reading matter and advertisements on the same page.
In the good old times a monthly magazine like M c-
Clure's or the American or the Metropolitan or the
Cosmopolitan showed an arrangement which allowed a
double interpretation. One interpretation, the ideal-
istic one, was that the magazine consisted of articles
and stories in solid unity, which formed the bulk of the
issue. In front of this content, and after it, pages with
advertisements were attached. The other interpreta-
tion, which suggested itself to the less ambitious reader,
was that the magazine consisted of a heap of entertain-

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PSYCHOLOGY AND SOCIAL SANITY
ing advertisement pages, between which the read-
ing matter was sandwiched. But in any case there
was nowhere mutual interference. The articles stood
alone, and the automobiles, crackers, cameras, and other
wares stood alone, too. All this has been completely
changed in the last two or three years. With a few
remarkable exceptions like the Atlantic Monthly, the
World's Work, and the Century, the overwhelming ma-
jority of the monthly and weekly papers have gone over
to a system by which the tail of the stories and articles
winds itself through the advertisement pages, and all
the advertising sheets are riddled by stray pieces of
reading matter. The immediate purpose is of course
evident. If the last dramatic part of the story sud-
denly stops on page 15 and is continued on page 76,
between the announcements of breakfast food and a
new garter, the publisher, or rather the advertiser,
hopes, and the publisher does not dare to contradict,
that some of the emotional interest and excitement will
flow over from the loving pair to the advertised articles.
The innocent reader is skilfully to be guided into the
advertiser's paradise.

We claimed that here the economic innovation,
whether profitable or not, has its cultural significance.
The sociologists who have thought seriously about the
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SOCIAL SINS IN ADVERTISING

American type of civilization have practically agreed
in the conviction that the shortcoming of the American
mind lies in its lack of desire for harmony and unity.
It is an aesthetic deficiency which counts not only where
art and artificial beauty are in question, but shows still
more in the practical surroundings and the forms of life.
The nation which is and always has been controlled by
strong idealistic moral impulses takes small care of the
aesthetic ideals. The large expenditures for external
beautification must not deceive. Just as the theatre is
to the American essentially entertainment and amuse-
ment and fashion, but least of all a life need for great
art, so on the whole background of daily life a thou-
sand motives show themselves more effectively than
the longing for inner unity and beautiful fitness. The
masses who waste their incomes for beautiful clothes,
not because they are beautiful, but because they are
demanded by the fashion, patiently tolerate the dirt
in the streets, the crowding of cars, the chewing of
gum, the vulgar slang in speech, and shirt-sleeve
manners. But this undeveloped state of the sense of
inner harmony has effects far beyond the mere outer
appearances. The hysterical excitement in politics, the
traditional indifference to corruption and crime up to
the point where they become intolerable, the bewilder-

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PSYCHOLOGY AND SOCIAL SANITY
ing mixture of highest desire for education and cheapest
faith in superstitions and mysticism and quacks, all
must result from a social mind in which the aesthetic
demand for harmony and proportion is insufficiently
developed. The one great need of the land is a sys-
tematic cultivation of this aesthetic spirit of unity. It
cannot be forced on the millions by any sudden and
radical procedures. The steady, cumulating influences
of the whole atmosphere of civic life must lead to a
slow but persistent change. Fortunately, many such
helpful agencies are at work. Not only the systematic
moulding of the child's mind by art instruction, and
of the citizen's mind by beautiful public buildings, but
a thousand features of the day aid in bringing charm
and melody to the average man.

