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This article examines the role of technology firms in computerizing psychological tests from the 1960s to 1980s. It focuses on National Computer Systems (NCS)'s development of computer software to interpret the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory. NCS trumpeted their computerized interpretation as a way to free up clerical labor and mitigate human bias, even as psychologists cautioned that proprietary algorithms risked obscuring decision rules. Clinics, courtrooms, and businesses all had competing interests in the use of computerized personality tests. I argue that test developers promoted computerized psychological tests as technical fixes for bias, even as courts and psychologists pointed to the complex layers of technological and social mediation embedded in software programs for psychological tests. This article contributes to histories of computing emphasizing the importance of intellectual property law in software development; to the relationship between labor, technology, and expertise; and to scholarship on the history and politics of algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the impact of psychologist Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs in American management. I trace how a roster of management experts translated the hierarchy of needs into management through case studies of job redesign programs at Texas Instruments and marketing firm Young & Rubicam's management training. The hierarchy of needs resonated with management, I argue, because it seemed to offer both a concrete guide for management, with practical implications for designing management training and work structures, alongside a broader social theory that purported to explain changing social values and economic circumstances in America. For the management theorists who invoked the hierarchy of needs, the corporation served as both the prime site for people to fulfill their higher psychological needs and the ideal site to study and cultivate motivation. This article contributes to histories of psychology that show how psychology became a prominent resource in American public life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article traces the history of a popular interwar psychological test, the Humm-Wadsworth Temperament Scale (HWTS), from its development in the early 1930s to its adoption by corporate personnel departments. In popular articles, trade magazines, and academic journals, industrial psychologist Doncaster Humm and personnel manager Guy Wadsworth trumpeted their scale as a scientific measure of temperament that could ensure efficient hiring practices and harmonious labor relations by screening out "problem employees" and screening for temperamentally "normal" workers. This article demonstrates how concerns about the epistemological and scientific credibility of the HWTS were intimately entangled with concerns about its value to business at every step in the test's development. The HWTS sought to measure the emotional and social dimensions of an individual's personality so as to assess their suitability for work. The practice of temperament testing conjured a vision of the subject whose emotional and social disposition was foundational to their own capacity to find employment, and whose capacity to appropriately express, but regulate, their emotions was foundational to corporate order. The history of the HWTS offers an instructive case of how psychological tests embed social hierarchies, political claims, and economic ideals within their very theoretical and methodological foundations. Although the HWTS itself may have faded from use, the test directly inspired creators of subsequent popular personality tests, such as the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory and the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]