Abstract
In everyday life we have a pleasant experience of success in a certain result of work and an unpleasant experience of failure in another result. These experiences of success or failure, according to Ferdinand Hoppe's experimental study, depend not on the objective results of the work but on the subjective conditions of the worker himself, on what Hoppe called “Anspruchsniveau”, the transposition of which was the central problem to be solved in his work.
In this work I wished to inquire into the manner of the transposition of Anspruchsniveau as well as the manner of the outbreak of competitive attitude in a joint work, by which I mean a work done separately by two persons who aim at the same end shown by the experimenter in the same work field.
The present study comprises five experiments. In the first experiment two persons were told by the experimenter to do the following six kinds of work in a situation freest to them: 1, Picking up soybeans as many as possible. 2, Shooting a target. 3, Guessing at the number of balls in two cups. 4, Mirror-drawing. 5, Waking a verse. 6, Solving a puzzle-problem. In this experiment it was found that they did their work sometimes in competitive attitude sometimes cooperative and less frequently they behaved quite indifferently to each other.
The purpose of the second experiment was to determine whether these differences were caused by the conditions of doing a joint work or by the individual difference of character and also to see the general difference of behavior of workers in joint work and in a work done alone.
This experiment seemed to show the competitive attitude is more closely related to the character of work than that of worker.
In the third and the fourth experiments in which I used question methods I found every worker had his own view of work, his own opinion of work from the view point of value; in the other words each work was evaluated in his own way after the system of value of the worker.
The last experimemt was done in joint work its results and the transposition of “Anspruchsniveau” were shown in curve with an aid of particularly devised question methods.
Through these above mentioned experiments it was found that the competiave attitude was affected by the very “system of value” of the workers and by the relative faculties concerning the work, and the serious competition could only be seen bstween the persons who did not much differ in their faculties concerning the work which wasestimated high by both of them. In the pulling up of “Anspruchsniveau” the workers were more impatient in. the joint work than in the work done alone and in the pulling down of it the contrary is true.
The schematic expression of the manner of transposition of “Anspruchsnlveau” is shown in the text classified in three: the first is the case where two workers show faculties of almost the same level, the second where there is some distance between their faculties the third where there is an extreme difference between them.