Seen from this point of view the new fashion in the
makeup of the periodical literature is a barbaric and
inexcusable interference with the process of aesthetic
education. A page on which advertisements and read-
ing matter are mixed is a mess which irritates and hurts
a mind of fine aesthetic sensitiveness, but which in the
uncultivated mind must ruin any budding desire for
subtler harmony. The noises of the street, with all the
whistles of the factories and the horns of the motor
cars, are bad enough, and the antinoise crusade is quite
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SOCIAL SINS IN ADVERTISING

in order. Yet the destructive influence of those chaotic
sounds is far weaker than the shrillness and restlessness
of these modern specimens of so-called literature. The
mind is tossed up and down and is torn hither and
thither, following now a column of text while the adver-
tisements are pushing in from both sides, and then read-
ing the latest advertisement while the serious text
is drawing the attention. It is the quantity which
counts. The popular magazines which circulate in a
million copies and reach two or three million minds are
the loudest preachers of this sermon of bewilderment
and scramble. A consciousness on which these tu-
multuous pages hammer day by day must lose the sub-
tler sense of proportionate harmony and must develop
an instinctive desire for harshness and crudeness and
chaos. To overcome this riot of the printing press is
thus a truly cultural task, and yet it is evident that the
mere appeal to the cultural instinct will not change
anything as long as the publisher and, above all, the
advertiser, are convinced that they would have to sac-
rifice their personal profit in the interest of aesthetic
education. If an end is to be hoped for, it can be expected
only if it is discovered that the calculation of profit is
erroneous, too. But this is after all a question of naked
facts, and only the scientific examination can decide.

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PSYCHOLOGY AND SOCIAL SANITY
The problem might be approached from various
sides. It was only meant as a first effort when I car-
ried on the following experiment: I had a portfolio
with twenty-four large bristol-board cards of the size
of the Saturday Evening Post. On eight of those cards
I had pasted four different advertisements, each filling
a fourth of a page. On some pages every one of the
four advertisements took one of four whole columns;
in other cases the page was divided into an upper and
lower, right and left part. All the advertisements were
cut from magazines, and in all the name of the firm and
the object to be sold could be easily recognized. On
the sixteen other pages the arrangement was different.
There only two fourths of the page were filled by two
advertisements; the other two fourths contained funny
pictures with a few words below. These pictures were
cut from comic papers. All the pictures were of such
a kind that they slightly attracted the attention by
their amusing content or by the cleverness of the draw-
ing, but never demanded any careful inspection or any
delay by the reading of the text. This, in most cases,
consisted of a few title words like "The Widow's Might,"
"Pause, father, is that whip sterilized?" or similar
easily grasped descriptions of the story in the picture.
Even where the text took two lines, it was more easy
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SOCIAL SINS IN ADVERTISING

to apperceive the picture and its description than the
essentials of the often rather chaotic advertisements.
By this arrangement we evidently had thirty-two adver-
tisements on the eight pages which contained nothing
else, and thirty-two other advertisements on the sixteen
pages which contained hah* propaganda and hah* pic-
tures with text. All this material was used as a basis
for the following test, in which forty-seven adult persons
participated. All were members of advanced psycho-
logical courses, partly men, partly women. None of
those engaged in the experiment knew anything about
the purpose beforehand. Thus they had no theories,
and I carefully avoided any suggestion which might
have drawn the attention in one or another direction.

Every one had to go through those twenty-four pages
in twelve minutes, devoting exactly thirty seconds to
every page, and a signal marked the time when he had
to pass to the next. He was to give his attention to
the whole content of the page, and as both the pictures
and the advertisements were chosen with reference to
their being easily understood and quickly grasped, an
average time of more than seven seconds for each of
the four offerings on the page was ample, even for the
slow reader. Of course the time would not have been
sufficient to read every detail in the advertisements,

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PSYCHOLOGY AND SOCIAL SANITY
but no one had any interest in doing so, as they were
instructed beforehand to keep in mind essentially the
advertised article and the firm, and in the case of the
pictures a general impression of the idea.

