The Hawthorne effect is named after a pattern in 1920s factory lighting data that nobody checked against the records for eighty years — when two economists finally found the originals, the famous result was not in them

The Hawthorne effect is named after a pattern in 1920s factory lighting data that nobody checked against the records for eighty years — when two economists finally found the originals, the famous result was not in them

The Hawthorne effect is one of the most cited findings in social science, and for most of its life nobody went back to look at the numbers it was built on. The story is familiar from psychology textbooks, management seminars and workplace training decks: in the 1920s, researchers at Western Electric’s Hawthorne Works factory in Cicero, Illinois, changed the lighting for a group of workers assembling telephone relays. Productivity went up. Then, …