The "Hawthorne effect"--what did the original Hawthorne studies actually show?

By Gustav Wickstrom, T. Bendix, P. M. Scandinavian Journal of Work, Environment and Health, 2000

659 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The "Hawthorne effect" is often mentioned as a possible explanation for positive results in intervention studies. It is used to cover many phenomena, not only unwitting confounding of variables under study by the study itself, but also behavioral change due to an awareness of being observed, active compliance with the supposed wishes of researchers because of special attention received, or positive response to the stimulus being introduced. At times, the term seems to be used as a social equivalent to "placebo effect". In social research, there is much critical literature indicating that, in general, the term "Hawthorne effect" should be avoided. Instead of referring to the ambiguous and disputable Hawthorne effect when evaluating intervention effectiveness, researchers should introduce specific psychological and social variables that may have affected the outcome under study but were not monitored during the project, along with the possible effect on the observed results.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b30b830a3517f5a081854b9e67d628b8c90665af

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In Cognitive Neuroscience

In Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

Citations in the corpus

Gaussian Process Robust Regression for Noisy Heart Rate Data (2008, background): “enough to be tolerated by participants for such periods [10].”
Handling the Hawthorne effect: The challenges surrounding a participant observer (2014, background): “More recently, it has become common to attribute any unexpected result within an experiment with human participants to the Hawthorne effect (Wickstrom and Bendix, 2000).”
Empathetic Leadership: How Leader Emotional Support and Understanding Influences Follower Performance (2018, background): “While questions remain about what the studies revealed (Jung & Lee, 2015; Wickström & Bendix, 2000), one cannot deny these studies created a new way to look at leadership—the idea that leaders must pay attention to followers’ emotional needs as well as directing and coordinating follower activities…”
Reliability and validity of the combined heart rate and movement sensor Actiheart (2005, background): “European Journal of Clinical Nutrition (2005) 59, 561–570 & 2005 Nature Publishing Group All rights reserved 0954-3007/05 $30.00 www.nature.com/ejcn observed (Wickstrom & Bendix, 2000; Tate et al, 2003).”
Guidelines for Reporting Reliability and Agreement Studies (GRRAS) were proposed. (2011, neutral): “, ensuring that the rater’s behavior is not altered because of an awareness being observed) [4,71].”
The Research Excellence Framework and the ‘impact agenda’: are we creating a Frankenstein monster? (2011, background): “A further analogy is with the Hawthorne effect in management, where the mere presence of researchers brings about a significant change in performance of the workers being observed, a form of psychological ‘placebo effect’ (Wickström and Bendix, 2000).”
Suggestion, Cognition, and Behavior (2012, background): “But as research has shown (Adair, 1984; Wickström & Bendix, 2000), reports of these studies—often included in textbooks—are riddled with errors that dramatically limit the inferences that can be drawn from them: variables (such as music) are described as having been manipulated, but they never…”
Adaptive n-back training does not improve fluid intelligence at the construct level: Gains on individual tests suggest that training may enhance visuospatial processing (2013, background): “Note finally that these types of factors aremuch less relevant than generally assumed (Adair, Sharpe, & Huynh, 1989; Kompier, 2006; Wickstrom & Bendix, 2000).”