As soon as the twenty-four pages had been seen,
every one was asked to write down the ideas of five of
the funny pictures within three minutes. The results
of this were of no consequence, as the purpose was only
to fill the interval of the three minutes in order that all
the memory pictures of the advertisements might settle
down in the mind and that all might have an equal chance
If we had turned immediately to the writing down of
firms and articles, the last ones seen would have had
an undue advantage. But when the three minutes had
been filled with an effort to remember some of the funny
pictures and to write down their salient points, all the
mental after-images of the pages had faded away, and a
true memory picture was to be produced. In the pres-
entation care was taken to have the twenty-four pages
follow in irregular order, the pages of straight advertis-
ing mixed with those of the double content. After
the three minutes every one had to write down as many
names of firms with the articles as his memory could re-
produce. The time was now unlimited. Nothing else
was to be added; the reference to the particular adver-
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SOCIAL SINS IN ADVERTISING

tisement was entirely confined to the firm and the
object. Where they knew the firm name without the
object, or the article without the advertiser, they had
to make a dash to indicate the omission. The aim was to
discover whether the thirty-two advertisements on the
mixed pages had equal chances in the mind with the
thirty-two on the straight advertisement pages. In
order to have an exact basis of comparison, we counted
every name 1, and every article 1. Thus when firm
and object were correctly given it was counted 2.

Of course there were very great individual differences.
It is evident that a person who would have remembered
all the sixty -four advertisements on this basis of cal-
culation would have made 128 points. The maximum
which was actually made was in the case of two women,
each of whom reached 50 points. One man reached 49.
The lowest limit was touched in the exceptional case
of one woman who made only 11 points. The average
was 28.4. These figures seem small, considering that
less than a fourth were kept in mind, and even by the
best memory less than a half, but it must be considered
that in the modern style of advertisement the memory
is burdened with many side features of the announce-
ment, and that the result is therefore smaller than if
name and article had been memorized in an isolated
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[ PSYCHOLOGY AND SOCIAL SANITY
form. But these figures have no relation to our real
problem. We wanted to compare the memory fate
of the advertisements on the one kind of pages with
that of the parallel advertisements on the other land.
As soon as we separate the two kinds of reproduced
material we find as total result that the forty-seven
persons summed up 570 points for the advertisements
on pages with comic pictures, but 771 for the advertise-
ments on pages which contained nothing else. The
average individual thus remembered about six whole
advertisements out of the thirty-two on the combined
pages, and about eight and a fifth of the thirty-two on
the straight pages. Among the forty-seven persons,
there were thirty-six who remembered the straight-page
notices distinctly better than the mixed-page advertise-
ments, and only eleven of the forty-seven showed a
slight advantage in favour of the mixed pages. In the
case of the men this difference is distinctly greater than
in the case of the women. Only two of the fifteen men
who participated showed better reproducing power for
the mixed material, while nine of the thirty-two women
favoured it. As the advertiser is not interested in the
chance variations and exceptional cases among the
reading public, but naturally must rely on the averages,
the results show clearly that the propaganda made on



SOCIAL SINS IN ADVERTISING

pages which do not contain anything but advertise-
ments has more than a third greater chances, as the
relation was that of 6 to 8.2.

The result is hardly surprising. We recognized that
the conditions for the apprehension of the special
advertisements are in themselves equally favourable
for both groups. As the pictures were very easily
grasped, it may even be said that there was more time
left for the study of the advertisements on the mixed
pages, and yet the experiment showed that they had a
distinct disadvantage. The self-observation of the ex-
perimenters leaves hardly any doubt that the cause
for this lies in the different attitude which the mixed
pages demand from the reader. The mental setting
with which those pictures or the written matter is
observed, is fundamentally different from that which
those propaganda notices demand. If the mind is
adjusted to the pleasure of reading for its information
and enjoyment, it is not prepared for the fullest appre-
hension of an advertisement as such. The attention
for the notice on the same page remains shallow as long
as the entirely different kind of text reaches the side
parts of the eye. On those pages, on the other hand,
which contain announcements only, a uniform setting
of the mind prepared the way for their fullest effective-

