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