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