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PSYCHOLOGY AND SOCIAL SANITY
ness. The average reader who glances over the pages
of the magazines is not clearly aware of these psy-
chological conditions, and yet that feeling of irritation
which results from the mixing of reading matter and
propaganda on the same page is a clear symptom of this
mental reaction. The mere fact that both the adver-
tisements and stories or anecdotes or pictures are seen
in black and white by the retina of the eye, and are in
the same way producing the ideas of words and forms
in the mind, does not involve the real psychological
effect being the same. The identical words read as a
matter of information in an instructive text, and read
as an argument to the customer in a piece of propaganda,
set entirely different mental mechanisms in motion.
The picture of a girl seen with the understanding that it
is the actress of the latest success, or seen with the
understanding that it is an advertisement for a toilet
preparation, starts in the whole psychophysical system
different kinds of activities, which mutually inhibit
each other. If we anticipate the one form of inner
reaction, we make ourselves unfit for the opposite.

An interesting light falls on the situation from experi-
ments which have recently been carried on by a Swed-
ish psychologist. He showed that in every learning
process the intention with which we absorb the memory
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SOCIAL SINS IN ADVERTISING

material is decisive for the firmness with which it sticks
to our mind. If a boy learns one group of names or
figures or verses with the intention to keep them in
mind forever, and learns another group of the same
kind of material with the same effort and by the same
method, but with the intention to have them present
for a certain test the next day, the mental effect is
very different. Immediately after the learning, or on
the morning of the next day, he has both groups equally
firmly in his mind, but three days later most of what
was learned to be kept is still present. On the other
hand, those verses and dates which were learned with
the consciousness that they had to serve the next day
have essentially faded away when the time of the test
has passed, even if the test itself was not given. Every
lawyer knows from his experience how easily he forgets
the details of the case which has once been settled by
the court, as he has absorbed the material only for the
purpose of having it present up to the end of the pro-
cedure. These Swedish experiments have given a cue
to further investigations, and everything seems to con-
firm this view. It brings out in a very significant way
that the impressions which are made on our mind from
without are in their effectiveness on the mind entirely
dependent upon the subjective attitude, and the idea

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PSYCHOLOGY AND SOCIAL SANITY
that the same visual stimuli stir up the same mental
reactions is entirely misleading. The attitude of read-
ing and the attitude of looking at advertisements are
so fundamentally different that the whole mental mech-
anism is in a different setting.

The result is that whenever we are in the reading
attitude, we cannot take the real advertising effect out
of the pictures and notices which are to draw us to the
consumption of special articles. The editor who forces
his wisdom into the propaganda page is hurting the
advertiser, who, after all, pays for nothing else but the
opportunity to make a certain psychological impression
on the reader. He gets a third more of this effect for
which he has to pay so highly if he can have his adver-
tisement on a clean sheet which brings the whole mind
into that willing attitude to receive suggestions for buy-
ing only. It is most probable that the particular form
of the experiment here reported makes this difference
between advertising pages with and without reading
matter much smaller than it is in the actual perusal of
magazines, as we forced the attention of the individual
on every page for an equal time. In the leisurely
method of going through the magazine the interfering
effect of the editorial part would be still greater. Com-
pared with this antagonism of mental setting, it means
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SOCIAL SINS IN ADVERTISING

rather little that these scattered pieces of text induce
the reader to open the advertisement. If we were
really of that austere intellect which consistently sticks
to that which is editorially backed, we should ignore
the advertisements, even if they were crowded into the
same page. They might reach our eye, but they would
not touch our mind. Yet there is hardly any fear that
the average American reader will indulge in such sever-
ity of taste. He is quite willing to yield to the temp-
tation of the advertising gossip with its minimum re-
quirement of intellectual energy for its consumption.
He will therefore just as readily turn from the articles
to the advertisements if they are separated into two
distinct parts. Frequent observations in the Pullman
cars suggested to me rather early the belief that these
advertisement parts in the front and the rear of the
magazine were the preferred regions between the two
covers.

