘forces in society that tend in the direction of homogeneity. ... the greater the ability with which we are dealing, the greater is the amount of idiosyncrasy we can tolerate’. Edwin E. Ghiselli’s chapter on ‘ManagerialTalent’will be of particular interest to those concerned with the interaction of groups in productive endeavor. The interest in this volume would be enhanced by short biographical sketches of the authors. Fortunately , the first lecture includes notes on the life of Bingham, whose widow generously established the annual lectures at Carnegie-Mellon University where Bingham founded the first American department of applied psychology and where his papers and memorabilia are preserved. Artistic America, Tiffany Glass and Art Nouveau. Samuel Bing, with an introduction by Robert Koch. The M.I.T. Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1970. Reviewed by :GabrielP. Weisberg* This is a...