{"id":1453,"date":"2012-05-07T11:06:32","date_gmt":"2012-05-07T11:06:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/presentation-skills-blog.co.uk\/?p=1453"},"modified":"2012-05-07T11:06:32","modified_gmt":"2012-05-07T11:06:32","slug":"presentations-and-the-hawthorn-effect","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/presentations-and-the-hawthorn-effect\/","title":{"rendered":"Presentations and the Hawthorne Effect"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>I spent over two decades as a research scientist. I published in grown-up, peer-reviewed journals and have letter both after my name and in front of it! And I was a social scientist. And that means, amongst other things, that I’m painfully familiar with a number of issues which plague research. One is called the Pregnant Man Syndrome (but let’s move hastily on!) and another is the Hawthorne Effect.<\/p>\n

The Hawthorne Effect says, basically, that the process of studying something changes it, so that it’s\u00a0hard to get an idea of what something is really<\/strong> like. For example, I do a lot of work supporting people as their organisation is restructured so that they need to develop some emotional resilience (coping tools): if I do a survey of the people in the workplace and include the question “Are you stressed?” I’m likely to cause some people thing think of themselves as stressed when they didn’t before I asked the question. In other words, asking the question about stress biases the answers.<\/p>\n

So it is with presentation skills training using videos.<\/p>\n

Seriously.<\/p>\n

Anyone who doesn’t think people change how they ‘perform’ when there’s a camera in the room needs to try it. Any anyone who insists<\/strong> that they don’t change after that is either masssssssively experienced or about as in touch with reality as the drunk driver who says that they actually drive better after four pints of beer.<\/p>\n

Nope, you just drive so badly you don’t notice your mistakes…<\/p>\n

Okay, I’m over-stating but you get the picture. (There are times when it’s a good thing, certainly, but I’m concentrating on the bad here!)<\/p>\n

So unless you’re going to be presenting to a video camera, why practise with a video camera?!<\/p>\n

Actually there is one time I can think of that makes the camera handy – and I was reminded of it when I watched Rory Bremner being interviewed on the tv this morning (hey, I was at the gym and it was on the machine, okay!?!). I remember him saying a long time ago that one of the ways he got his impressions sorted out was to watch video recordings of his ‘victim’ played at high speed. That way, he pointed out, visual habits became much more obvious much more quickly… and in a presentation almost any visual habit is a bad habit.<\/p>\n

Essentially if the audience notices it, it’s a bad thing. Why? Because anything that distracts from the message needs to be pared down if at all possible.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I spent over two decades as a research scientist. I published in grown-up, peer-reviewed journals and have letter both after my name and in front of it! And I was a social scientist. And that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,9,10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1453","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-personal","category-presentation-tips","category-rant"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1453","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1453"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1453\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1453"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1453"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1453"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}