Applied psychology

Applied psychology is the use of psychological methods and findings of scientific psychology to solve practical problems of human and animal behavior and experience. Mental health, organizational psychology, business management, education, health, product design, ergonomics, and law are just a few of the areas that have been influenced by the application of psychological principles and findings.

Quotes

• Administration is both social engineering and applied psychology. It is apparatus and mechanics, incentives and human nature. Let no one think it is merely the former. Nowhere is the need for psychology greater than in the organization, direction, and inspiration of men working in large groups. Outstanding administrative results are produced by spirit, morale, atmosphere; these, in turn, are the product of psychological mainsprings and invigorating incentives. As Benjamin Lippincott has recognized, both governmental and business administration resolve fundamentally into the role played by effective incentives.
  • Marshall E. Dimock, "The Study of Administration." American Political Science Review 31.01 (1937): p. 30

• War has given applied psychology a tremendous impulse. This will, on the whole, do good, for psychology, which is the largest and last of the sciences, must not try to be too pure.
  • G. Stanley Hall (1919); Cited in O'Donnell, John M. "The crisis of experimentalism in the 1920s: EG Boring and his uses of history." American Psychologist 34.4 (1979). p. 290

• It is in applied psychology, if anywhere, that today we should be modest and grant validity to a number of apparently contradictory opinions; for we are still far from having anything like a thorough knowledge of the human psyche, that most challenging field of scientific enquiry. For the present we have merely more or less plausible opinions that defy reconciliation.
  • Carl Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul (1933), p. 57

• Applied psychology can... speak the language of an exact science ill its own field, independent of economic opinions and debatable partisan interests.
  • Hugo Münsterberg. Psychology and Industrial Efficiency, 1913