I to talk a little bit today about labor and work.
When we think how people work, the naive intuition we have is that people are like rats in a — that all people care about is money, and the moment give them money, we can direct them to work one way, we can them to work another way. This is why we give bonuses to bankers and pay in all kinds ways. And we really have this incredibly simplistic view of why people work, and the labor market looks like.
At the same time, if you about it, there’s all kinds of strange behaviors in the world around us. Think about like mountaineering and mountain climbing. If you read books of people who climb mountains, difficult mountains, do think that those books are full of moments of joy happiness? No, they are full of misery. In fact, it’s all frostbite and having difficulty walking, and difficulty breathing — cold, challenging circumstances. And people were just trying to be happy, the moment they would get the top, they would say, “This was a terrible mistake. I’ll do it again.”
(Laughter)
“Instead, let me sit on a beach somewhere drinking mojitos.” instead, people go down, and after they recover, they go up again. if you think about mountain climbing as an example, it suggests all kinds of things. suggests that we care about reaching the end, a peak. It that we care about the fight, about the challenge. It suggests that there’s all kinds of other things motivate us to work or behave in all kinds ways.
And for me personally, I started thinking about after a student came to visit me. This was one my students from a few years earlier, and he came one day to campus. And he told me the following story: He said for more than two weeks, he was working on PowerPoint presentation. He was working in a big bank, and this was in preparation a merger and acquisition. And he was working very hard on presentation — graphs, tables, information. He stayed late at night every day. And the day before was due, he sent his PowerPoint presentation to his boss, and his wrote him back and said, “Nice presentation, but the merger is canceled.” the guy was deeply depressed. Now at the moment he was working, he was actually quite happy. Every night was enjoying his work, he was staying late, he was this PowerPoint presentation. But knowing that nobody would ever watch made him quite depressed.
So I started thinking about how do we with this idea of the fruits of our labor. And to start with, created a little experiment in which we gave people Legos, we asked them to build with Legos. And for people, we gave them Legos and we said, “Hey, would you like to build Bionicle for three dollars? We’ll pay you three dollars it.” And people said yes, and they built with these Legos. And they finished, we took it, we put it under the table, and we said, “Would you like to another one, this time for $2.70?” If they said yes, we gave them another one, and when finished, we asked them, “Do you want to build another one?” for $2.40, $2.10, and on, until at some point people said, “No more. It’s worth it for me.” This was what we called the condition. People built one Bionicle after another. After they finished every one of them, put them under the table. And we told them at the end of the experiment, we will take these Bionicles, we will disassemble them, we will put them back in boxes, and we will use it for the next participant.
There was condition. This other condition was inspired by David, my student. And this other we called the Sisyphic condition. And if you remember the story about Sisyphus, Sisyphus was punished the gods to push the same rock up a hill, and he almost got to the end, the rock would roll over, he would have to start again. And you can think about this the essence of doing futile work. You can imagine if he pushed the rock on different hills, at least he would have some sense progress. Also, if you look at prison movies, sometimes way that the guards torture the prisoners is to them to dig a hole, and when the prisoner finished, they ask him to fill the hole back up and then dig again. There’s something this cyclical version of doing something over and over and over that seems to particularly demotivating.
So in the second condition of this experiment, that’s exactly what we did. We asked people, “Would like to build one Bionicle for three dollars?” And if they said yes, built it. Then we asked them, “Do you want to build another one for $2.70?” And they said yes, we gave them a new one, and as they were it, we took apart the one that they just finished. And they finished that, we said, “Would you like to build another one, this time for 30 less?” And if they said yes, we gave them one that they built and we broke. So this was an endless of them building, and us destroying in front of their eyes.
Now what happens you compare these two conditions? The first thing that happened that people built many more Bionicles — eleven in the meaningful condition, versus seven in the condition. And by the way, we should point out this was not big meaning. People were not curing cancer or building bridges. were building Bionicles for a few cents. And not only that, everybody knew that the Bionicles would be quite soon. So there was not a real opportunity for big meaning. But the small meaning made a difference.
Now we had version of this experiment. In this other version of experiment, we didn’t put people in this situation, we just described to the situation, much as I am describing to you now, and we asked them predict what the result would be. What happened? People the right direction but not the right magnitude. People who were just the description of the experiment said that in the meaningful condition, people would build one more Bionicle. So people understand that meaning important, they just don’t understand the magnitude of the importance, the to which it’s important.
