364. Unmasking the Hawthorne Effect: Improving Performance and Motivation (Refreshed Episode)

Welcome to episode 364 of the Brainy Business.

Understanding the Psychology of why People Buy.

Today's episode is all about the Hawthorne Effect.

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Let's get started.

You are listening to the Brainy Business podcast, where we dig into the psychology of why people buy and help you incorporate behavioral economics into your business, making it more brain friendly. Now, here's your host, Melina Palmer.

Hello.

Hello, everyone.

My name is Melina Palmer and I want to welcome you to the Brainy Business Podcast. Today's episode is digging in on something known as the Hawthorne Effect.

To share a little of what this.

Means, I want you to imagine you.

Are a manager at a large company.

You're a few rungs down the corporate.

Ladder, you're leading a meeting for your team, when all of a sudden the CEO comes in and says, oh, don't mind me.

I'm just a fly on the wall. Act as you normally would. Pretend I'm not here.

Yeah, right.

Of course, the CEO being in the room has an impact in the same way a parent being in the room impacts the behavior of their kids. And a consultant observing a team will impact their behavior. Or a researcher. This is all the root of the Hawthorne Effect, which is the focus of today's episode. I refreshed this one today because of the guest you're going to hear from in this upcoming Friday's episode. Felicity Heathcote Marks is back, and when.

She was on the show the first.

Time around, we discussed her work in ethnographic research and specifically talked about the Hawthorne Effect.

So it felt like a good time to go ahead and refresh this one.

As you think about research and experiments and how behavior may change when people know they're being watched, including you, your team members, your customers, and more.

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Brainy Business podcast, now's a great time to hit that subscribe button wherever you.

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Miss that episode with Felicity or any others.

And don't forget that there are links.

For everything, including past episodes, books and articles, all waiting for you in the show. Notes for this episode, which are found within the app you're listening to and at the brainy business.com,364. All right, let's talk about the Hawthorne Effect.

