Truth and nothing like the truth

The term “Hawthorne Effect” is now widely accepted by social scientists, and is defined by the Oxford Dictionary of Sociology as “The behaviour modifying effect of being the subject of social investigation”, and the writer suggests that this is something journalists need to be aware of, because it threatens to undermine one of our primary tools: the interview. Is the process of interviewing itself altering the answers we receive in interviews? If the Hawthorne Effect is distorting the information we relay to the public in some way, it is our business to know about it. “We must acknowledge the existence of the Hawthorne Effect and integrate the term into our journalistic discourses, debates and training programmes,” she writes. “We must realise that part of what it means to be a good journalist is to be able to understand the Hawthorne Effect, to learn how to employ it when it enriches our journalism and safeguard against it when it threatens to undermine our work.”