The first variable to be studied was the lighting – would workers be more productive in higher/lower levels of light? So, the lighting level was increased. And productivity increased. Lighting levels were lowered; productivity increased. Cleaning the workplace, removing obstacles, and changing the working positions all seemed to increase productivity. Shortening the working day increased output. Returning to the original hours increased output. Other variables were experimented with. The results were that changing a variable usually resulted in increases in production – even when the change was back to the original condition! Output seemed to slump when the experiment was ended. Note that there is some controversy about this – no one has been able to identify the original data. Thus, Richard Nisbett has described the Hawthorne effect as ‘a glorified anecdote’. But, if that is what it is, I think it is an illustrative one. However, it is still used in Social Psychology as an example of compliant behaviours during experimental situations. The most controversial of these were the experiments conducted by Milgram where experimental participants were instructed to carry on giving electric shocks to supposed ‘subjects’ in a phoney experiment, even though the gauges showed lethally high levels of electric shocks! And Zimbardo, who set up a mock prison setting then allocated roles of ‘guards’ and ‘prisoners’ to participants – with astounding results! (Read these – you will be shocked [no pun intended] and amazed at what people will do when they think they are taking part in an experiment!)
So, the ‘Hawthorne Effect’ is a term we use to describe a tendency in some people to try to do their best when they are taking part in experiments. It may be that the whole experimental situation, and the attention that they receive from the researchers, results in changes in their behaviour.
I first came across the term in 1971 at a conference in Aberdeen on research into doctor–patient communication. One presenter mentioned in her work that she had taken steps to avoid the ‘Hawthorne Effect’. This stunned everybody there – ‘What's that?’ ‘Have you heard of it?’ Then, after some considerable digging, someone came up with the answer, ‘It's the bank wiring room experiments!’ All of us had read about them in our undergraduate psychology or sociology courses and referred to them as ‘the bank wiring room experiments’. This immediately prompted a tendency for conference participants to refer to spurious jargon terms to try to catch each other out! (I sometimes wonder if we ever grow up!) Of course, in medicine, the ‘Hawthorne Effect’ is known as and is referred to as … that's right, the ‘Placebo Effect’.
And that is why we tend to expect experiments involving humans to have at least two arms, one of which will involve a ‘control situation’ or a ‘placebo group’ who do not receive an active intervention or treatment.
For further reading on this topic, try Fox, Brennan, and Chasen (2008), Kolata (1998), Landsberger (1958), Levitt and List (2011), and McCarney, Warner, and Iliffe, et al. (2007).
Example 1: Martin Seligman's Learned Helplessness Experiments
Martin Seligman is one of my psychology heroes. In his early research, he was doing some experiments involving Pavlovian conditioning in dogs. These involved restraining dogs in a ‘Pavlovian hammock’ and giving them conditioning in which tones (sounds) were followed by electric shocks which were painful but not damaging. These shocks could not be avoided – no matter what the dog did. They were inescapable – uncontrollable. Afterwards the dogs were put in a ‘shuttle box’ (Figure 2.5). This was a large box divided into two sections with a dog‐shoulder high barrier in the middle. The floor had a grid which could be electrified on either or both sides. Seligman (1975) eloquently describes his initial results.
When placed in a shuttle box, an experimentally naïve dog, at the onset of the first electric shock, runs frantically about until it accidentally scrambles over the barrier and escapes the shock. On the next trial, the dog, running frantically, crosses the barrier more quickly than on the preceding trial; within a few trials it becomes very efficient at escaping, and soon learns to avoid shock altogether. After about fifty trials the dog becomes nonchalant and stands in front of the barrier; at the onset of the signal for shock it leaps gracefully across and never gets shocked again.
A dog that had first been given inescapable shock showed a strikingly different pattern. This dog's first reactions to shock in the shuttle box were much the same as of a naïve dog; it ran about frantically for about thirty seconds. But then it stopped moving; to our surprise, it lay down and quietly whined. After one minute of this we turned the shock off; the dog had failed to cross the barrier and had not escaped from shock. On the next trial, the dog did it again; at first it struggled a bit, and then, after a few seconds, it seemed to give up and to accept the shock passively. On all succeeding trials, the dog failed to escape. This is the paradigmatic learned‐helplessness finding. (Seligman, 1975).
FIGURE 2.5 Shuttlebox design.
Seligman demonstrated from this and later work on human subject that learned helplessness saps the motivation to initiate responses; disrupts the ability to learn; and produces emotional disturbance. That is, it has three levels of effect:
motivational
cognitive
emotional.
He went on to show how this effected people in real life and that this could even be implicated in depression and death. Read his book Learned Helplessness: On Depression, Development, and Death (1975); in addition to being educational, it is a thoroughly good read!
Don Hiroto (Hiroto 1974; Hiroto and Seligman 1974) worked on learned helplessness research in humans – using the universally accepted subjects: university students. Now, you can't put humans into shuttle‐boxes, they are too unwieldy and dangerous. But they designed a ‘finger shuttle box’. This was a small box with two compartments into which the research subject could insert her/his finger. There was a low barrier in the middle and the subjects could move their fingers from one side to the other. Another approach was to use a four‐button board. This was a simple board with four buttons, a green light (to indicate success), and a red light (to indicate failure). Pushing any button four times made the noise stop immediately in the ‘control’ group, but not if they were in the ‘helpless’ group when no amount of button pushing could stop the noise. He used a triadic design – with subjects being randomly assigned to one of three groups. An escape group were given loud noise which could be turned off by pushing a button. A yoked group got the same loud noise as the escape group, but they had no control over it. The third group got no noise. Subjects in a yoked group are linked to the subjects in the experimental group, but have no control over the stimuli they are given. Next, all were taken to a finger shuttle