Fun Size Bytes (from @Tj)

Help Me Find an Article I’ve Already Read

Dear Friends:

Within the past few months I read an article which I am now trying to find again, and cannot.

I was fairly certain that I found it either through Kottke, or Waxy Links or Daring Fireball but I have looked through their various archives and been unable to find it. (On the other hand, I could be wrong and I found it somewhere else.)

The “gist” of the article was talking about behaviors (and perhaps even “productivity”) which was changed simply because it was being monitored.

For example, let’s say you wanted changed all the lightbulbs in your factory from “pale yellow” to “bright white” and wanted to see if that made a different in the happiness/productivity/etc of your employees. If you measured it for a month, you’d find that happiness/productivity/etc had increased; however, if you changed it back from “bright white” to “pale yellow” at some point in the future, you’d find that happiness/productivity/etc had increased again.

The conclusion that this article reached (if I am remembering it correctly) was that effect was caused more by people knowing that things were being monitored (not in a negative “big brother” sense) than the “Change” itself being for the better.

I realize this is stupidly vague, which is a) why I’m trying to find the article again and b) probably why all of my searching has been fruitless (no good keywords).

Does anyone know the article/study that I am thinking of?

UPDATE: The article I was looking for was The Nike Experiment: How the Shoe Giant Unleashed the Power of Personal Metrics from Waxy Links in June. This phenomena is known as the Hawthorne Effect.

Many thanks to @ nicbarajas (also, Tumblr) for saving me from certain insanity.

I had looked at that exact archive page on Waxy.org and even seen the Wired/Nike+ article, but didn’t put the two of them together.