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