Tag
hawthorne_effect
4 findings
EducationGift Exchange and Hawthorne CounterfactualsNo significant differences in teacher absence or teaching activity were found between treatment and control groups in Year 1 or Year 2; moreover, contract teacher interventions yielded cumulative two-year gains twice as large as one-year gains, ruling out general novelty decay.RCTEconomics (general)Hawthorne Effect Control via Diagnostic-Only Counterfactual DesignControl plants achieved only a 12 percentage point increase in management practice adoption (versus 37.8 percentage points in treatment plants) and exhibited no significant reduction in quality defects or major productivity gains, confirming that observer presence alone did not drive performance improvements.RCTMethods & evidenceHawthorne Effect Mitigation in Phone SurveysStandardized fortnightly phone surveys collected reliable longitudinal search data without generating detectable Hawthorne or priming effects, preserving true treatment-control contrast across survey rounds.Observational StudyEducationHawthorne Transitory Performance DecayInitial short-term test score gains of 0.28 to 0.47 standard deviations decayed to a persistent gain of approximately 0.10 standard deviations one year post-program, revealing significant transitory effort components.RCT