โ Scribed by W.T. Singleton
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
This is very much an American book: only in America have experiments on this scale been conducted; only Americans write books of this size. No other country has had the resources or the temperament for this sort of human factors work. In Europe we have managed to restrict such lavish experimentation to the physicists and we are now getting them under better control.
In external appearance the book is not unduly large but, using thin paper and small print, it runs to nearly halfa million words. In biblical terms this is a good deal longer than the New Testament but shorter than the Old Testament. The author is a former president of the Human Factors Society. In the course of his career in this field, which began immediately after World War I/, he moved around a considerable number of American universities and consultant corporations. As he points out, there was an enormous investment in this kind of experiment but it is not easily accessible in the literature because reports were usually produced rather than published and for some years after the work was done they often remained classified. He has done us all a service by acquiring and assimilating all this material and putting it between two covers (there are about 600 references) together with his own assessment of what it amounts to. His acknowledgements suggests that he has, on particular projects, sought the help of senior psychologists who were personally involved. His judgements are not inhibited, on pp. 508-9 he baldly names the projects he considers were successful, those which had "unknown effects" and those which "stand out for their failure of accomplishment".
The book begins with an interesting account of the origins of this kind of work. It all started with the design of the Combat Information Centres which themselves were introduced into the American Navy as a consequence of the development of radar. These set the basic problem, a vast input of information which had to be received, processed and used for decision making by a group of men working as a team. The shift of such centres into aircraft to improve the effective range (Airborne Early Warning Systems) increased the human factors problems of presentation of information about remote events to a decision-making group.
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