Bianca is conducting an experiment to determine how temperatures affect the productivity of employees. she has just completed the first phase of her experiment, in which she had a group of employees perform job-related tasks in a special room where the temperature was 10 degrees cooler than on the factory floor. the employees in the experimental group consistently outperformed employees in the factory. the hawthorne effect suggests that the most likely reason for this improvement in performance is that the cooler working conditions allowed the employees in the experiment to work harder without getting tired.