The effect of witnessing consequences on the behavioral recordings of experimental observers.
Observer counts can inflate when they hear praise, so hide the consequence stream from your coders.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Harris et al. (1978) asked six adults to watch video clips and score a child’s eye contact.
While the adults coded, the tape played praise for the child. The team wanted to know if hearing that praise would nudge the scorers to mark more eye contact than was really there.
The study ran like a single-case experiment: first no praise, then praise, then praise again.
What they found
Half of the observers bumped up their eye-contact counts when the praise started.
When praise stopped, their counts dropped back. The second praise round did not repeat the jump, so the effect was shaky.
Even though inter-observer agreement stayed high, the raw numbers still crept upward for three people.
How this fits with other research
Wildemann et al. (1973) saw the same kind of drift, but for a different reason. They told observers, “We’re checking reliability,” and agreement scores rose. Harris et al. (1978) kept reliability checks hidden, yet scores still crept up when observers heard praise. Together, the two papers show that any social cue—being watched or hearing consequences—can tilt data.
Rey et al. (2020) worked with kids and DRO schedules, not observers, but they also tracked how hidden contingencies shape behavior. Their study and this one both warn us: if you can see or hear a consequence, your own behavior changes, even when you try to stay neutral.
Hursh et al. (1974) used a lab game where adults checked scores after each round. Score gaps drove more “audit” looks, much like praise drove more eye-contact marks here. Both studies say the same thing: social feedback leaks into measurement.
Why it matters
High IOA is not enough. If observers can hear reinforcement, their pens can still drift. Build blind coding—mute the audio, use separate rooms, or have a second coder who never hears the praise. Check your own sessions this week: are your data collectors hearing the client’s rewards? If yes, give them headphones with white noise or move them behind a screen. Clean data start with hidden consequences.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
The cueing effects of interviewer praise contingent on a target behavior and expectation of behavior change were examined with six observers. Experiment I investigated the effect of cues in conjunction with expectation. Experiment II assessed the relative contributions of cues and expectation, and Experiment III examined the effect of cues in the absence of expectation. The frequencies of two behaviors, client eye contact and face touching, were held constant throughout a series of videotaped interviews between an "interviewer" and a "client". A within-subjects design was used in each experiment. During baseline conditions, praise did not follow eye contact by the client on the videotape. In all experimental conditions, praise statements from the interviewer followed each occurrence of eye contact with an equal number of praises delivered at random times when there was no eye contact. Three of the six observers dramatically increased their recordings of eye contact during the first experimental phase, but these increases were not replicated in a second praise condition. There were no systematic changes in recorded face touching. Witnessing the delivery of consequences, rather than expectation seemed to be responsible for the effect. This potential threat to the internal validity of studies using observational data may go undetected by interobserver agreement checks.
Journal of applied behavior analysis, 1978 · doi:10.1901/jaba.1978.11-513