What Caused the Hawthorne Effect?

Abstract

The studies that produced the Hawthorne effect have been the biggest Rorschach blot in behavioral and social science. Commentators read into them their own identifications of the confounding variable that caused a progressive rise in worker's production rates. But the clues to the real perpetrator of the Hawthorne effect were there all the time. Scientific detective work has yielded hard evidence showing that the workers were systematically receiving information feedback, i.e., knowledge of results about their output rates. The same research on research brought into greater prominence an accomplice, a method of piecework payment whereby the workers earned more when they worked faster. Together, information feedback and differential reward could account for the gradually increasing productivity, especially in an explanatory framework of response shaping in operant conditioning. After the solution to the Hawthorne mystery was published, it was learned that the perpetrator had been identified years earlier by an eminent psychologist who had worked briefly in the Hawthorne studies, but the word never got around. Industry should be interested in the implications, which support the proliferating use of behavior modification to increase productivity.