a particularly notable discovery that came out of the hawthorne experiments was the hawthorne effect-the discovery that production increases were due to the known presence of benign observers the researcher's concern for and attention to the workers led the workers who naturally wanted to be reciprocally nice to increase production this effect caused great confusion at first because the changing physical conditions seemed to make on difference output just kept going up once they realized that the worker's perception of participation was the causal vari-able the effects of the effect were understood