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