The Hawthorne Effect

McCarney, R., Warner, J., Iliffe, S., van Haselen, R., Griffin, M., & Fisher, P. (2007). The Hawthorne Effect: A Randomised, Controlled Trial. BMC Medical Research Methodology.

Type

Journal article

Intellectual base

Primary research

Year

2007

ISSN

1471-2288

DOI

10.1186/1471-2288-7-30

DOI registrant

Springer Nature

Link

https://doi.org/10.1186/1471-2288-7-30

Cited by

4 citations across 4 artifacts.

Each citation links to the sentence it supports in the citing article.

Mechanisms

• Perceptual Rhythm Walkthrough
  • Its failure mode is that observation changes behavior: a participant told to watch for a rhythm attends far harder than a real distracted user ever would, so the walkthrough can certify a pattern that only works when someone is looking for it — a Hawthorne-style artifact of being studied.

    This sourceIdentifies the observed effect as a Hawthorne-style artifact of being studied.

• Pilot Project
  • Its central distortion is that a pilot is watched: the extra attention, the vendor's best team, and the volunteers who opted in all make pilot performance overstate rollout performance.
• Policy Pilot
  • But real-world testing brings the Hawthorne effect and the broader problem of external validity: people who know they are in a closely watched trial may behave differently than a whole population under routine operation.

    This sourceShows that intensive observation and research participation can change outcomes and threaten generalization from a closely watched trial to routine practice.

• Workflow Observation Log
  • Its signature failure mode is the Hawthorne effect: people behave differently when watched, so the presence of an observer can suppress exactly the shortcuts the log exists to find, flattering the workflow into looking more compliant than it is.

Verification

Does it exist? Confirmed. This work's DOI resolves to a registered record, which fixes its identity. That is all it fixes.

Does it back the claim? Not recorded. Neither this nor any other of the 4 citations of this work carries a recorded support check.

Support is checked per citation rather than per work — the same source can be cited soundly in one article and wrongly in another. Per-citation recording began recently, so a citation with no recorded check is a gap in the record rather than evidence it went unchecked.

See how references were verified.

Links previously used in the corpus

Before the registry existed this work was also linked 1 other way.

• https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1936999/ ×1

Registry ID ref:b667ed1bc675 · see in the full table