Review Question - QID 103896

The phenomenon in which study participants change their behavior when they are aware that they are being observed is called the Hawthorne effect.

The Hawthorne effect is also called the observer-expectancy effect. More generally it refers to the tendency of people to adjust their behavior towards what they believe is expected of them when they are aware that they are being studied. It is named after the Hawthorne Works, an electric factory outside Chicago where occupational psychological studies investigated the effects of changing lighting on worker productivity. It was noticed that even negligible changes in lighting produced short term gains in productivity, a finding which was eventually chalked up to the fact that workers were responding both to being studied and to the interest being shown in them. Such a bias can alter the results of the study, leading to an incorrect conclusion about the effect of an intervention, such as either exaggerating an actual effect or making an effect appear to be present when it would not otherwise (type I error).

Incorrect Answers:
Answer 1: Selection bias most commonly causes concern when the likelihood of having the outcome affects the probability of a patient being sampled for the study.
Answer 3: Recall bias most commonly affects retrospective studies in which the likelihood that a patient will remember their exposure status is altered by their disease status.
Answer 4: The Pygmalion effect occurs when an investigator inadvertently conveys his desired result to the participant, who then alters his behavior accordingly. This is also known as the expectancy effect.
Answer 5: Lead time bias spuriously increases disease survival with earlier detection of disease during the asymptomatic period.