Talk:Hawthorne effect

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The Hawthorn effect refers to an increase in performance caused by the special attention given to employees, rather than tangible changes in the work. (pg 12. Lussier.R, "Human Relations in Organizations"

Contents

[edit] 2008 Merge

No mention of the 'Rabble hypothesis', which was an important aspect of the Hawthorne studies in dismissing the belief orchestrated by Taylor, that society on a whole was unorganized and that individuals only acted to serve self interest. A dismissal, which led to the formation of McGregor's theory X and theory Y principles of motivation. This is something Mayo thought of being one of the greatest contributions of the Hawthorne studies. Unfortunately it isn't discussed or mentioned in many business school texts as they tend to over emphasize the importance of the illumination and bank wiring vault experiments.

-scarfjackson 16:54, 14 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] 2005 merge

These should not be merged. I am just learning about both subjects for the first time and they seem quite distinct. The experiments were specific and apparently some of the first in industrial psychology. The Hawthorne effect appears to have a much broader applicability and to have been an interesting by product of the studies. I think they are fine as separate articles. scarykitty

I think that this is correct in every situation

I concur.

I agree-- the "Hawthorne effect" only describes one aspect of the Hawthorne experiments, the latter should be a separate article instead of a redirect. There are some good references listed here, we just need someone to read them and write up a summary. -Rbean 03:16, 20 December 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Quote

Statistician David Salsburg wrote:

The Hawthorne plant gave its name to a phenomenon known as the "Hawthorne effect." An attempt was made to measure the difference between two methods of management during the 1930s at the Hawthorne plant. The attempt failed because the workers impoved their efforts immensely for both methods. This was because they knew they were being watched carefuly. Since then, the term Hawthorne effect has been used to describe the improvement in a situation that occurs just because an experiment is being run. Typical is the fact that large clinical trials comparing new treatments with traditional ones usually show an improvement in patient health, more than would have been expected from the traditional one based on past experience. This makes it more difficult to detect the difference in effect between the traditional and the new treatment. The Lady Tasting Tea, page 254.

brup!

[edit] Donation of text from a university professor

On Sun, 16 Oct 2005, Ed Poor wrote:

> Would you be willing to write an article about the > Hawthorne effect for Wikipedia? Or perhaps simply > license your notes for use as a first draft for our > dedicated volunteer staff to work into an article? I

Feel free to have an article written out of those pieces. I think an encyclopaedia rather than a dictionary entry would be right, because as my web page I think shows, there are actually a bunch of related effects and what people most need to know is that: i.e. there isn't a single Hawthorne effect which was just what they were thinking of in the first place. So explaining it by contrast, with pointers to things like placebo effect, and Rosenthal's pygmalion effect would probably do most to interest and educate readers.

Steve Draper Dept. of Psychology, University of Glasgow, Glasgow G12 8QQ, U.K. 0141-330 4961 (...5089 to leave a message; fax: ...5086) (The code for UK is 44 e.g. in Germany dial: 00 44 141 330 4961) s.draper@psy.gla.ac.uk http://www.psy.gla.ac.uk/~steve/

I regard the above e-mail exchange as permitting us to consider the GFDL to apply to the entire Steve Draper article, the same as if he had created a Wikipedia account and posted his article himself. Uncle Ed 20:53, 19 October 2005 (UTC)


[edit] Good stuff

This article, although it's far too long for an encyclopedia, has a lot of good stuff in it. Some of it should be separated into Pygmalion effect, like the accounts of teacher expectation at "Oak School".

I have personally found as a teacher that once a student believes that "they can do it", their progress can be astonishing. But students who think they are backward or stupid show only the barest of improvement, and it often vanishes soon after the last test of the unit.

I had sort of an epiphany during 6th grade in which I suddenly grasped the basic concept of the equation in algebra. Four years later, I scored higher than 99% of all college-bound takers of the Math SAT. Was I a child prodigy, or did I simply exploit one of these effects? I sure did learn, but why so quickly and lastingly, when my peers were barely passing? Uncle Ed 22:47, 19 October 2005 (UTC)

Yes, the info is good. But we should work on making the article more readable so the info can be more accessable. I'm going to work on it as I have time. --DanielCD 14:54, 27 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Issues

Here's a sampling of issues that I came across in this article:

