When war came to the United States, Bingham was recruited by Robert Yerkes as a member of a small group that developed the Army Alpha and Beta tests.
He looked at problems with monotony, attention and fatigue, physical and social influences on the working power, the effects of advertising, and the future development of economic psychology.
In 1915, after serving as an assistant professor at Dartmouth College, he was invited to Carnegie Institute of Technology to create a unit that would use psychology to help students with career choices.
[1] While at Carnegie he embarked on his pioneering venture of using psychology as a tool to help clarify the problems of some of the large industries in the Pittsburgh area.
At the same time, with the founding of a division of applied psychology, he endeavored to provide instruction for students planning careers in industrial management and other fields where success depended in some measure on the ability to understand and influence people.
The final forms of the Army Alpha and Beta tests were published in January 1919, and by the end of the war they had been administered to approximately two million men.
[2] Bingham spent the years after the First World War writing books and articles emphasizing the civilian applications of the testing procedures he helped develop for the Army.
The onslaught of World War II brought a new position as Chief psychologist in the Army Adjutant General's office to Bingham.
[10] As applied and industrial psychology grew in prominence, Bingham became focused on the measurement of the abilities of able and brilliant students and the early identification of the gifted.
[11] Bingham's works have been widely used and his research established training in applied psychology as a respectable and common part of the curriculum at institutions of higher learning.
Additionally, his hope that more attention would be paid to students of high ability has certainly been realized in the greatly increased research and educational activity in this area.
Throughout the many positions he held during his lifetime, he made a point to show those he affected that psychology could be used to tap into the ability of individuals while using this as a method to match the right people to the right career roles.
[11] Today, personnel psychology aids in the recruitment, selection, placement, psychometrics, performance appraisal, training and development and legal issues (Equal Employment Opportunity) Title VII, CRA 1991.
Since the founding of the Carnegie program in 1915, Bingham's research, vision, and work have determined in large measure the directions that applied and industrial psychology have taken today.
Millicent Todd Bingham was the first woman to receive a doctorate in geology and geography from Harvard and later became a leading expert on Emily Dickinson.