The Hawthorne Effect
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
This is the short edition of More or Less, first broadcast on the BBC World Service.
Hello and welcome to More or Less on the BBC World Service. We're the programme about the numbers which surround us in the news and in life, and I'm Tim Harford. This week I thought I'd tell a story. A story about one of the most famous and most misunderstood social experiments in the 20th century. So are you sitting comfortably?
What are the Hawthorne Experiments and where did they take place?
Then I'll begin. BELL RINGS We're in 1920s Chicago, one of the great American cities and a major new industrial centre.
MUSIC
The Hawthorne plant in the suburb of Cicero was making telecommunications equipment and it became the venue for one of the most famous experiments in industrial history.
How did early illumination tests suggest productivity changed with lighting?
The National Academy of Sciences began an experiment to see how the level of lighting affected how productive workers were. The findings from this simple experiment have become legendary because when fancy new lights were installed, the workers worked harder. And when the lights were removed again, the workers worked harder. Nine more years of research followed and the same results. Lengthened work breaks, the workers worked harder. Shortened work breaks, the workers worked harder. Shortened the working day, the workers worked harder. Lengthened the working day, the workers worked harder. And perhaps that's not a surprise. Factory work was tedious and repetitive. Being experimented on was much more interesting.
When they asked me would I like to work in a test room, I thought it was going to be something different than what they were doing.
Here's one of the original workers from Hawthorne being interviewed on an AT&T documentary, The Year They Discovered People, years later.
We liked it. All of us liked it. You know, every day we had to do something different. It wasn't the same thing over and over.
Why did researchers conclude attention, not conditions, improved worker output?
The grand conclusion was that it wasn't the details of the work environment that mattered, it was receiving close attention from the experimenters.
We could more logically attribute the increase in efficiency to a betterment of morale than to any of the alterations made in the course of the experiment. We concluded that the same relationship might exist throughout the plant and that the best way to improve morale was through improved supervision.
It was an extraordinary realisation. Workers weren't just flesh-and-blood robots on the production line. They were humans. And they responded to attention and to communication. This became known as the Hawthorne effect.
This was not only a very important scientific moment that some researchers would argue...
How did the Hawthorne findings shape management and the human relations movement?
is a breakthrough as important as Galileo, but it also had an important effect on industrial relations and how employers actually treat employees.
This is John List, a professor of economics at the University of Chicago. And he's alluding to the fact that there were really two audiences for the Hawthorne effect, and it came to mean different things to these two groups of people. For social scientists like John List, the Hawthorne effect was a headache. John List specialises in field experiments, that is, experiments performed on people in their workplace or some other everyday environment. The Hawthorne studies showed that once experimenters show up and start fussing around, they can easily change people's behaviour and spoil the validity of the experiment. But the other group of interested people were management experts. And for them, the Hawthorne studies weren't a headache, but an opportunity to improve productivity.
This was a time when people viewed the employee as an automaton, a person who you could turn on and off, and they would work Monday through Saturday and have one day off on Sunday. Now, the Hawthorne experiments showed that that indeed was not correct and that employee relations is extremely important.
And you can still see the effects of these experiments today with even just a cursory surf through the management guru section of YouTube.
What prompted economists John List and Steve Levitt to search for the original data?
This study gave rise to the human relations movement, which really shows the importance of not only communicating to, but communicating with your employees.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–0:41
2
What are the Hawthorne Experiments and where did they take place?
0:41–1:11
3
How did early illumination tests suggest productivity changed with lighting?
1:11–2:19
4
Why did researchers conclude attention, not conditions, improved worker output?
2:19–3:08
5
How did the Hawthorne findings shape management and the human relations movement?
3:08–4:40
6
What prompted economists John List and Steve Levitt to search for the original data?
4:40–6:13
7
How did the recovered data challenge the original Hawthorne Effect claim?
6:13–7:58
8
What is the modern view on Hawthorne effects and where can listeners send questions?
7:58–9:33