  • "The Hawthorne Effect is still widely invoked, even after being proved incorrect." Sounds pov to me, and the rest of the article doesn't seem to support the fact that it has been proven incorrect. I've never heard it criticized before, at the very least, you might say that the validity is in dispute.
  • What is up with "Can we trust the research?" and "Can we trust the literature?" Both sounds like the same question to me. sections should probably be merged and a more encyclopedic heading chosen.
(May be the literature on this subject can't be trusted because it improved just because people were going to read it...? 193.129.65.37 07:22, 1 June 2006 (UTC))
  • In the Can we trust the research section, it's not clear what is a quote and what is a comment on a quote, very difficult to read.
  • Some of the quotes in this section are uncited, and it's not clear their relevance. Who is Don Smith and why do I care what he thinks of the Hawthorne effect?
  • In that same section "A dismissive comment which back-handedly tells you something about the power of anecdote and narrative." Unencyclopedic and pov. If you've given me the quote with the proper context, why do you then need to tell me what the quote says? Either I can see that myself, or it's just one interpretation of the comment (and then that interpretation needs to be cited).
  • Why do we have a "summary view of hawthorne" right dab in the middle of the article? Summaries are good at the beginning, and less good at the end, but in the middle?
  • In that section "In the light of the various critiques, I think we could see the Hawthorne effect at several levels". Use of first person and particularly the phrase like "I think" and "I would" makes this original research. It's also prescriptive instead of descriptive. axe this section.
  • From "Teacher effects" -- "Tim O'Shea once told me that in all studies..." What's all this first person? This is beginning to smell like a copyvio, has anyone looked into whether this is someones essay yanked off the web? In anycase, this should be rewritten as an encyclopedia article.
  • And finally, this article is way too long. Remember to write in summary style and cover just the essentials, other stuff can be moved off to more specific or appropriate articles.

Sorry if this comes across as harsh, You've got a lot of data here, so you're well on your way to a good article. It just needs a good editing job. Matt 20:40, 13 March 2006 (UTC)

Ok, a follow up. The bulk of the text is from here. Added in this edit where it's stated that the text was donated. Just mentioning it here to save others the time of looking into it. Matt 21:26, 13 March 2006 (UTC)
The only major problem with this is the use of personal pronouns. Length is not really the issue - some articles simply have to be longer than is preferable for a *print* encylopedia to fully explain their subject. Since I don't really have any knowledge of this I can't say whether or not this is one of those articles, but cutting length is not something that is high priority. Good organization can cut down on 'perceived' length so people can stomach the article more easily. Rarr 22:12, 13 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Illumination Issue, and general good source

==

Joe Romm's book "Cool Companies" published in 1998 included an appendix on the Hawthorne Effect. He dealt with the illumination study issue as well; it turns out that when natural light is included (based on weather records) that productivity was indeed showing a response to level of illumination - either excessively dim light or excessive glare. I put this in comments rather than editing the article because I am paraphrasing from memory, and Romm is a secondary source in any case; he referenced a primary source. So there is pointer. If someone wants to track down the primary source it might make a good addition. I'm adding this in talk because I have to give a secondary rather than primary source. If someone wants to find a copy of "cool companies" to find the reference, then track the primary source it might interesting. That appendix by the way refers to a number of major debunking studies on the subject, so it is a good guide in general. Apparently there was an extensive review of literature, which showed no Hawthorne effect in a number of studies where it might have been expected. Gar Lipow 01:58, 19 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Comments from the original trouble maker

The wikipedia entry was originally based on my web page about this. Having just done some minor updates to that, I've had a look at the article and at the discussion here. I think most of the comments, including the harsh ones, have some merit. However here's a few points I think should be borne in mind by anyone minded to clean up this article.

Although the article is much longer than typical encyclopedia articles, there was a reason for that at least in the original web page: that understanding what the Hawthorne effect might be seemed best done by relating it to a number of other effects/things that I at least didn't have separate articles on. Defining it by contrast, in other words, but where all the terms had to be introduced for the first time.

Furthermore, it is not clear what field it belongs in: or rather, its significance varies across fields. Taking the view that the Hawthorne studies were in management science (or possibly, organisational psychology) is perfectly logical BUT in fact the enquiries I've had (and so the hits the page might get in wikipedia) have actually come mostly from elsewhere. That is because there are methodological lessons here for all fields that have humans as experimental subjects (or participants, to use the politically and technically more correct term): psychology, education, medicine, management, ... I suppose I'm saying that on the one hand, it might be good to separate each of these aspects into cross-referring articles. But it is worth noting that a number of people half remember it from one field and want to apply it in another. They are right to try, but the discussion they really need isn't provided by a one-field article.

This relates to the fact that it is disputed by some whether any Hawthorne effect exists. The long debate in management science (as referred to by Gillespie, cited in the article) on how to interpret those studies is one thing, and those in that field can find it fairly easily. However outsiders periodically want to refer to the issue of how the expectations of participants may seriously affect experiments, and apart from having had lectures refer to the Hawthorne effect, it isn't easy for them to get a clear and easily available treatment. For them, it perhaps doesn't matter what the opinions are on how to manage factory workers: they just need to think about and talk about possible effects with a view to improving experimental designs. But here I couldn't think how to do better than alert them to a variety of such effects.

