170 | The Hawthorne Effect

Why We Do What We Do · Aug 19, 2020 · 43m

Workplace performance, be it group or an individual, is something that has been studied for decades. Nearly 100 years ago, a series of studies on worker performance yielded an interpretation that an increase in productivity occurred regardless of the manipulation of the independent variable. Researchers at the time attributed these changes to the presence of the experimenters, noting that workers must be trying to please them per the experiment at hand. More recent interpretations have shifted, and extraneous variables present during the original experiment and failure to find evidence of…