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The Hawthorne effect is a type of human behavior reactivity in which individuals modify an aspect of their behavior in response to their awareness of being observed. 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 original research involved workers who made electrical relays at the Hawthorne Works, a Western Electric plant in Cicero, Illinois. Between 1924 and 1927, the lighting study was conducted, wherein workers experienced a series of lighting changes that were said to increase productivity. This conclusion turned out to be false. In an Elton Mayo study that ran from 1927 to 1928, a series of changes in work structure were implemented (e.g. changes in rest periods) in a group of six women. However, this was a methodologically poor, uncontrolled study from which no firm conclusions could be drawn. (2025). 9780826199676, Springer. ISBN 9780826199676 Elton Mayo later conducted two additional experiments to study the phenomenon: the mass interviewing experiment (1928–1930) and the bank wiring observation experiment (1931–32).
One of the later interpretations by Henry Landsberger, a sociology professor at UNC-Chapel Hill, suggested that the novelty of being research subjects and the increased attention from such could lead to temporary increases in workers' productivity. This interpretation was dubbed "the Hawthorne effect".
This effect was observed for minute increases in Lighting. In these lighting studies, light intensity was altered to examine the resulting effect on worker productivity. When discussing the Hawthorne effect, most industrial and organizational psychology textbooks refer almost exclusively to the illumination studies as opposed to the other types of studies that have been conducted.
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. Thus, the Hawthorne effect can apply to a cause or causes other than changing lighting.
Elton Mayo, ''Hawthorne and the Western Electric Company'',
''The Social Problems of an Industrial Civilisation'',
Routledge, 1949.
However, when the intensity of light was increased in the experiment room, researchers found that productivity had improved in both rooms. The light level in the experiment room was then decreased, and the results were the same: increased productivity in both rooms. Productivity only began to decrease in the experiment room when the light level was reduced to about the level of moonlight, which made it hard to see.
Ultimately it was concluded that illumination did not have any effect on productivity and that there must have been some other variable causing the observed productivity increases in both rooms. Another phase of experiments was needed to pinpoint the cause.
Output was measured mechanically by counting how many finished relays each worker dropped down a chute. 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. In the experiment room, a supervisor discussed changes in their productivity.
Some of the variables were:
Changing a variable usually increased productivity, even if the variable was just a change back to the original condition. It is said that this reflects natural adaption to the environment without knowing the objective of the experiment. Researchers concluded that the workers worked harder because they thought that they were being monitored individually.
Researchers hypothesized that choosing one's own coworkers, working as a group, being treated as special (as evidenced by working in a separate room), and having a sympathetic supervisor were the real reasons for the productivity increase. One interpretation, mainly due to Elton Mayo's studies,Mayo, Elton (1945) Social Problems of an Industrial Civilization. Boston: Division of Research, Graduate School of Business Administration, Harvard University, p. 72 was that "the six individuals became a team and the team gave itself wholeheartedly and spontaneously to cooperation in the experiment." Further, there was a second relay assembly test room study whose results were not as significant as the first experiment.
Possible explanations for the Hawthorne effect include the impact of feedback and motivation towards the experimenter. Receiving feedback on their performance may improve their skills when an experiment provides this feedback for the first time. Research on the demand effect also suggests that people may be motivated to please the experimenter, at least if it does not conflict with any other motive. They may also be suspicious of the purpose of the experimenter. Therefore, Hawthorne effect may only occur when there is usable feedback or a change in motivation.
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.. 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.
Mayo contended that the effect was due to the workers reacting to the sympathy and interest of the observers. He discussed the study as demonstrating an experimenter effect as a management effect: how management can make workers perform differently because they feel differently. He suggested that much of the Hawthorne effect concerned the workers feeling free and in control as a group rather than as being supervised. The experimental manipulations were important in convincing the workers to feel that conditions in the special five-person work group were actually different from the conditions on the shop floor. The study was repeated with similar effects on mica-splitting workers.
Clark and Sugrue in a review of educational research reported that uncontrolled cause on average 30% of a standard deviation (SD) rise (i.e. 50–63% score rise), with the rise decaying to a much smaller effect after 8 weeks. In more detail: 50% of a SD for up to 4 weeks; 30% of SD for 5–8 weeks; and 20% of SD for > 8 weeks, (which is < 1% of the variance).
Harry Braverman pointed out that the Hawthorne tests were based on industrial psychology and the researchers involved were investigating whether workers' performance could be predicted by pre-hire testing. The Hawthorne study showed "that the performance of workers had little relation to their ability and in fact often bore an inverse relation to test scores ...". Braverman argued that the studies really showed that the workplace was not "a system of bureaucratic formal organisation on the Max Weber, nor a system of informal group relations, as in the interpretation of Mayo and his followers but rather a system of power, of class antagonisms". This discovery was a blow to those hoping to apply the behavioral sciences to manipulate workers in the interest of management.
The economists Steven Levitt and John A. List long pursued without success a search for the base data of the original illumination experiments (they were not true but some authors labeled them experiments), before finding it in a microfilm at the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee in 2011.BBC Radio 4 programme More Or Less, " The Hawthorne Effect", broadcast 12 October 2013, presented by Tim Harford with contributions by John List Re-analysing it, they found slight evidence for the Hawthorne effect over the long-run, but in no way as drastic as suggested initially. This finding supported the analysis of an article by S. R. G. Jones in 1992 examining the relay experiments. Despite the absence of evidence for the Hawthorne effect in the original study, List has said that he remains confident that the effect is genuine. Podcast, More or Less 12 October 2013, from 6m 15 sec in
Gustav Wickström and Tom Bendix (2000) argue that the supposed "Hawthorne effect" is actually ambiguous and disputable, and instead recommend that to evaluate intervention effectiveness, researchers should introduce specific psychological and social variables that may have affected the outcome.
It is also possible that the illumination experiments can be explained by a longitudinal learning effect. 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.
Evaluation of the Hawthorne effect continues in the present day. Despite the criticisms, however, the phenomenon is often taken into account when designing studies and their conclusions. Some have also developed ways to avoid it. 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. (2025). 9780435331603, Heinemann. ISBN 9780435331603
Greenwood, Bolton, and Greenwood (1983) interviewed some of the participants in the experiments and found that the participants were paid significantly better. Bolton's archives relevant to his work on the Hawthorne effect are held at West Virginia University.
Although little attention has been paid to this phenomenon, the scientific implications are very large. Evidence of this effect may be seen in recent studies that assign a particular problem to a number of researchers or research teams who then work independently using the same data to try and find a solution. 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. soccer).
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