Of Pups and Puzzles

This episode of John Nesbitt's long-running THE PASSING PARADE series of short subjects talks about advances in hiring practices under the current national emergency, and the techniques and personnel to administer them.

After telling us how wonderful this is, there is a bypath as first some dogs are tormented for illustrative purposes, and then three men are asked to add up columns and numbers -- only to have the tester fire off a handgun while they are working.

Fun, fun fun! We are told that all three men got jobs that suited them. I expect that's how the guy who fired a gun while other people worked got his.

Interesting short documentary about the emergence of personnel tests for screening job applicants when there was the need for massive hiring and selection for a wide variety of jobs in factories to support WWII. The film states that tests for humans were derived from psychological research with animals. An experiment showed dogs who were trained to recognize abstract symbols as precursors for food rewards, and then had varying 'emotional' reactions when they could not decipher the meaning of a novel stimulus. (thus film title, Pups and Puzzles) The film showed that if a novel stimulus is presented while humans take a personnel test, then the psychologist can determine the individual's temperament. The psychologist fired a pistol over the heads of job applicants to see if they could recover quickly from being startled and successfully conclude their math test. Certainly this method of determining 'adaptability', would not be acceptable in today's time either for research or employment testing! Personnel testing has come a long way since then! The film is crafted to be amusing for all audiences, but it is really most amusing in its historical perspective. It will be of particular interest to research psychologists and industrial/ organizational personnel specialists.

I've seen a few shorts from this era on TCM and find them fascinating windows on the past.

At least one other uses the same music. Does anyone know who did the music for this (and other) shorts and if it was the main theme of a movie from the same general era?

It is *so* familiar and gave me that "I've heard this before" vibe -- but definitely not from other shorts, but from a movie.

There's something of the Pavlov's dog to this short feature that illustrates quite amusingly that an initiative test is likely to provide a better candidate for a job than just randomly selecting one based on what they might look like. Whilst that latter technique might work better if you want a lumberjack, it's not so effective when you need a problem solver or someone who can focus when all hell is breaking loose nearby. This isn't just an analysis of how people deal with these tests, but we also see three dogs using associative theory to assess the likelihood of food coming and there's a scene stealing chimp that best combines it's wits with it's innate nimbleness to get the banana. Is this a serious documentary or is it a spoof? I don't know, but with a quickly-paced narration and some wet feet, it's worth ten minutes.

We take employee testing and psychological profiles for granted these days, but for the audiences of 60 years ago who hired people by pointing, this was informative. Information is boiled down a bit beyond any reasonable application, but what the heck--it's a short film. And it's particularly interesting to see the psychologist doing the testing get the applicants to fill out a form and then stands behind them and fires six shots in the air from a revolver to see how they react. Now that's two-fisted personnel management! :)

The film has that "industrial giant of the American century" feel to it like many similar films, but it's interesting to see for the way in which information is presented.