
Questioning the Hawthorne effect: Light work - mblakele
http://www.economist.com/finance/displaystory.cfm?story_id=13788427
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tokenadult
Thanks for posting the link. I'm surprised that the Economist editors hadn't
heard of much earlier questions about the supposed Hawthorne effect. When I
brought up what "everyone knows" about the Hawthorne effect in online
discussion in the mid-1990s, I was told about much reexamination of the
original studies that showed the effect was not as simple as described.
Workers DON'T appear to work harder just because they know an experimenter is
watching them. Here are some other links:

"The Hawthorne defect: Persistence of a flawed theory"

<http://www.cs.unc.edu/~stotts/204/nohawth.html>

"The Powerful Placebo and the Wizard of Oz" (.PDF)

<http://www.math.princeton.edu/math_alive/placebo_oz.pdf>

and others. The most definitive refutation of the usual account of the
Hawthorne effect was written by a professor at the University of Wisconsin,
although I don't see his article, which I read from the original journal back
in the 1990s (the article is older), online via a quick Google search.

