A Study of Compensation

Although pages have been written in psychological text books on compensation, a survey of the literature shows an extremely meagre amount of experimental data. The present study is an attempt to formulate some of the problems of compensation into experimental form. Forty subjects were given a series of laboratory tests in which accuracy and speed were compared under normal conditions and under conditions of distraction. Thirty-one of the same subjects were given a written test of the questionnaire type which was divided into three arbitrary categories; traffic compensation (T), social compensation (S), and industry or ambition (I). The following correlations were obtained: rST + .210, rSI - .221, rTI + .309. There was no significant correlation between grade discrepancies as a measure of compensation and laboratory or written-test measures of compensation. The latter two correlated + .12 which was not as high as intercorrelations between categories of the written test. The tentative conclusion is that compensation is a more or less specific function. Further data are being obtained