Hawthorne effect
[1][2] The effect was discovered in the context of research conducted at the Hawthorne Western Electric plant; however, some scholars think the descriptions are fictitious.
The Hawthorne Works had commissioned a study to determine if its workers would become more productive in brighter or dimmer levels of light.
The workers' productivity seemed to improve when changes were made but returned to their original level when the study ended.
[9] Although early studies focused on altering workplace illumination, other changes such as maintaining clean work stations, clearing floors of obstacles, and relocating workstations have also been found to result in increased productivity for short periods of time.
To establish a baseline productivity level, the measurement was begun in secret two weeks before the women were moved to the experiment room, and then continued throughout the study.
[13] The study was conducted by Elton Mayo and W. Lloyd Warner between 1931 and 1932 on a group of fourteen men who put together telephone switching equipment.
These results show that workers were more responsive to the social force of their peer groups than to the control and incentives of management.
J. G. Adair warned of gross factual inaccuracy in most secondary publications on the Hawthorne effect and that many studies failed to find it.
He advanced the view that awareness of being observed was not the source of the effect, but participants' interpretation of the situation is critical.
Parsons defined the Hawthorne effect as "the confounding that occurs if experimenters fail to realize how the consequences of subjects' performance affect what subjects do" [i.e. learning effects, both permanent skill improvement and feedback-enabled adjustments to suit current goals].
His key argument was that in the studies where workers dropped their finished goods down chutes, the participants had access to the counters of their work rate.
He suggested that much of the Hawthorne effect concerned the workers feeling free and in control as a group rather than as being supervised.
This discovery was a blow to those hoping to apply the behavioral sciences to manipulate workers in the interest of management.
[20] Re-analysing it, they found slight evidence for the Hawthorne effect over the long-run, but in no way as drastic as suggested initially.
Parsons has declined to analyse the illumination experiments, on the grounds that they have not been properly published and so he cannot get at details, whereas he had extensive personal communication with Roethlisberger and Dickson.
For instance, there is the case of holding the observation when conducting a field study from a distance, from behind a barrier such as a two-way mirror or using an unobtrusive measure.
[32] Bolton's archives relevant to his work on the Hawthorne Effect are held at West Virginia University.
The latter may have several mechanisms: (1) Physicians may tend to recruit patients who seem to have better adherence potential and lesser likelihood of future loss to follow-up.
For one, the researchers may choose seemingly innocuous steps in their statistical analyses that end up causing significantly different results using the same data; e.g. weighting strategies, factor analytic techniques, or choice of estimation.
In addition, researchers may use software packages that have different default settings that lead to small but significant fluctuations.
The idea of the secondary observer effect was floated by Nate Breznau in a thus far relatively obscure paper.
This is a process called crowdsourcing data analysis and was used in a groundbreaking study by Silberzahn, Rafael, Eric Uhlmann, Dan Martin and Brian Nosek et al. (2015) about red cards and player race in football (i.e.
