Review of Assessment of men: Selection of personnel for the office of strategic services

Abstract

Reviews the book, Assessment of men: Selection of personnel for the office of strategic services by the OSS Assessment Staff (1948). Whereas World War I produced one military personnel program in which psychologists played a crucial part, World War II produced four major and at least as many minor programs. Those of the Army Air Forces and of the Navy's Bureau of Personnel have been described in detail in volumes edited by Flanagan and his collaborators and by Stuit and his associates; the work of the psychologists in the Adjutant General's Office of the Army and in the Navy's Aviation Psychology Section of the Bureau of Medicine and Surgery has been described in scattered papers in the professional journals. And now Donald Fiske, Eugenia Hanfmann, Donald MacKinnon, James Miller, Henry Murray and others have made available in this volume a detailed account of the philosophy, methods, and results of the personnel selection program of the Office of Strategic Services. This volume is as distinctive in literary style and as easy to read as any treatise by specialists in fantasy should be; it is as full of insights into personality structure and measurement as one would hope from personologists and clinicians; and it reveals the quick grasp of practical matters which was demonstrated time and again during World War II by academic and laboratory psychologists who turned to the practice of psychology. This is a valuable book, worthy of careful study by students of personality and by students of man at work. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)