This effect is named after a series of tests done at Western Electric's Hawthorne location back in the 1920s. The aim of the study was to see how changes in worker conditions would impact productivity, and it was one of the first bits of research to look at incorporating worker opinions and mindset into the company's planning process. Most all the companies at that time saw factory workers as an extension of the machines they were working on, helping or hindering productivity. There were long hours and difficult conditions, Attempts to squeeze every ounce of production out of the day, machines and people working them. Workers were also closely supervised by autocratic leadership and often had no benefits. Hawthorne was progressive and ahead of its time, One of the few places offering benefits for their factory workers, including vacations after five years and sickness or disability pay. In 1924, the Hawthorne location was part of a study to see how the brightness of lighting would impact output. The theory was that brighter light would help people to work faster, and the study did show that. But output also improved among those who had no difference in the lighting and those whose lights were dimmed, in some cases down to the point of candlelight. Every change resulted in increased output, which was puzzling, of course, and the experiments were scrapped. A few years later, Hawthorne started a new experiment with Harvard to see how relays could be created more efficiently. They brought six women into the study, which lasted more than five years. They were in a special area that was under observation, and they were able to provide feedback and thoughts as they tried out different timing for rest periods, longer and shorter work days, incentives and other interventions. Productivity was up 30% for the group, and they expanded to other areas across the company. But what caused the difference? Was it a certain time of day for the breaks or a magic number of hours to work? No, the studies concluded that one big difference was being able to provide input, having an ability to be treated as a human person with opinions and worth, which resulted in a revolution of changes in working conditions far beyond the Hawthorne location and Western Electric over the decades that followed. The other important piece of information from these studies is the finding that when people know they're being watched, and especially when they know what the researchers are looking for, it biases the results. If you tell a group of workers, we're going to be testing to see which lighting makes people more productive, and we'll be watching you 10 people very closely, which is why you're going to come into this special room every day. It impacts the speed that people work. When modern researchers have looked back on the data from the original Hawthorne studies, they did find some issues. For one thing, there were too many factors being changed at once, and that likely influenced the outcome of the research. Let's look at the small group of women that had the five years or so getting special treatment compared to the Other workers on the main floor, they were able to have their voices heard, yes, but they also received incentive pay, had better working conditions, and had a lot of motivation to do a good job to ensure they kept their status on this special team, even if it wouldn't have been a real consequence for them. Do you think these ladies would have some version of an I better do an extra good job because if I don't, I might get sent back to the main floor and they'll bring in someone else mentality? They might not have known it consciously, but that pressure to keep status might have pushed them to work harder than those in ordinary conditions, or even what they themselves would have been doing in ordinary conditions. While those more modern evaluations of the data have found there was more going on than met bi the Hawthorne Effect was still present, just to a smaller degree. So what exactly is it? In its simplest form, the Hawthorne Effect is saying that when people know they're being observed or that there's an experiment taking place, it changes their behavior. To put it another way, the mere act of doing an experiment often impacts the results. As with every concept I talk about here on the show, there's good and bad on both sides of this and times where you would want to have people know they're being watched, and others where you want to do everything possible to avoid having them know they're being watched and why. Let's start with the times you don't want people to know they're being watched or observed. If you're trying to find out what people naturally do, you're running an experiment of some kind and want to see if a small change can impact behavior. You do not want those involved in the test, those you're observing to to be biased and change their actions simply because they're being tested. You wouldn't go out and tell everybody you want to see and prove that red buttons are more likely to be clicked on than green buttons because it's going to impact the results. And this is why so many research studies I talk about on the show will have that caveat of people didn't realize this was what the researchers were actually looking for. But the true intent of a behavioral or psychological study like this will often be hidden within the experiment itself. You're told you're doing a word sorting task, but don't know how your word list is different from the words that others got. You think it's to see how quickly you're able to unscramble and sort words, but it's actually looking at how the words themselves primed your actions in a later step in the process that seemed mundane. Like to go down the hall and tell the professor that you're done. They want to know if the rude words you were primed with will make you more likely to interrupt the professor while they're having a seemingly random conversation with another student. But you don't know that. This lets the researchers know if the rude words make people behave differently than those with considerate words or unrelated words. To see how priming works, if the participants were told we're looking to see how quickly people will interrupt when they're primed with different types of words, just act natural. We'll look at the results ourselves. It would completely bias the behavior even if people didn't consciously realize it. And it sounds really ridiculous when I point it out in this way. But think about how often you do this in your own business and life that you tell people what you're looking for and that's probably having an impact on what you end up seeing and finding. Other studies have shown that when people know what the researchers are looking for, they will on some level give a little extra effort to help prove them right. So if it is important that you get a natural view of what's going on in the brain or behavior, you want to be as incognito as you can. This is why companies hire secret shoppers to come in and go through a buying experience in the same way anyone coming in off the street would go through. If the head of customer service comes in and says, hi, I'm from corporate and I'm testing the experience our customers have, will you help me as if.

I were a regular customer?

No special treatment. There's no way the data they get will be impartial and unbiased, right? That employee may go above and beyond to prove their worth, try to justify their job. Maybe they've been looking for an opportunity to get a promotion and want a powerful connection or just don't want to look incompetent so they go the extra mile when they know they are being watched and why they behave differently. I used to do branch visits at the credit union all the time where I would go hang out for anywhere from two to four hours or a full day in each location. I made it to every branch once a quarter and would mostly watch and listen. What questions were people asking? How were staff answering those questions? Where were they finding their materials to help make the point? When did they struggle? What made people happy or frustrated? How long did each step take when did people take breaks to chat? What were they talking about in earshot of customers? Some of these I was taking mental notes on. Sometimes I would ask a follow up question like how'd you know they really wanted X? Or why did you use this form instead of that one? Never judging or accusatory, always curious. Because I came in regularly, they got more comfortable with me over time. The first visits were shorter, those two hour ones. Saying hello, letting the team know who I was asking and answering more surface level questions. Just listening to them, finding out their pain points and proving I was there to help and learn as they saw the benefits of providing feedback. Maybe a feature on the intranet that said Anna in the west side branch made this suggestion and now we've made the process easier for everyone. Thanks so much. Anna made it so people were more open to having conversations with me at the beginning of any visit. There was a period of time where people would have that Hawthorne Effect impact, where they're clearly modifying their behavior because someone from the corporate office offices there. And that's why I stayed for a longer period of time. Eventually, and quicker than you might think, people get used to you being there. It's like nature photographers going out into the habitat to get shots. When you first arrive, everything is scared off, but once you've been around for a bit, they acclimate and get back to normal. You blend into the background. They knew I was there, but it didn't impact them as much after a while. So I could see more of how things truly were. In a few weeks, there's going to be an interview on the show with an ethnographer named Felicity Heathcote Marks, who gives some great tips on how she overcomes the Hawthorne Effect in her research. One of those tips is that it's better to be in with the team without breaks as much as you can, to become one of them and have this effect where they let their guard down than it is to be sporadic. So if you want to see how a team really works, it's better to spend three straight days with them than it is to come by every Thursday for a month. A solid day that you're investing is better than two hours here and two hours over there and two hours next week. And if you're looking for something specific in those visits, don't tell the people on the team what you're trying to do whenever it can be avoided. I know not everyone has this luxury, but when I went to do those branch visits I spoke about earlier, I didn't have a specific agenda. I went to watch, learn, ask questions, get to know people, and just see what things were like. So I might sit in the lobby and flip through a magazine for an hour, watching, listening, taking mental notes, learning things I can follow up on later, but trying not to impact the natural flow when I could avoid it. If I was to say, we're thinking about getting rid of all the brochures and so I want to see if anyone is really using them, loss aversion will kick in and people will make sure to hand out extra brochures while I'm there to prove they need them. If I'm just watching for a few hours, I can see that no one uses the brochures and no one was.