Just as the great public habitually prefers the light
comedy and operetta to the theatre performances of
high aesthetic intent, it moves instinctively to those
printed pages on which a slight appeal to the imagina-
tion is made without any claim on serious thought. It
is indeed a pleasant tickling of the imagination, this
leisurely enjoyment of looking over all those picturesque

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PSYCHOLOGY AND SOCIAL SANITY
announcements; it is like passing along the street with
its shopwindows in all their lustre and glamour. But
this soft and inane pleasure has been crushed by the
arrangement after to-day's fashion. Those pages on
which advertising and articles are mixed helterskelter
do not allow the undisturbed mood. It is as if we con-
stantly had to alternate between lazy strolling and
energetic running. Thus the chances are that the old
attractiveness of the traditional advertising part has
disappeared. While those broken ends of the articles
may lead the reader unwillingly to the advertisement
pages, he will no longer feel tempted by his own in-
stincts to seek those regions of restlessness; and if he is
of more subtle sensitiveness, the irritation may take
the stronger form, and he may throw away the whole
magazine, advertisement and text together. The final
outcome, then, must be disadvantageous to publisher
and advertiser alike. The publisher and the editor
have certainly never yielded to this craving of the
advertiser for a place on the reading page without a
feeling of revolt. Commercialism has forced them to
submit and to make their orderly issues places of dis-
order and chaos. The advertisers have rushed into this
scheme without a suspicion that it is a trap. The ex-
periments have proved that they are simply injuring
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SOCIAL SINS IN ADVERTISING

themselves. As soon as this is widely recognized, a
countermovement ought to start. We ought again to
have the treasures of our magazines divided into a
straight editorial and a clean advertisement part.
The advertisers will profit from it in dollars and cents
through the much greater psychological effectiveness of
their announcements, the editors will be the gainers
by being able to present a harmonious, sympathetic,
restful magazine, and the great public will be blessed
by the removal of one of the most malicious nerve ir-
ritants and persistent destroyers of mental unity.



[249]



THE MIND OF THE INVESTOR



VIII
THE MIND OF THE INVESTOR

THE psychologist who tries to disentangle the inter-
play of human motives finds hardly a problem for his
art to solve when he approaches the conscientious in-
vestor. His work has brought him savings, and his
savings are to work for him. Hence they must not lie
idle, and in the complicated market, with its chaotic
offerings, he knows what he has to do. He seeks the
advice of the expert, and under this guidance, he buys
that which combines great safety with a fair income.
The intellectual and emotional processes which here
take control of the will and of the decision are perfectly
clear and simple, and the mental analysis offers not
the least difficulty. The fundamental instincts of man
on the background of modern economic conditions must
lead to such rational and recommendable behaviour.
A psychological problem appears only when such a
course of wisdom is abandoned, and either the savings
are hidden away instead of being made productive, or



PSYCHOLOGY AND SOCIAL SANITY
are thrown away in wildcat schemes. Yet of the two
extremes the first again is easily understood. A hys-
teric fear of possible loss, an unreasonable distrust of
banks and bankers, keeps the overcautious away from
the market. But while such a state of mind is said to
be frequent in countries in which the economic life is
disorderly, enterprising Americans seldom suffer from
this ailment, and even the theoretical doctrine that it
is sinful to have capital working seems not to have
affected practically those who have the capital at their
disposal. The specific American case is the opposite
one, and with regard to those reckless investors it seems
less clear what psychological conditions lie at the bot-
tom of their rashness.

Foreign visitors have indeed often noticed with sur-
prise that the American public, in spite of its cleverness
and its practical trend and its commercial instinct, is
more ready to throw its money into speculative abysses
than the people of other lands. What is the reason?
Those observers from abroad are usually satisfied with
the natural answer that the Americans are gamblers,
or that they have an indomitable desire for capturing
money without working. But the students of com-
parative sociology cannot forget the fact that many
national institutions and customs of other lands sug-
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THE MIND OF THE INVESTOR

gest that the blame might with much more justice be
directed against the other party. America prohibits
lotteries, while lotteries are flourishing on the European
continent. The Austrians, Italians, and Spaniards are
slaves to lotteries, and even in sober Germany the