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