Observer effect

Look up observer effect in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

Observer effect may refer to:

• Hawthorne effect, a form of reactivity in which subjects modify an aspect of their behavior, in response to the fact that they know that they are being studied.
• Heisenbug of computer programming, where a software bug seems to disappear or alter its behavior when one attempts to study it
• Observer effect (information technology), the impact of observing a process while it is running
• Observer effect (physics), the impact of observing a physical system
• Observer-expectancy effect, a form of reactivity in which a researcher's cognitive bias causes them to unconsciously influence the participants of an experiment.

It may also refer to:

• Observer Effect, an episode of Star Trek: Enterprise, named after this effect

It is sometimes conflated with:

• Heisenberg's uncertainty principle
• Actor-observer bias

See also

• Schrödinger's cat, a thought experiment, often described as a paradox, devised by Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger
• Hawthorne effect

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