What Is the Hawthorne Effect?

The "Hawthorne effect" is the effect that people deliberately change some behavior or verbal expression when they realize that they are being watched or observed.

Hawthorne Effect or Hawthorne Effect

The so-called "Hawthorne effect" means that individuals who realize they are being observed by others have a tendency to change their behavior. A required characteristic in psychology. In the 1920s and 1930s, American researchers discovered the experimenter effect in experiments conducted by Chicago Western Power Company's Hawthorne Plant on working conditions, social factors, and production benefits, called the Hawthorne effect. For example, let employees vent their dissatisfaction; increase performance or efforts due to additional attention. The basic condition of the Hawthorne effect is that important working environment attributes can be captured in large quantities without hidden or hidden information ^[2]

The initial study of the Hawthorne experiment was to explore a series of control conditions (

We call this the "Hawthorne Effect" when there is an increase in performance or effort due to additional attention.

George Elton Mayo studies Hawthorne effect

This is extremely common in school education. There is a foreign school. When students are enrolled, an intelligence test will be performed on each student. Students will be divided into excellent classes and ordinary classes based on the results of the intelligence test. As a result, during a routine inspection, it was found that the test results of a group of students who were enrolled a year ago were reversed due to some kind of mistake, that is, the excellent class was actually an ordinary child, while the really smart child was in an ordinary class. However, this year's course results are the same as in previous years. The excellent class is significantly higher than the ordinary class, and there is no abnormality. The ordinary children were originally regarded as top students, and they themselves considered themselves excellent. The extra attention and psychological hints made the ugly duckling truly a white swan. ^[4]

Hawthorne effect-based psychological cues can also treat depression, inferiority, and nervousness, and other mental illnesses. Hawthorne effect is also effective in corporate management applications and leadership behaviors. ^[4]

When some sociological textbooks discuss the objectivity and morality of social research, the Hawthorne effect is often used as an example of bias in social research to illustrate the impact of the research process itself on the behavior of the researched person. "Sociologists should keep in mind that sociology is the science of human behavior, and people respond to the research process-sometimes we cannot foresee these reactions. It is the emergence of researchers that may distort the social emotions being studied. This phenomenon is often called a reaction. " ^[4]

Precautions

In the research of social sciences, the impact of the experiment itself on the results must be taken into account, because the subject knows that he or she has participated in the experiment. This "cognition" has changed their usual behaviors, resulting in In the case of stimulus intervention, the dependent variable still changes. We must pay attention to overcoming such disadvantages.

In order to avoid the above-mentioned disadvantages such as the "Hawthorne effect", people sometimes design intervention methods for double-blind experiments. The so-called double-blind experiments refer to that in an experiment, the experimental stimulus is unknown to the subject and the observers participating in the experiment, that is, whether the experimental group or the control group was given the experiment The stimulus is unknown to both parties involved in the experiment. The experimental stimulus is randomly assigned and given by a third party other than the experimenter and the subject. In this way, it is possible to avoid experimental bias caused by the experimenter's expectations of the research ("primary test effect" also known as "Pigmarion effect") and experiments caused by the subject's perception and attitude of the subject Bias ("subject effect", also known as "Hawthorne effect").