One of the interesting stories that came out, you might have heard of this thing called the Hawthorne effect. Yeah. Now. So the superficial sort of story of the Hawthorne effect is that, and this was done in the early part of the 20th century by Elton Mayo, and some other people from the Harvard Business School. And they did this on the relay assembly test road of the Western Electric plant in Hawthorne, Illinois. So the superficial story is that worker productivity is tied to changing environmental conditions. And we had this whole controlled experiment thing where they affected the level of white and the level of this kind of thing. But the really interesting part of the story is it didn't matter what you did, it went up, as long as you did something. As long as you did something,
It was the paying attention that had the effect.
Some, so that the human relations School of Management took this to mean that if you treat workers nice, they will be more productive. And the other what I would call, sort of the cognitive science interpretation when cognitive science didn't exist then, but if it had, the interpretation would be if you get their attention, they do what you want. And that's what they did. that they turn the lights up, productivity went up to turn Lights down, productivity went up. They made the place noisier, productivity went up, they made the price quieter, productivity went up. So my conclusion from that was that they weren't… what workers want is to understand that you're paying attention. Yeah. So the most important thing with respect to dealing with a pandemic, is the students wanted to know that the instructor was mindful of how big a change this was now. |