Psychologists must sometimes find new depths of cleverness and gumption when they confront a new kind of problem. A historic example of this is Jackson and Schoenfeld’s attack on the question of deodorants. Details are in their study:
“Experimental and Statistical Analysis of the Effectiveness of Deodorant Creams,” T.A. Jackson, E.A. Jerome, and N. Schoenfeld, Journal of Applied Psychology, vol. 26, no. 3, 1942, pp. 308-315. The authors explain:
PROBLEMS in applied psychology are frequently baffling to the experimentalist because the methods at his command are not suitable. In many cases a new approach must be developed or an old one modified considerably. Something of this type of difficulty was met in the present attempt to determine the relative effectiveness of deodorant creams. Many tentative approaches were discarded before arriving at the method described in this article….
The program of experimentation for a particular “worker” consisted in: (1) (Preliminary) Working twenty minutes for three days on the exercycle to get herself in condition for the experiment proper. (2) “Working for another three days. On each of these days thirty minutes before the exercising was begun a deodorant cream was applied to one armpit….
The first method considered for estimating the intensity of the odor sample was the one used by Zwaardemaker This was discarded because of the difficulty of preparing the stimulus cylinders The Elsberg blast-injection technique was next tried but it too was rejected because in a preliminary try-out of the method it was found that with perspiration odors, large volumes of air had to be injected under high pressure before the odor could be detected The method we finally adopted was the “stream” injection technique which Elsberg employed to induce sensory adaptation This method allows of injection of large volumes of air under low pressure, and seems especially useful for weak stimuli such as those involved in this work. The stimuli to be judged were gauze pads saturated with perspiration…