What Are Examples of Social Phenomena?
There are a number of social phenomena, especially in business settings; good examples include the Hawthorne effect, butterfly effect and John Henry effect. Socialists normally analyze social phenomena from different perspectives and at varying levels.
The butterfly effect states that future events can be affected by a small change made at a certain point in time, which may change the course of the future.
The Hawthorne effect says that employees change the way they behave to their seniors according to the standards they know their seniors are measuring them with. For example, when an employee is aware that the boss will pass by his or her workplace to inspect the work done, the employee will try to do a better job on that particular day of inspection unlike if the employee was not aware that the boss will be coming.
The John Henry effect states that people in a control group are able to work harder in overcoming a perceived challenge than those in an experimental group. For example, packaging workers in a company are able to work harder to overcome the fact that they are humans compared to an automated packaging machine.
There are also other examples of social phenomena, such as Pygmalion effect, cascading failure and domino effect.
