| Summary: | "The present book, by one of the most energetic of these applied psychologists, is in many ways a monument to the advancing spirit of science in business. Its author has been for many years actively engaged in teaching, research, and consultation in the special field of which the book treats. Many of his own investigations, heretofore known only to the readers of technical journals, are here assembled. With these are to be found, in systematic arrangement, and with their interpretation lucidly presented, many significant results from the studies of other workers. Such experimental findings, vividly illustrated, and related, as they here are, to the general principles of human nature and to the concrete problems of advertising, constitute a lively picture of the progress of the psychology of advertising and its contemporary status. Earlier writers who attempted to present the psychological principles involved in advertising and selling were impelled to delete such words as "science," "mental," and "psychology" from their vocabularies. The old-fashioned business man shied from these words as he did from suggested investments in flying machines, wireless communication, moving pictures, and horseless carriages. Today's stock exchange list shows that there are more things in science than our progenitors even dreamed of. And today the scientific psychologist need not blush at the name of his specialty. Instead, his outstanding solicitude is the task of educating the business man to discriminate between the pirates who fly the word "psychology" at their masthead and the genuine expert who undertakes to dig out sober fact from the mines of data and communicate it in the form of law and verifiable conclusion. The present volume, presenting, with accuracy and inviting form, the authentic knowledge and the current methods of the psychology of advertising, fills several long-felt needs. It assembles for the student, the teacher, and the practicing advertiser many scattered contributions. It sets these in a frame of general mental laws and tendencies, thus bringing up to date and aptly illustrating the established principles of one important field of the astonishingly complex art of publicity. Finally, its detailed exposition of the technique of investigation and analysis should give new impetus and suggest new problems to those whose privilege it will be to push still further the adaptation of our knowledge of our nature to the satisfaction of our needs"--F. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2005 APA, all rights reserved).
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