The Test at Station S

As the 18 men clambered out of a truck, they were properly bewildered. They didn't know exactly where they were, or why. They only knew that they had volunteered for "dangerous and hazardous" duty. They did not know that some of them would soon be guerrilla leaders in the Burma jungles, social scientists in London, bridge dynamiters or underground agents in some enemy-occupied city. This comfortable country estate, some 40 minutes out of Washington in the gently rolling Virginia hills, did not look hazardous. The 18 men did not know that it was the Office of Strategic Services' Station S where this first group of recruits (in December 1943) would be scientifically sized up and assigned to duty.

The candidates for Station S--and for six other "assessment centers" eventually set up by OSS in the U.S. and the Far East-- were carefully selected from the Army, Navy and Marine Corps, both officers and enlisted men, and some from civilian life. The volunteers were delivered to Station S in groups of 18. In anonymous fatigue clothes, and using fictitious names, they spent three days being observed, studied and tested. They lived and worked with each other and with the station staff -- seven top-flight psychologists, psychiatrists and sociologists, assisted by eight psychology students.

Assuming that practically no one works alone, the examiners tried to uncover each candidate's character and capabilities as a member of a group. Some of the techniques for this odd vocational guidance experiment were borrowed from the British War Office Selection Board; others were developed on the spot.

The psychologists, making good use of a rare opportunity for laboratory study of normal, intelligent men, believe that the method they developed for appraising candidates could be usefully applied to candidates for responsible; social and administrative jobs. Possible applications: Annapolis and West Point candidates, State Department career men, foreign representatives of business firms.

Some of the tests used at Station S:

P: The candidate was told to assume that he had been caught riffling through secret files in a government office; in ten minutes he would be grilled for an explanation. Then, facing a spotlight in a dark cellar room, he got an expert crossexamination.

P: A group of six men sitting around a table were told to discuss the chief problems confronting the U.S. after the war. At the end of half an hour, they were to appoint a chairman to summarize their conclusions. The vital questions: who would contribute the best ideas? Who would become the leaders as the discussion developed?

P: A candidate was given a pile of construction material. With the help of two assistants, he was to complete a structure within ten minutes. The two "helpers" were stumblebum stooges, master tacticians at noncooperation and delay. What the psychiatrists wanted to see: how the candidate reacted to frustration.

Of the 5,500 men & women tested at three centers in the U.S., 20% were not recommended for overseas duty. The records of those who went abroad are not yet complete, but on the basis of the first 300 cases reported, only six out of every 100 proved unsatisfactory. Only one was a psychoneurotic.

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