This is a photo from about 1930 of the “Relay Assembly Test Room,” from the factory known as the Hawthorne Works, operated by Western Electric and site of a famously studied phenomenon in psychology called “the Hawthorne Effect”.
Starting in 1924, Western Electric sponsored a series of experiments on the effect of lighting and efficiency in the workforce, with a view to accumulating evidence that use of more light would mean better productivity — obviously this was in the self-interest of Western Electric.
And so, women employees like the ones shown here were run through experiments to test these illumination studies, which gave rise to the notion of “the Hawthorne Effect,” which is the tendency for people’s performance to improve merely because they are being observed. The idea was that any changes at all in the lighting situation of these employees would lead to a temporary increase in their work productivity — it wasn’t the lighting, but rather the awareness of being watched, that made the women (temporarily) improve. Since that time, the Hawthorne Effect has become a well-known phenomenon in psychology studies. Scientists are taught to control for the Hawthorne Effect whenever they design such tests.
The thing is, the Hawthorne Effect never actually happened. The studies done in the 1920s had exceptionally poor methodologies (two out of three groups had no control, for instance), and out of the first three groups, only one showed improved productivity. But psychologists publishing on it have talked about the Hawthorne experiments as though they really had demonstrated that the subjects of an experiment would change their behavior merely because they were being watched.
In fact, the idea of the Hawthorne Effect is one that bears noticing — people *can* change the way they act when they are watched. But other factors — like the autonomy of participants, being treated “specialer,” or even the days and times of observation can also skew results. Thus, students taking college courses in psychology continue to study the (made up) Hawthorne Effect.
Source(s): _Scientific American_, “The Hawthorne Effect: an Old Scientists’ Tale of Lingering ‘in the Gunsmoke of Academic Snipers,'” Hilda Bastian July 26, 2013. Photo from Harvard Business School Baker Library Historical Collections “The Women in the Assembly Test Room” the Hawthorne Effect.