Let me try again:

  1. There is no absolute or completely factual truth in this area. What most of the less confused people seem to mean by "the Hawthorne effect" is, I believe, essentially Mayo's interpretation of the Hawthorne studies. Roughly, that the awareness of being studied had at least as big an effect as the variables that the researchers thought they were studying. This was eventually an important landmark in management science. But Mayo's interpretation, though permanently influential, was and continues to be disputed.
  2. Other fields need a term like Hawthorne effect to refer to the issue of how observing people can change their behaviour and so change the outcome of studies (regardless of what happened at Hawthorne): and quite a lot of people use "Hawthorne effect" for this. It's a case where a term is needed, but not really soundly established.
  3. My web page came out of a discussion on an email forum: hence some of the quotes. Use of the first person came from flagging up personal opinions.
  4. I think it likely that a rewrite would benefit readers of wikipedia but don't feel I have the right distance to do it myself (I am indeed happy for any use to be made of any of my web pages here). Although I think this is actually a quite interestingly tricky case for the whole notion of an encyclopedia: both because of the overlap of related but distinct terms and issues; and because of the mix of consensus, dispute and uninformed need around the topic.

Steved2 13:21, 14 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Factual Accuracy

Does this mean the factual accuracy box can be removed yet...? The article doesn't seem to be THAT disputed... and certainly seems to be attempted to present all points of view. 193.129.65.37 07:24, 1 June 2006 (UTC)

Not in my opinion. The unqualified claim that the "Hawthorne effect has been proven false" is totally inappropriate. It must be acknowledged that the phrase as commonly used has a number of meanings from very specific to very general, that some of the original Hawthorne studies and the conclusions drawn from them are debatable, but the fact that observation has a large influence, perhaps but not certainly overwhelming the influence of the intervention, is not much under debate, and certainly not "proven false."

The Harthorne effect is when subjects guess the hypothesis and act according to it. The first time this was noticed was at the Hawthorne factory. As a result production did increase, but only because the workers believed that was what the study was about increasing production. The workers could have guessed to decrease downtime and as a result done that instead of increasing production. (Research Design in Counseling, Heppner 2nd ed. pg 273)

[edit] Plagiarism

It looks like much of this article is plagiarized fromhere. Mo-Al 01:49, 15 August 2006 (UTC)

by permission of the author, surely (see above) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 84.69.103.247 (talk • contribs)

[edit] Too Long - Keep it simple

I did a copy and paste into MS Word to get some statistics

  Words       7,800+
  Lines         770
  Characters 49,000+ (Spaces included)

The Wikipedia style guide says to consider the user. The Hawthorne effect is a simple story.

Please break this up into separate sections so that the basic idea is accessible to the general reader. Use links to further develop concepts, history, etc. for those who are interested.

[edit] Factual... Definitely

It is well known that the Hawthorne Effect is a major concern when designing and implementing studies. If you don't think that this article has acedemic or encyclopedic value, or that any part of it is untrue, please do point out the portions that are not accurate. I have taken both College Psychology and Sociology, Of which the professor cose (Richard T. Shaefer, Tenth Edition, 2007) and "The Hawthorn effect" is referenced as TERMS in both of the college level books that I have used. There is no need to mute it because the theory is simple. The fact that this term is used amongst many disciplines such as Psychology, Sociology, Marketing, to name a few, has different considerations for the design for each of these studies in these disciplines. But I agree that it could be shortened. The "Teacher Effects" section should be completely moved to a seperate article called "Teacher-Expectancy Effect". This term meens that teachers expectations of students will have an effect on studen'ts actual performance. I will either create a new article if it does not exist, or add this text to the existing one. Just don't burn my ass because I will put a "see also" link at the bottom of the page. That's just my two pennies.M jurrens 17:00, 8 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Teacher effect split

I split the teacher effects into these two articles: Pygmalion_effect, for the teacher effects portion and Placebo effect , for the portion mentioning the placebo effect. Thus eliminating that section all together. I will be working to try to find any loose references and transfer them. The Three articles will all have see also sections that mention each other since yes they are very similar.M jurrens 17:15, 8 November 2006 (UTC)

  • It is done feel free to revert it if you like, but none of what was written was lost, just transfered to the applicable articles :P.M jurrens 17:15, 8 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Clean-up and editing suggestions

I'm a new reader of this article, and I think the writers assume I know what the Hawthorne experiments are, but I don’t. I have a vague idea from something I learned in college, but I would really appreciate it if this article were organized more like: definition, background (with a possible link to a separate "Hawthorne experiments" article), and current findings and analysis.

