The notion that the process of studying something can change it is an old and useful theme in the behavioral sciences and other disciplines. Perhaps the most famous illustration is the Hawthorne effect, which was uncovered (as the myth goes) when Harvard Business School researchers who were studying the effects of illumination and other physical changes on employee performance at the Hawthorne Western Electric plant in the 1920s. Many reports suggest that employee productivity at Hawthorne went up mostly because the researchers and their managers were just paying more attention to the employees. As I learned it in graduate school, Harvard's Elton Mayo and his colleagues reported a pattern that looked something like this list at ACCEL when they experimented with different working arrangements with a group of six "girls" (this was the 1920s, remember):
Conditions and results
Under normal conditions with a forty eight hour week, including Saturdays,
and no rest pauses. The girls produced 2,400 relays a week each.
They were then put on piece-work for eight weeks.
- Output went up
Two five minute rest pauses, morning and afternoon, were introduced
for a period of five weeks.
- Output went up once more
The rest pauses were lengthened to ten minutes each.
- Output went up sharply.
Six five minute pauses were introduced, and the girls complained that
their work rhythm was broken by the frequent pauses.
- Output fell slightly
Return to the two rest pauses, the first with a hot meal supplied by
the Company free of charge.
- Output went up
The girls were dismissed at 4.30 p.m. instead of 5.00 p.m.
- Output went up
They were dismissed at 4.00 p.m.
- Output remained the same
Finally, all the improvements were taken away, and the girls went back
to the physical conditions of the beginning of the experiment: work on
Saturday, 48 hour week, no rest pauses, no piece work and no free meal.
This state of affairs lasted for a period of 12 weeks.
- Output was the highest ever recorded averaging 3000 relays a week
You can see the Hawthorne effect myth here in more detail at the ACCEL site or the more staid and cautious explanation at the Harvard Business School site here — but regardless of what actually happened in this study (whether the simple act of paying attention to these workers increased their output — or not), the Hawthorne effect is now used to mean "the phenomenon in which subjects in behavioral studies change their performance in response to being observed."
I started thinking about the Hawthorne effect because of the Floon Beetle Expedition, one of the many masterpieces by the late Mad Magazine columnist Don Martin. I used the cartoon below last week to demonstrate how the act of studying things can change them… in this case, destroy them!
Leave a Reply