There was one other piece of data we at. If you think about it, there are some people who Legos, and some people who don’t. And you would that the people who love Legos would build more Legos, for less money, because after all, they get more joy from it. And the people who love Legos less build less Legos because the enjoyment that they derive it is lower. And that’s actually what we found in the meaningful condition. There was a nice correlation between the love of Legos and the amount of Legos built.
What happened in the Sisyphic condition? In that condition, the correlation was zero — was no relationship between the love of Legos, and how much people built, suggests to me that with this manipulation of breaking in front of people’s eyes, we basically crushed any that they could get out of this activity. We basically eliminated it.
Soon I finished running this experiment, I went to talk to a big software company in Seattle. I can’t you who they were, but they were a big company in Seattle. was a group within the software company that was put a different building, and they asked them to innovate, create the next big product for this company. And the week before I up, the CEO of this big software company went to that group, 200 engineers, and canceled project. And I stood there in front of 200 the most depressed people I’ve ever talked to. And I to them some of these Lego experiments, and they said they like they had just been through that experiment. And I them, I said, “How many of you now show up to work than you used to?” And everybody raised their hand. said, “How many of you now go home earlier you used to?” Everybody raised their hand. I asked them, “How many of you now add not-so-kosher things your expense reports?” And they didn’t raise their hands, they took me out to dinner and showed me they could do with expense reports. And then I asked them, said, “What could the CEO have done to make not as depressed?” And they came up with all kinds of ideas.
They said the CEO could asked them to present to the whole company about their over the last two years and what they decided do. He could have asked them to think about which aspect of their could fit with other parts of the organization. He could have them to build some next-generation prototypes, and see how they work. But the thing is that any one of those would require some effort and motivation. And I the CEO basically did not understand the importance of meaning. If the CEO, like our participants, thought the essence of meaning is unimportant, he [wouldn’t] care. And he would say, “At the moment I directed you this way, and now that I’m directing you in this way, will be okay.” But if you understood how important is, then you would figure out that it’s actually important to spend some time, energy and effort in people to care more about what they’re doing.
The next experiment was different. We took a sheet of paper with random letters, and we people to find pairs of letters that were identical next each other. That was the task. People did the sheet, then we asked if they wanted to do another for a little less money, the sheet for a little bit less, and so on and so forth. And had three conditions. In the first condition, people wrote name on the sheet, found all the pairs of letters, it to the experimenter, the experimenter would look at it, scan it from to bottom, say “Uh huh,” and put it on the pile to them. In the second condition, people did not write their on it. The experimenter looked at it, took the of paper, did not look at it, did not it, and simply put it on the pile of pages. So take a piece, you just put it on the side. In the third condition, the got the sheet of paper, and put it directly into shredder.
(Laughter)
What happened in those three conditions?
In this plot I’m showing you what pay rate people stopped. So low numbers mean that worked harder. They worked for much longer. In the acknowledged condition, people worked the way down to 15 cents. At 15 cents per page, they basically stopped efforts. In the shredder condition, it was twice as much — 30 cents per sheet.
And is basically the result we had before. You shred people’s efforts, output — you them not to be as happy with what they’re doing. But I should point out, by the way, that the shredder condition, people could have cheated. They could done not so good work, because they realized people just shredding it. So maybe the first sheet you’d good work, but then you see nobody is really it, so you would do more and more and more. So in fact, in the shredder condition, could have submitted more work and gotten more money, and less effort into it. But what about the ignored condition? Would the condition be more like the acknowledged or more like shredder, or somewhere in the middle? It turns out it almost like the shredder.
Now there’s good news and bad news here. The bad news is that the performance of people is almost as bad as shredding their effort in front of eyes. Ignoring gets you a whole way out there. good news is that by simply looking at something somebody has done, scanning it and saying “Uh huh,” that seems to be quite to dramatically improve people’s motivations. So the good news is that adding motivation doesn’t seem to be difficult. The bad news is that eliminating motivations seems to be incredibly easy, and if don’t think about it carefully, we might overdo it. So this is all in terms negative motivation, or eliminating negative motivation.
The next part I want show you is something about positive motivation. So there is a store in U.S. called IKEA. And IKEA is a store with kind of okay furniture that takes a long time assemble.
(Laughter)
I don’t know about you, but every time assemble one of those, it takes me much longer, it’s much more effortful, it’s more confusing, I put things in the wrong way — I can’t I enjoy those pieces. I can’t say I enjoy the process. But when I finish it, I to like those IKEA pieces of furniture more than I other ones.
