MYERS, Charles Samuel

Myers was a pioneering psychologist and founder of the National Institute of Industrial Psychology. He is widely credited as the founding father of industrial psychology in Britain. 

Myers was born in London on 13 March 1873, the son of a merchant. He was educated the City of London School and then Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, where he received first-class honours in the natural sciences tripos in 1893 and again in 1895. He received an MB degree from St Bartholomew’s Hospital, London before joining the Cambridge anthropological expedition to New Guinea and Borneo in 1898-9. Another member of the expedition was Myers’s future Cambridge colleague the psychologist W.H.R. Rivers. 

Returning to England, Myers served briefly as a house doctor at St Bartholomew’s before going to Egypt in 1900-02, ostensibly for his health. In fact, he seems to have spent most of his time in Egypt conducting medical research, and he received his doctorate in medicine from Gonville and Caius in 1901. In 1902 he returned to Cambridge where he joined Rivers as a lecturer in psychology. In 1912 Myers set up the Cambridge Laboratory of Experimental Psychology, serving as its director until 1930. From 1906-09 he was also professor of psychology at King’s College, London. He married Edith Seligman in 1904. 

During the First World War Myers, like Rivers, was much involved in treating soldiers who had suffered psychological trauma. In 1915 he joined the Royal Army Medical Corps, and in 1916 was appointed consultant psychologist to the British army in France. He spent much of the war trying to persuade the army high command to take a more humane view of shell-shock victims. Following the war Myers returned to Cambridge where he transferred his interest to the new and emerging field of industrial psychology. In 1918 he joined he Industrial Fatigue Research Board, and in 1919 organised a summer school on industrial administration at Cambridge; T.H. Pear and E.M. Wrong, both future Rowntree Conference speakers, were among the lecturers. The collected lectures from this summer school were published as Lectures on Industrial Administration, edited by Myers’s fellow Cambridge psychologist Bernard Muscio. 

Becoming dissatisfied with the arid academic atmosphere of Cambridge, Myers turned increasingly towards practical applied psychology. In 1921, with support from the businessman H.J. Welch, Myers founded the National Institute of Industrial Psychology. He left Cambridge the following year (though he remained director of the Cambridge Laboratory) and moved to London, becoming the Institute’s full-time director.  

Myers was also one of the founding members of the Psychological Society, later the British Psychological Society, and was president of the society from 1920-23. In 1920 also he helped to establish the scientific journal Discovery. From 1911-24 he was editor of the British Journal of Psychology. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1915, and received the CBE in 1919 in recognition of his war-time work. He received honorary doctorates from the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Calcutta and the University of Manchester. He died at Minehead, Somerset on 12 October 1346. 

Most biographers of Myers concentrate on his earlier experimental work and his wartime work with shell-shock victims; he is often mentioned in the same breath as Rivers. His later work in industrial psychology is treated rather casually, as a later ‘interest’ on which Myers decided to concentrate to the detriment of his experimental work. Lyndall Urwick, who knew Myers well, takes rather a different view: 

While he had given full weight to the specialized techniques which psychology could contribute to management in such fields as vocational selection and training, he did not restrict the claims of industrial psychology to narrow confines. Industrial psychology in his view was the means by which the whole process of management could be thought through in order to take its rightful place as a social science… In his earlier years he had helped to take psychology from the lecture-room to the laboratory. In his later career he took if from the laboratory into the manager’s office and on to the factory floor. 

(Urwick 1956: 165-6) 

Certainly Myers himself took the subject of industrial psychology very seriously, and as Urwick says, he was a student – though a critical one – of the scientific management movement, especially the work of Frederick W. Taylor and Frank and Lillian Gilbreth (the latter also had a doctorate in psychology). Apart from his wartime writings on shell-shock, two early textbooks on psychology and the later collection of essays, In the Realm of the Mind, most of his mature work was on industrial psychology. Although he looked closely at issues such as industrial fatigue – a subject which was then receiving widespread attention on both sides of the Atlantic as abuses of scientific management began to become manifest – Myers was also attempting to look deeper into what we would now call behaviour at work, by both workers and managers.  

His best book is probably Mind and Work from 1921, a short, part-scientific and part-philosophical study of how work affects the mind, and vice versa. Industrial Psychology in Great Britain describes the current state of research and thinking, and Industrial Psychology of 1928 is an excellent collection of essays. Business Rationalization discusses scientific management and restates some of Myers’s early critiques. 

His Rowntree lecture, delivered as Myers was on the cusp of moving ‘out of the laboratory and into the field of everyday life’, is as much a manifesto as it is a lecture on psychology. He begins by discussing the proposed National Institute of Industrial Psychology and describes his vision of what the institute will achieve. The time has come, he says, to apply the principles of science in the workplace in order to resolve some of the problems that have arisen there.  

As an illustration, he offers a critique of scientific management. 

I have no hesitation in saying that scientific management has hitherto consisted largely in the application of scientific methods to industry in the absence of psychological principles. The result of that has been that the workers have become suspicious of the whole movement. They have feared undue speeding up, and unfair cutting of the piece rate; they have thought that the object merely in view was increased profit for the employers; they have been afraid of the de-humanisation of labour, and also an increase of unemployment. 

None of this would have happened, says Myers, had the principles of psychology been put into effect. Thus far, scientific management has aimed at what he calls ‘low-level’ efficiency, treating workers as if they were machines. But today’s better educated, more self-aware worker will not accept such treatment, says Myers. The true goal of scientific management should be mental efficiency. 

In place of discipline and driving workers, Myers says, the goal now should be to achieve a full understanding of what he calls ‘the human factor’. To achieve this, factories and workplaces need to employ industrial psychologists, independent experts who can judge the morale and mental efficiency of the workforce and make recommendations on how to improve them. He discusses factors such as proper lighting, reduction in monotony, better training for the workers themselves and other issues which would later be taken up by the human relations movement.  

Returning to the role of the industrial psychologist, Myers describes him as a kind of referee, whose impartial recommendations on everything from wages to production methods will help improve both the efficiency of the plant and the welfare of the workers. As already noted, this paper is a kind of manifesto for the industrial psychology movement, and as such deserves to be more widely considered by historians of industrial psychology and the human relations school. 

Major works 

Text-Book of Experimental Psychology, 1909. 

Introduction to Experimental Psychology, 1911. 

‘A Contribution to the Study of Shell-Shock’, 1915. 

Present-Day Applications of Psychology, 1919. 

Mind and Work: The Psychological Factors in Industry and Commerce, 1921. 

Industrial Psychology in Great Britain, 1925. 

Industrial Psychology, 1929. 

Business Rationalization, 1932. 

(with H.J. Welch) Ten Years of Industrial Psychology. 

In the Realm of the Mind, 1937. 

Bartlett, F.C., ‘Myers, Charles Samuel’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. 

Obituary notice, The Times, 14 October 1946. 

Murchison, C.A., A History of Psychology in Autobiography, New York: Russell & Russell, 1961. 

Muscio, B. (ed.) Lectures on Industrial Administration, London: Pitman, 1920. 

Pear, T.H., ‘Charles Samuel Myers’, The American Journal of Psychology 60, pp. 289-96, 1947. 

Urwick, L.F., The Golden Book of Management, London: Newman Neame, 1956.