Eco_Weekly_考研特刊.docxVIP

Questioning the Hawthorne effect质疑”Hawtorne(霍桑)”效应Light work 照明的作用Jun 4th 2009 From The Economist print editionBeing watched may not affect behaviour, after all总之，被盯着也许并不会影响人的行为WHEN 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 in 1924, it hoped they would learn how shop-floor lighting affected workers’ productivity. Instead, the studies ended up giving their name to the “Hawthorne effect”, the extremely influential idea that the very act of being experimented upon changes subjects’ behaviour.在1924年，当派出两名工程师到一个芝加哥附近的大型电话机部件生产厂商——Hawthorne工厂——来指导一系列产业试验时，美国国家研究委员会（NRC）曾希望他们能够搞清楚工厂照明是如何对工人生产力产生影响的。这些研究以一个被他们命名为Hawthorne效应的结论结束，这个在当时十分具有影响力的结论告诉我们，仅仅是被实验就足以使实验客体的行为发生改变。The idea arose because of the perplexing behaviour of the women who assembled relays and wound coils of wire in the Hawthorne plant. According to accounts of the experiments, their hourly output rose when lighting was increased, but also when it was dimmed. It did not matter what was done; so long as something was changed, productivity rose. An awareness that they were being experimented upon seemed to be enough to alter workers’ behaviour by itself.此结论是从那些组装继电器和盘绕电线圈的产业妇女令人疑惑的行为中得出的。根据实验的记录，无论是加强还是减少照明，她们的每小时产出都会提高。无论做了什么；只要产生了变化，工人们的生产力就会提高。其实人们应该注意到：仅仅是被他人实验本身似乎就足以改变工人的行为。The data from the illumination experiments had never been rigorously analysed and were believed lost. But Steven Levitt and John List, two economists at the University of Chicago, discovered that the data had survived the decades in two archives in Milwaukee and Boston, and decided to subject them to econometric analysis. The Hawthorne experiments had another surprise in store for them. Contrary to the descriptions in the literature, they found no systematic evidence that levels of productivity in the factory rose whenever changes in lighting were implemented. 这些从照明实验中得到的数据从没经过严谨地分析，并且被认为已经遗失了。但是来自芝加哥大学的