What happened at Hawthorne?
Parsons reanalysed overlooked evidence from the relay assembly test room at Hawthorne and argued that the steady rise in output pointed to feedback on performance combined with financial reward, favouring operant conditioning as the explanation. He defined the Hawthorne effect as the confounding that arises when experimenters fail to account for how the consequences of subjects' performance shape their behaviour, and suggested studying the phenomenon in its own right and extending it to worker motivation.
Parsons reanalysed overlooked evidence from the relay assembly test room at Hawthorne and argued that the steady rise in output pointed to feedback on performance combined with financial reward, favouring operant conditioning as the explanation. He defined the Hawthorne effect as the confounding that arises when experimenters fail to account for how the consequences of subjects' performance shape their behaviour, and suggested studying the phenomenon in its own right and extending it to worker motivation.
Written from the abstract as shown on PubMed (PMID 17756742), 2026-11-02.
What our sources record
Recorded when this source was checked, figures included, with page references and quotation marks removed.
Parsons, H. M. (1974). “What happened at Hawthorne?” Science, 183(4128), 922-932. doi:10.1126/science.183.4128.922 https://doi.org/10.1126/science.183.4128.922