Imagine it’s a slow day at the office. Maybe you’re scrolling through an online sale, or firing off a couple quick texts to a friend. Perhaps spending a couple extra minutes around the water cooler, chatting with coworkers about current events. Just as you’re getting a little too comfortable, the CEO pops up next to your desk, or asks the water cooler crew what everybody’s talking about. You’d quickly click out of our non-work related windows, shove your phone in your pocket and start frantically typing, or say something like “just prepping for tomorrow’s big meeting!” when really you’d just been debating the true compatibility of your favorite celebrity couple.
This is the Hawthrone effect in-action. It’s named after workplace experiments originally conducted at Western Electric’s Hawthorne Works electric company just outside of Hawthorne, Illinois in the 1920s and 30s. The company had commissioned research from Henry A. Landsberger to determine the effect of various environmental factors on worker productivity.
The hardest-hitting finding of Landsberger’s research was that workers were briefly more productive when they were aware of the fact that they were being observed. This phenomenon has been applied to a number of areas, from healthcare to education. But in the context of traditional market research, the Hawthorne effect manifests as a conscious bias.
The Hawthorne effect makes it so that participants of traditional types of market research, especially in focus groups, will make assumptions about the purpose of the study they’re part of or because of the fact that they’re being observed and intentionally alter their behavior or performance as a result. This makes for inaccurate findings that don’t reflect the true behavior or preferences of the consumer.
We’re going to unpack exactly how the Hawthorne effect functions as a bias, as well as how you can use modern market research methods to not just work around it, but eliminate it entirely.
In a workplace context, it makes sense to assume that your boss wants you to be productive.
You’re motivated to appear as someone who is always actively productive when on the clock, even if you’re not, because it feels like your job depends on it. Our imaginary CEO from earlier probably wouldn’t have fired you on the spot for socializing with your coworkers, and may even have gladly shared their own opinions about your favorite celebrity couple, but their position causes you to think twice before being yourself. When consumers participate in market research studies, they make similar assumptions.
When participants make assumptions about why you’re conducting research, The Hawthrone effect can act as an umbrella for other, less conscious biases, like acquiescence. As an example, you might be conducting research to gauge how much people care about the nutritional value of your snacks to determine the messaging of your next campaign. The participant might assume that you’re developing an entirely new, healthier snack, causing them to respond to questions from a totally different context that’s based more in their desire for a new product, not their existing behavior.
Things like incentives can create motivations to appear a certain way, creating workplace-adjacent assumptions in the consumer that skew your data, where the researcher is seen as having an authority that causes the participant to act or answer in ways that they think will please the researcher.
Performative when watched
As we’ve explored in our deep-dive on the observer effect, we just act differently when we know we’re being watched, and even more so when we’re aware that we’re going to be watched.
We tend to prepare, anticipate questions, and even when we delineate from the script we wrote in our heads, it tends to be more out of nervousness or other biases creeping in.
Traditional market researchers might try to curb this aspect of the Hawthrone effect with less "obtrusive" observation methods, or keeping hypotheses confidential from participants, or by putting participants in comfortable, familiar-feeling settings. These attempts are made in effort to get participants to respond as naturally as possible, in hopes that they’ll forget they’re being watched and their responses recorded, but they’re still not getting to that root of the issue.
These efforts may mitigate the level to which the Hawthorne effect can manifest, but that’s not enough to claim truly clean data. As long as the participant is made aware of the fact that they’re being observed, that they’re part of a study, the effects of this bias will always be present.
The Hawthrone effect functions as a bias in that it causes consumers who are aware of their participation in a study to respond inorganically based on their assumptions and the knowledge that they’re being watched.
In the wild research circumvents the Hawthrone effect entirely by removing the participant’s awareness that they’re contributing to a market research study. Our research goes in-feed, where consumers already are — on and off the clock — to collect unfiltered thoughts and responses unaffected by anyone looking over their shoulders.