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