Photo: StutiJohn List and I stumbled onto the original, never-analyzed data from the original illumination experiments done at the Hawthorne Plant. These studies gave rise to what is now known as the Hawthorne Effect.
We find that there actually wasn’t a Hawthorne Effect in the original data, at least not of the sort that you read about in virtually every introductory psychology textbook, where it is claimed that the workers’ output went up every time the lighting was changed, whether the change was to make the lights brighter or dimmer.
The Economist magazine has a nice piece on it.
and 
. You can also watch it on 
Garvit Sah: It’s still worth it to test whether things really are as is expected.
Kenn: What you are talking about is called the Observer Effect, which says that the act of observing (or measuring) an object will slightly change that object. Putting a room temperature thermometer into a hot drink, for example, will cool off the drink.
Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle is something else entirely. It is a _law of quantum mechanics_ that says, essentially, you can never measure everything about a wave at once. The more specifically you know where a wave is, the less you know about how fast it is moving.
The Uncertainty Principle is related to the observer effect, but they are definitely not the same thing.
You think that’s strange — death by horsekick in the Prussian army wasn’t Poisson after all. That’s right folks THE classic textbook, first ever, application of the Poisson distribution has big flaws. Just sum all the deaths for all the guardcorps to get the Prussian yearly totals and the sample variance-to-mean ratio is about 2.0 — too high for a Poisson.
Maybe everything we know is wrong.
The Hawthorne Effect is a basic element of the canon for the training of middle managers, like the Hierarchy of Needs and the Japanese quality management system and so forth. What are we going to do without it?!?!?! Although it appeals to the sense of comic irony more than to the sense of moral outrage, the fact that we have abused each other with it for so many decades gives one cause to wonder what are we really doing in management training – perhaps that is the REAL Hawthorne Effect – we manage better for being trained, no matter what the actual training consists of. Would you believe that?
DWR
See also
* Was There a Hawthorne Effect?
* Stephen R. G. Jones
* The American Journal of Sociology,
Vol. 98, No. 3 (Nov., 1992), pp. 451-468
(article consists of 18 pages)
* Published by: The University of Chicago Press
* Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2781455