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Hawthorn Effect

By Kendra Van Wagner, About.com

Definition: A term referring to the tendency of some people to work harder and perform better when they are participants in an experiment. Individuals may change their behavior due to the attention they are receiving from researchers rather than because of any manipulation of independent variables.

This effect was first discovered and named by researchers at Harvard University who were studying the relationship between productivity and work environment. Researchers conducted these experiments at the Hawthorn Plant of Western Electric and found that productivity increased due to attention from the research team and not because of changes to the experimental variable.

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