Hawthorne Effect

The Hawthorne effect describes the tendency of people to change their behavior, often improving their performance, simply because they know they are being observed or studied. The phenomenon takes its name from a series of experiments conducted at Western Electric's Hawthorne Works plant near Chicago from the late 1920s into the 1930s, in which researchers found that workers' productivity rose when working conditions were changed, and continued to rise even when conditions were changed back, suggesting that the attention paid to workers, rather than the specific changes tested, drove the improvement. The finding became foundational to the human relations movement in management and remains widely cited, and contested, in discussions of workplace behavior and research methodology.