单选题
In 1924 America"s National Research Council sent two engineers to supervise a series of industrial experiments at a large telephone-parts factory called the Hawthorne Plant near Chicago. It hoped they would learn how shop-floor lighting
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workers" productivity. Instead, the studies ended
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giving their name to the "Hawthorne effect", the extremely influential idea that the very
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to being experimented upon changed subjects" behavior.
The idea arose because of the
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behavior of the women in the Hawthorne plant. According to
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of the experiments, their hourly output rose when lighting was increased, but also when it was dimmed. It did not
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what was done in the experiment;
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something was changed, productivity rose. A(n)
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that they were being experimented upon seemed to be
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to alter workers" behavior
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itself.
After several decades, the same data were
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to econometric analysis. Hawthorne experiments had another surprise in store.
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the descriptions on record, no systematic
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was found that levels of productivity were related to changes in lighting.
It turns out that peculiar way of conducting the experiments may be have let to
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interpretation of what happed.
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, lighting was always changed on a Sunday. When work started again on Monday, output
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rose compared with the previous Saturday and
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to rise for the next couple of days.
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, a comparison with data for weeks when there was no experimentation showed that output always went up on Monday, workers
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to be diligent for the first few days of the week in any case, before
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a plateau and then slackening off. This suggests that the alleged "Hawthorne effect" is hard to pin down.