An examination of the effects of eye-tracking on behavior in psychology experiments

We examined whether eye-tracking produced Hawthorne effects in six commonly used psychological scales and five behavioral tasks. The dependent measures were selected because they are widely used and cited and because they involved measures of sensitive topics, including gambling behavior, racial bias, undesirable personality characteristics, or because they require working memory or executive attention resources, which might be affected by Hawthorne effects. The only task where Hawthorne effects manifested was the mixed gambles task, in which participants accepted or rejected gambles involving a 50/50 chance of gaining or losing different monetary amounts. Participants in the eye-tracking condition accepted fewer gambles that were low in expected value, and they also took longer to respond for these low-value gambles. These results suggest that eye-tracking is not likely to produce Hawthorne effects in most common psychology laboratory tasks, except for those involving risky decisions where the probability of the outcomes from each choice are known.PMID:38509269 | DOI:10.3758/s13428-024-02393-5
Source: Behavior Research Methods - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Source Type: research