First sentence of article now: “The Hawthorne effect is a label first used in 1955 to give a new interpretation of the results of the original Hawthorne experiments conducted from 1924-1932.” Right here we need an explanation of what the Hawthorne experiments were. I recommend a short explanation and then, if desired, a separate article on the Hawthorne experiments.

This sentence from the “Case studies” section would be better at the beginning: “The original Hawthorne research was a series of studies on the productivity of workers manipulated various conditions (pay, light levels, rest breaks, etc.), but on average each change resulted in productivity rising, including eventually a return to the original conditions. This was true of each of the individual workers as well as of the group mean.”

Also in the “Case studies section: Studies were done between 1924 and around 1933. Fritz Roethlisberger and William J. Dickson give a great amount of detail, but little interpretation. Elton Mayo of Harvard Business School gives a shorter account,…” What studies?

I’ve written other comments in the article with hidden text, so you’ll have to edit the article in order to see them. I apologize for entering the fray so ungently, but my nitpicky editor got out and I couldn’t get her back in. Dblomgren 22:49, 14 November 2006 (UTC)

Well, I got tired of waiting on the experts :) and decided to make some of my suggested changes in the first two sections. I didn't remove the "needs cleanup" tag because I thought it would be more appropriate for someone else to make that judgment. I will add more info to the bank wiring studies when I have more time. In case anyone's interested in continuing, I used these sites for resources. (Should they be added as references at the bottom of the article?)

Dblomgren 02:56, 16 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Outline of proposed rewrite

I propose the following outline for this article. The case studies section will be more complete (and longer), but the overall article should be shorter since I’ll delete much of the content that came from Steve Draper’s webpage. Note that not all bullets will be headings. It’s just to give an idea of what should be included.

1. General information about the Hawthorne effect (general definition, place, researchers, purpose, significance, controversy)

2. Case studies

  • Illumination studies
  • Relay assembly test room
  • Mica splitting
  • Bank wiring room
  • Interviewing
  • Personnel counseling

3. Sources of information on the studies

  • Primary resources from the researchers and their backgrounds
  • Major secondary sources

4. Definitions and significance of the Hawthorne effect

  • Sample definitions of Hawthorne effect
  • Significance
    • industrial and occupational pscychology
    • organizational development
    • social psychology
    • business management
    • medicine (placebo effect)
    • educational psychology (halo effect)
    • research methods and experiment variables (meaning the researchers thought they were only changing the lights and didn’t take into account other changes they introduced to conduct the experiments) – nice segue to:

5. Interpretation, criticism, and conclusions

  • other possible causes of results
  • untruthful reporting of events (use part of section Can we trust the literature?)
  • accepted without foundation

6. Footnotes

7. References (books and websites referenced in text)

8. Further reading

  • halo effect (add part of section Teacher effects)
  • placebo effect
  • Pygmalian effect
  • John Henry effect (create article base on information in this one)
  • etc.

9. External links

Please let me know what you think. Dblomgren 04:34, 17 December 2006 (UTC)

Seems very reasonable. Andrew73 18:26, 17 December 2006 (UTC)
That appears to be a sound approach with a good flow. M jurrens 18:13, 19 January 2007 (UTC)
Agreed that it sounds like a good approach. Something missing from the current article are the implications of the Hawthorne effect for experimental design. I gather that you plan to cover this under your section 4, which would be a vaulable addition. Zoe Ocean 02:43, 15 November 2007 (UTC)

In case anyone's wondering, I am rewriting and reorganizing the article. I was hoping to replace the text in one fell swoop, but I decided it would be more reassuring to other editors to add it piece by piece. DBlomgren 03:07, 10 January 2007 (UTC)

Uhh, and just out of reference, not sure of the correct section to place this, but per a discussion above... in the UK at least, the hawthorne effect is a part of the Sociology Syllabus for A-level, which is a college level qualification.... but not the Psychology Syllabus - if you reference it in psychology you lose marks as each subject has pretty specific terminology. 90.240.133.130 22:05, 22 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Please do not link to HUP

Please do not link this article to the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. It is a misconception to attribut observers interfering with the experiment as the reason behind HUP. Quantum mechanics is not applicable in these scenarios. Thanks, --ScienceApologist 15:31, 17 December 2006 (UTC)


Quite right. Steved2 18:26, 23 December 2006 (UTC)

This is a very important topic for every management student.So,this should not be removed from the wiki.

I understand that the actual topic is not a Psychology topic. There still remains the fact that the improvements were short lived. I would endevor to relate finding this to regression psychology in order to understand the stress of observation. From an Industrial Engineering point of view the sociological factors are also of importance and tend to be overlooked by scholars.