Hawthorne effect | Hacker News Reader

Hawthorne effect

en.wikipedia.org

68 pointsHooke47 comments

The book The Effective Executive recommends keeping detailed logs of your activity for two weeks so you can better understand where your time goes. I did that and found that keeping those logs made me far more focused and productive. Knowing I would have to write down “spent 6 minutes looking for the perfect song to listen to” or “argued with people online about politics for 14 minutes” kept me on task like nothing else. It’s unsustainable but it was a nice short-term productivity boost.

> It’s unsustainable but [...]

I was nodding along, including to this bit — and then I thought, why? It echoes my experience of finding it hard to stick to processes like these even when I find the results not just useful but also gratifying. I guess there's something about it that I resist? The sacrifice of spontaneity perhaps? Why do _you_ say it is unsustainable?

I've often thought that the most impactful productivity tool for me would be a personal assistant reminding me to follow procedures that I'd previously decided were a good idea. Or barring that, a software equivalent. A personal digital assistant, if you will.

Well, it felt unsustainable to me. Logging everything by hand was very tedious and it would have been a real pain to keep it up long term.

Maybe I could do it if I had some good tools to make the logging easier. I know lawyers are often required to log where their time goes in 15 minute increments, so it’s possible those tools already exist. I should take some time to look into what’s out there.

We’re human beings, not machines. We didn’t evolve with the capacity for 100% focused productivity all the time. Our energy levels ebb and flow. We have to physically move to keep our muscles and bones healthy.

But that in itself doesn't seem to be in conflict with "log everything". Unless you're suggesting that logging everything makes you try to be more productive than you should be, and maybe those YouTube breaks and arguing with people on the internet about politics are actually useful breaks or something that make the overall experience more sustainable? I.e. maybe a lot of the stuff you kinda regret when you look back on it actually served an important purpose?

I don't actually believe one way or the other particularly strongly. There's just something about the outcome that bothers me because I don't understand it.

> Unless you're suggesting that logging everything makes you try to be more productive than you should be

That was my point. Thanks for wording it better than I could.

Works for dieting too. People hilariously underestimate how many calories they consume on a daily basis… until they have to record them all.

Dieting is really odd. It seems like a lot of people are both trying to lose weight, and making an effort to remind themselves to eat even if they aren't hungry.

I wonder if automated collection of daily activity - for self-evaluation only - perhaps through home automation or wearables - might help self-correct negative patterns or correlations.

A lot of people "waste time" when they are tired or under the weather. They may not realize that's why. If it's why, telling them they are "wasting time" probably won't have much effect.

Agreed. The thought is more about achieving insights like that. An example "Although you enjoy that horror series, you tend to sleep less well after watching it." These kinds of insights.

I'm fully aware of why I'm too tired to concentrate. It has nothing to do with watching horror movies.

I'm always genuinely surprised when I see things like "Studies show that watching horror movies before bedtime interferes with sleep." because that seems so obvious, I just can't imagine studying it. To me, that's like launching a study to determine if water is wet.

Confused by this whole interaction. The idea is to use AI + automated data collection to detect and surface patterns and correlations of behavior in order to improve quality of life.

Did you think this was somehow directed at you, personally?

I'm not so sure, I remember being unable to sleep after watching 'The Mummy' in my early teens because I found the idea of scarabs crawling under my skin particularly horrific, but haven't really noticed an effect since. I imagine horror movies may actually be better than more cheerful movies because they tend to involve dark scenes that probably don't mess with melatonin production as much.

I would like to see that study happen, I think the outcome might surprise (especially if they compare several different genres).

Oh man I feel like I had exact same outcome for that experiment. Also when logging your food for nutritional analysis I ate much healthier food during period of logging.

I found that tracking my income & expenses makes me more thrifty.

The "Hawthorne effect" is a myth, but what keeps the story going?

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17091208/

I've been wondering whether this effect is behind the positive results of 4-day work week trials. Does anyone know about data that could answer this?

Even more so, if they were to do a control group with a 5 day work week, I'm certain the 4 day workers would still deliberately work harder to prove that 4 day work weeks work, thus providing more evidence to convince bosses to implement them.

Perhaps the only way to measure true productivity is to tell people they're on permanent 4 day work week and then pull a sike after the secret measurements are done.

That sounds like a great way to lose good employees.

Related: Social Cooling 2692 points

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24627363

This calls into question most psychological research.

A lot of psychological studies are so poorly designed you can ignore the results completely for other reasons and not worry too much about this effect.

Any study that isn't replicated at least a few times, should be called into question.

That goes double or triple for psychology studies where it's not exception to find that less than half of a set of studies can be replicated: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis#Prevalence

No it doesn't, as psychological studies are done using control groups that, if implemented properly, ought to respond equally to any Hawthorne effect.

Regardless, the results are extrapolated to situations with no Hawthorne effect. So still , much of the research holds only when being observed

The Hawthorne effect doesn't necessarily apply to all people, nor does it affect all behaviors.

For example- it's difficult to poll people on some contentious topics. If you ask people, "Are you racist?" they tend to answer that they are not.

This doesn't call into question most or all polls. It just needs to be taken into account when designing and interpreting polls and especially with certain topics. The same applies to psychological research.

Why?

Is there a tool that indicates how "popular" a Wiki page is? Something like a Google Trends metric of how often the topic is searched for.

I'm not sure about searches, but you can view the metrics for page views: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Pageview_statistics

Thanks for this! I took a peak at traffic to the "artificial general intelligence" page. Quite the surge in traffic for 2023: https://pageviews.wmcloud.org/?project=en.wikipedia.org&plat....

The evidence on Hawthorne Effect is actually pretty poor

https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/critical-thinking-history/...

Reflexivity is like being your own observer, if you think about it. Suggests that we can modify our own behavior we are aware of ourselves, and that individuals lacking reflexivity are more "automatic", so to speak.

The Hawthorne effect is bullshit, but there's got to be a name for whatever effect we experience during white board interviews, where suddenly the awareness of being observed makes you stupid.

Related: https://dictionary.apa.org/experimenter-bias (= Subjects behave in ways that they believe help the experimenter.)

Social research has a sort of quantum uncertainty principle embedded in it: The observer disturbs the observed by the mere act of onbservation.

Panopticon: that surveillance screen hanging at the entrance to Walmart

Jeremy Bentham and his Panopticon would like a word...