Primed to look for opportunities to hand them out.

Now, what about the times when you want to let people know you're watching? Stanford University did some research in a clothing manufacturing plant in India in 2012, and they sorted their tasks into simple and complex to see if it made a difference on whether being monitored had a positive or negative impact on productivity. In this case, the monitoring was done by including RFID tags that the workers would scan before and after their task to record how long it took and the total number of units they produced in a day or an hour, whatever.

That happens to be.

They found that for the simple tasks, the monitoring helped boost productivity because the workers made a game out of accomplishing the tasks so they wouldn't get bored. This is your oh, I did 25 in the last hour. I bet I can do 26 this time mentality. For those simple tasks, when you incorporated monitoring, productivity went up 10%. For those with more complex tasks, productivity went down by 8.5%. When they were being monitored, those workers felt that monitoring was too controlling and it impacted their ability to do a good job. They felt rushed, which created stressful time pressure. So with simple tasks that can get monotonous, monitoring that encourages gamification can be really helpful in boosting productivity and making it more fun. For workers with more complex stuff, it may make it so people feel threatened that they're scared they might be punished if they mess up or make them focus too narrowly on things that might not be fully important. As you know from episode 89 on the focusing illusion, things feel much more important when you're thinking about them than they may be otherwise. And people may create their own story for why you're monitoring them. Even if you explain transparently what you're doing, say you put it out there that you're doing the monitoring so you can have more accurate time logs to determine how many people you want to hire for a new plant you're opening in a completely different city. They might read into it and think you're just tricking them and trying to force them to work faster and be more efficient, that their jobs might be at risk. They might focus on the wrong things, and it can just be stressful. So it's important to be careful when you introduce monitoring of any kind. And that doesn't mean you should never monitor those doing more complex tasks, but it is more important to involve them in the process when you can. Maybe those are times you want to ask for their input and opinion so they can explain why they do it a certain way and what matters to them in the process. Before you set up the monitoring and tracking, and when you're digging deeper, asking more personal questions, it's important to incorporate anonymity when you can, so people know that they can be forthcoming and honest with you. You just like you're being honest with them. And remember that being treated well and being involved in that process was determined to be a big reason why the Hawthorne studies had such a big impact on productivity in the first place. This is partially the IKEA effect as well, where letting people be involved in the process can help them value the entire experience higher. Here are a couple other examples where it can be good to let people know they're being monitored. One very simple example is that having security cameras can deter theft. If people know they're being watched, they'll act differently than if they thought no one would ever know or find out. You can also use monitoring to encourage good behavior. Say if people know the boss's boss is coming down for a visit, they might be more likely to clean and be on their best behavior. But of course you can't do this too often because much like the flip side of the observation in my branch visits where people acclimate to me being there, if you monitor too many things or have these visits all the time so it feels like it's normal, the staff will become more immune to them and they won't have an impact. That was another key piece of the Hawthorne studies. The boost in productivity happened in all cases, like with the lights, when you turn them up, down, or kept them the same. People had increased productivity during the study, but they basically went back to normal when they got back to the normal work environment. This led to a whole host of researchers over the decades using the Hawthorne effect as a sort of catch all for when a study didn't do what you expected it to do. While we were hoping people would be more productive, but they were less so.

