Our family was chosen recently as a Nielsen family, filling out the diaries about our viewing habits during one week. It’s surprising to me that the system is basically unchanged since my family did it when I was about 10. (Yes, they had television back then)

With my wife and daughter on a mission trip and my son not watching TV, it was basically a record of my viewing. I was interested to see how aware that made me of what I was watching. I don’t watch a lot of TV (everyone says that): an hour or so in the morning and some in the evening. But knowing that someone was going to see what I had watched made me ver self-aware; when I watched 30 minutes of Phineas and Ferb, I wondered what they would think of a 49-year-old cartoon fan.

Years ago, a sociological tendency was discovered, something called the Hawthorn Effect. Here’s a description from another website:

The Hawthorne effect — an increase in worker productivity produced by the psychological stimulus of being singled out and made to feel important.

Individual behaviors may be altered by the study itself, rather than the effects the study is researching was demonstrated in a research project (1927 – 1932) of the Hawthorne plant of the Western Electric Company in Cicero, Illinois. This series of research, first led by Harvard Business School professor Elton Mayo along with associates F. J. Roethlisberger and William J. Dickson started out by examining the physical and environmental influences of the workplace (e.g. brightness of lights, humidity) and later, moved into the psychological aspects (e.g. breaks, group pressure, working hours, managerial leadership). The ideas that this team developed about the social dynamics of groups in the work setting had lasting influence — the collection of data, labor-management relations, and informal interaction among factory employees.

The major finding of the study was that almost regardless of the experimental manipulation employed, the production of the workers seemed to improve. One reasonable conclusion is that the workers were pleased to receive attention from the researchers who expressed an interest in them. The study was only expected to last one year, but because the researchers were set back each time they tried to relate the manipulated physical conditions to the worker’s efficiency, the project extended out to five years.

The Hawthorne Effect isn’t all that it was once thought to be. That is, researchers have discovered that other factors influenced the original study. However, my experience as a Nielsen respondent reminded me that there is some truth to it. People alter their behavior when they know they’re being studied.

Or at least they become more aware of what they do. Even if it’s watching Phineas and Ferb.