(Laughter)
And there’s an old story about mixes. So when they started cake mixes in the ’40s, they take this powder and they would put it in a box, and they ask housewives to basically pour it in, stir some water it, mix it, put it in the oven, and — voila — you had cake. it turns out they were very unpopular. People did not want them, and they thought all kinds of reasons for that. Maybe the taste not good? No, the taste was great. What they out was that there was not enough effort involved. It was so easy that nobody could serve to their guests and say, “Here is my cake.” No, it was somebody else’s cake, as if you it in the store. It didn’t really feel like your own. So what did do? They took the eggs and the milk out of the powder.
(Laughter)
Now you had to break eggs and add them, you had to measure the milk add it, mixing it. Now it was your cake. everything was fine.
(Laughter)
(Applause)
Now, I think a bit like the IKEA effect, by getting people to work harder, actually got them to love what they’re doing to higher degree.
So how do we look at this experimentally? We asked people to build some origami. We gave them on how to create origami, and we gave them a sheet of paper. these were all novices, and they built something that was really quite ugly — nothing like frog or a crane. But then we told them, “Look, origami really belongs to us. You worked for us, I’ll tell you what, we’ll sell it to you. How much do you want to pay it?” And we measured how much they were willing to for it. And we had two types of people: We had people who built it, and the people who did not build it, and just looked it as external observers. And what we found was that the thought that these were beautiful pieces of origami —
(Laughter)
and they were willing to pay five times for them than the people who just evaluated them externally. you could say — if you were a builder, you think [you’d say], “Oh, I love this origami, but I know that nobody else love it?” Or “I love this origami, and everybody else will love as well?” Which one of those two is correct? Turns out the builders not only loved origami more, they thought that everybody would see the world in their view. They thought else would love it more as well.
In the next version, tried to do the IKEA effect. We tried to make more difficult. So for some people, we gave the task. For some people, we made it harder by the instructions. At the top of the sheet, we had little diagrams of how you fold origami. For people, we just eliminated that. So now this was tougher. What happened? Well in an way, the origami now was uglier, it was more difficult. Now we looked at the easy origami, we saw the same thing — builders loved more, evaluators loved it less. When you looked at the hard instructions, the was larger. Why? Because now the builders loved it even more.
(Laughter)
They put all extra effort into it. And evaluators? They loved it less. Because in reality, it was even uglier than the version.
(Laughter)
Of course, this tells you something about we evaluate things.
Now think about kids. Imagine I you, “How much would you sell your kids for?” Your memories associations and so on. Most people would say for a lot, a lot money.
(Laughter)
On good days.
(Laughter)
But imagine this was slightly different. Imagine if you not have your kids. And one day you went the park and you met some kids. They were just your kids, and you played with them for a hours, and when you were about to leave, the parents said, “Hey, by the way, just before leave, if you’re interested, they’re for sale.”
(Laughter)
How much would pay for them now? Most people say not that much. this is because our kids are so valuable, not because of who they are, but because of us, they are so connected to us, and because of the time and connection. By the way, you think IKEA instructions are not good, what about instructions that come with kids, those are really tough.
(Laughter)
By the way, these are my kids, which, course, are wonderful and so on. Which comes to tell one more thing, which is, much like our builders, when look at the creature of their creation, we don’t see that other people don’t things our way.
Let me say one last comment. If think about Adam Smith versus Karl Marx, Adam Smith had a very important notion of efficiency. gave an example of a pin factory. He said have 12 different steps, and if one person does 12 steps, production is very low. But if you get one to do step one, and one person to do two and step three and so on, production can increase tremendously. And indeed, this is a example, and the reason for the Industrial Revolution and efficiency. Karl Marx, on the hand, said that the alienation of labor is incredibly important in how people think about the connection to they are doing. And if you do all 12 steps, you care about the pin. But if you do step every time, maybe you don’t care as much.
I that in the Industrial Revolution, Adam Smith was more than Karl Marx. But the reality is that we’ve switched, now we’re in the knowledge economy. You can ask yourself, what happens in a knowledge economy? efficiency still more important than meaning? I think the answer is no. think that as we move to situations in which people to decide on their own about how much effort, attention, caring, connected they feel to it, are they thinking about labor the way to work, and in the shower and on, all of a sudden Marx has more things to say to us. So when think about labor, we usually think about motivation and payment as same thing, but the reality is that we should probably add all kinds things to it — meaning, creation, challenges, ownership, identity, pride, etc.
The news is that if we added all of those and thought about them — how do we create own meaning, pride, motivation, and how do we do in our workplace, and for the employees — I think could get people to be both more productive and happier.
Thank you much.