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In 1924 America's National Research Council sent two engineers to supervise a series of experiments at a telephone-parts factory called the Hawthorne Plant near Chicago. It hoped they would learn how shop-floor lighting affected workers' productivity. Instead, the studies ended up giving their name to the “Hawthorne effect”, the extremely influential idea that the very act of being experimented upon changed subjects' behavior.
The idea arose because of the perplexing behavior of the women in the plant. According to accounts of the experiments, their hourly output rose when lighting was increased, but also when it was dimmed. It did not matter what was done in the experiment; So long as something was changed, productivity rose. A(n) awareness they were being experimented upon seemed to be enough to alter workers' behavior by itself.
After several decades, the same data were subjected to econometric analysis. The Hawthorne experiments had another surprise in store. Contrary to the descriptions on record, no systematic evidence was found that levels of productivity were related to changes in lighting.
It turns out that the peculiar way of conducting the experiments may have led to misleading interpretations of what happened. For example, lighting was always changed on a Sunday. When work started again on Monday, output duly rose compared with the previous Saturday and continued to rise for the next couple of days. However, a comparison with data for weeks when there was no experimentation showed that output always went up on Mondays. Workers tended to be diligent for the first few days of the week in any case, before hitting a plateau and then slackening off. This suggests that the alleged “Hawthorne effect” is hard to pin down.