They must have known what we were.

Doing and it was probably just a Hawthorne Effect so we can move forward with implementation because I'm sure it would work in practice. Confirmation bias, anyone? Be careful when you have a hypothesis or are going in with a goal to make sure you aren't too focused on finding the outcome you're looking for. You can be biasing your own results and making yourself less likely to see the real problem or solution because it doesn't align with what you were looking to prove. And it's been shown that researchers can subtly give hints at what they're actually looking for if they're too focused on those things, which can again, bias the results by encouraging people to act in a certain way. If your results don't show what you expected, don't be so quick to write it off as a Hawthorne Effect issue. Look for opportunities to understand it further and see what that result means. If it is true, why did it happen? What can you learn from it? How can you test further? Is there a motivation or incentive you may have missed that's influencing behavior? Digging deeper is always a good idea. And now that you know how the Hawthorne Effect can be helpful and how it can be a hindrance, you have the opportunity to learn about your teams and hopefully boost morale, productivity, efficiency, and so much more.

So what got your brain buzzing as you learned about the Hawthorne Effect today?

For me, I think it is so.

Important to consider how we're impacting those around us in all ways. Yes, when we're physically in the room or someone otherwise knows they're being watched, but also in all the little aspects of behavioral design, those things we don't think should matter, but absolutely do. The basis of behavioral science and why behavioral economics is even a thing. Nudges are all around us. And it's important to know the impact of that our choices have on others. As you gain in your influence in an organization or otherwise, your impact grows when people know you're there, or that you could be there, or that you might see something later on. What I love about this too is.

That people may say they aren't impacted.

They may believe they're being unbiased. But as some of the research showed about unintentionally changing our behavior to help help the researcher find what they're looking for, even explaining what you think will be the case or what you're trying to prove can impact the results. It's fascinating how all this comes into play and something that you should always consider when setting up experiments, looking into data, meeting with teams, or considering how things really are. Whatever that means. Just because you don't experience something because it hasn't been that way for you, doesn't mean it isn't the way things are. This is a great opportunity to try and step outside of our own confirmation bias and the focusing illusion and try to take in the perspectives of others even if they're different than your own. Especially if they're different than your own. I know from having conversations with academic researchers and doctoral students it's become common to try and write anything and everything off as the Hawthorne Effect, and I think it is important to not go too far in that direction either. It isn't that nothing is real and no data can be trusted, but it is important to consider as many factors as you can. Look at the context before you move forward with the data or insights you gain from something. Be aware of who was in the room, what might have been different than normal, what translates and what may be different when this thing goes out into the wild. And in that case, if things don't.

Go as you planned or what your.

Research said would happen, don't assume it was all for naught. But look to the Hawthorne Effect as one possible source of what was going on and see how you might tweak your next test, experiment meeting, etc. And as you think about running that experiment, whatever it may be, be sure to tune into this upcoming Friday's episode with Dr. Felicity Heathcote Marks, an ethnographic.

Researcher who knows all about the Hawthorne Effect.

My first interview with her, where we specifically talk about the Hawthorne Effect is linked for you in the show notes as well, along with links to other related past episodes, articles on the Hawthorne Effect books, a timestamp summary of the episode, and more. It's all waiting for you in the app you're listening to and atthe brainy business.com 36 and just like that, episode 364 on the Hawthorne Effect is done.

Join me Friday for a brand new.

Episode with Dr. Felicity Heathcote Marks.

It's going to be a lot of fun. You don't want to miss it. Until then, thanks again for listening and.

Learning with me and remember to be thoughtful.

Thank you for listening to the Brainy Business podcast. Molina offers virtual strategy sessions, workshops and other services to help businesses be more brain friendly. For more free resources, visit thebrainybusiness. Com.