The Hawthorne Effect And Stanford Priso
Min Jeong Kim
Intro to Sociology
Dec 9, 2014
Professor Woods
The Hawthorne Effect and the Stanford Prison Study
The Hawthorne effect
Researchers need to be aware that subjects’ behavior may change simply because they are getting special attention, as one classic experiment revealed. In the late 1930s, the Western Electric Company hired researchers to investigate worker productivity in its Hawthorne factory near Chicago. One experiment tested the hypothesis that increasing the available lighting would raise worker output. First, researchers measured worker productivity or output (the dependent variable). Then they increased the lighting (the independent variable) and measured output a second time. Productivity had gone up, a result that supported the hypothesis. But when the research team later turned the lighting back down, productivity increased again. In time, the researchers realized that the employees were working harder (even if they could not see as well) simply because people were paying attention to them and measuring their output. From this research, social scientists coined the term Hawthorne effect to refer to a change in a subject’s behavior caused simply by the awareness of being studied. In conclusion, the aptitudes of individuals are imperfect predictors of job performance. Although they give some indication of the physical and mental potential of the individual, the amount produced is strongly influenced by social factors.
The Stanford Prison Experiment Prisons can be violent settings, but is this due simply to the “bad” people who end up there? Or as Phillip Zimbardo suspected, does the prison itself somehow generate violent behavior? This question led Zimbardo to devise a fascinating experiment, which he called the “Stanford County Prison”. Zimbardo thought that once inside a prison, even emotionally healthy people are likely to engage in violence. Thus Zimbardo treated the prison setting as the independent variable capable of causing
Intro to Sociology
Dec 9, 2014
Professor Woods
The Hawthorne Effect and the Stanford Prison Study
The Hawthorne effect
Researchers need to be aware that subjects’ behavior may change simply because they are getting special attention, as one classic experiment revealed. In the late 1930s, the Western Electric Company hired researchers to investigate worker productivity in its Hawthorne factory near Chicago. One experiment tested the hypothesis that increasing the available lighting would raise worker output. First, researchers measured worker productivity or output (the dependent variable). Then they increased the lighting (the independent variable) and measured output a second time. Productivity had gone up, a result that supported the hypothesis. But when the research team later turned the lighting back down, productivity increased again. In time, the researchers realized that the employees were working harder (even if they could not see as well) simply because people were paying attention to them and measuring their output. From this research, social scientists coined the term Hawthorne effect to refer to a change in a subject’s behavior caused simply by the awareness of being studied. In conclusion, the aptitudes of individuals are imperfect predictors of job performance. Although they give some indication of the physical and mental potential of the individual, the amount produced is strongly influenced by social factors.
The Stanford Prison Experiment Prisons can be violent settings, but is this due simply to the “bad” people who end up there? Or as Phillip Zimbardo suspected, does the prison itself somehow generate violent behavior? This question led Zimbardo to devise a fascinating experiment, which he called the “Stanford County Prison”. Zimbardo thought that once inside a prison, even emotionally healthy people are likely to engage in violence. Thus Zimbardo treated the prison setting as the independent variable capable of causing