I want talk a little bit today about labor and work.
When think about how people work, the naive intuition we have that people are like rats in a maze — that people care about is money, and the moment we give them money, we direct them to work one way, we can direct them work another way. This is why we give bonuses to bankers and pay all kinds of ways. And we really have this incredibly view 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 in the world around us. Think about something like and mountain climbing. If you read books of people who mountains, difficult mountains, do you think that those books are full moments of joy and happiness? No, they are full of misery. fact, it’s all about frostbite and having difficulty walking, and difficulty breathing — cold, circumstances. And if people were just trying to be happy, the moment would get to the top, they would say, “This 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 all kinds of things. It suggests that we 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 for me personally, I started thinking about this after student came to visit me. This was one of my students from few years earlier, and he came one day back campus. And he told me the following story: He said that for more than weeks, he was working on a PowerPoint presentation. He was working a big bank, and this was in preparation for merger and acquisition. And he was working very hard 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 wrote him back said, “Nice presentation, but the merger is canceled.” And guy was deeply depressed. Now at the moment when he working, he was actually quite happy. Every night he enjoying his work, he was staying late, he was perfecting this PowerPoint presentation. But knowing that would ever watch it made him quite depressed.
So I started thinking about how do we with this idea of the fruits of our labor. And to start with, we a little experiment in which we gave people Legos, and we asked them build with Legos. And for some people, we gave Legos and we said, “Hey, would you like to this Bionicle for three dollars? We’ll pay you three dollars for it.” people said yes, and they built with these Legos. when they finished, we took it, we put it under the table, and we said, “Would you like build another one, this time for $2.70?” If they said yes, we 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 point people said, “No more. It’s worth it for me.” This was what we called the condition. People built one Bionicle after another. After they finished every one them, we 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 the boxes, and we will use it for the participant.
There was another condition. This other condition was by David, my student. And this other condition we called the Sisyphic condition. And if you the story about Sisyphus, Sisyphus was punished by the gods to push same rock up a hill, and when he almost got the end, the rock would roll over, and he would to start again. And you can think about this as the essence of doing work. You can imagine that if he pushed the on different hills, at least he would have some of progress. Also, if you look at prison movies, the way that the guards torture the prisoners is get them to dig a hole, and when the prisoner is finished, they ask him to fill the back up and then dig again. There’s something about cyclical version of doing something over and over and that seems to be particularly demotivating.
So in the second of this experiment, that’s exactly what we did. We asked people, “Would you like build one Bionicle for three dollars?” And if they said yes, they built it. we asked them, “Do you want to build another one for $2.70?” if they said yes, we gave them a new one, and they were building it, we took apart the one that just finished. And when they finished that, we said, “Would like to build another one, this time for 30 cents less?” And if they yes, we gave them the one that they built and we broke. this was an endless cycle of them building, and us destroying front of their eyes.
Now what happens when you compare these conditions? The first thing that happened was that people built many Bionicles — eleven in the meaningful condition, versus seven in the Sisyphus condition. And the way, we should point out that this was big meaning. People were not curing cancer or building bridges. People were building Bionicles for a few cents. And 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 another version this experiment. In this other version of the experiment, we didn’t put people this situation, we just described to them the situation, much as I am describing you now, and we asked them to predict what result would be. What happened? People predicted the right but not the right magnitude. People who were just given the description of the experiment said in the meaningful condition, people would probably build one more Bionicle. So people understand that is important, they just don’t understand the magnitude of importance, the extent to which it’s important.
There was other piece of data we looked at. If you think it, there are some people who love Legos, and some people who don’t. And you speculate that 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 from is lower. And that’s actually what we found in the meaningful condition. was a very nice correlation between the love of Legos and the amount of people built.
What happened in the Sisyphic condition? In that condition, the correlation zero — there was no relationship between the love Legos, and how much people built, which suggests to me that with this manipulation of breaking things front of people’s eyes, we basically crushed any joy that they could get of this activity. We basically eliminated it.
Soon after I finished running this experiment, I went to to a big software company in Seattle. I can’t you who they were, but they were a big company in Seattle. This was group within the software company that was put in a building, and they asked them to innovate, and create next big product for this company. And the week before showed up, the CEO of this big software company went to 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 felt like they had just been through that experiment. And asked them, I said, “How many of you now up to work later than you used to?” And everybody raised their hand. I said, “How of you now go home earlier than you used to?” Everybody their hand. I asked them, “How many of you now add not-so-kosher things to expense reports?” And they didn’t raise their hands, but they took me to dinner and showed me what they could do 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 to the whole company about their journey over the last two years and 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 work. But the thing is that any one of would require some effort and motivation. And I think the basically did not understand the importance of meaning. If CEO, just like our participants, thought the essence of meaning is unimportant, he [wouldn’t] care. And he would say, “At the I directed you in this way, and now that I’m directing you in this way, everything be okay.” But if you understood how important meaning is, then you would figure out that it’s actually important spend some time, energy and effort in getting people to care more what they’re doing.
The next experiment was slightly different. took a sheet of paper with random letters, and asked people to find pairs of letters that were next to each other. That was the task. People did first sheet, then we asked if they wanted to another for a little less money, the next sheet for a little bit less, and so on and forth. And we had three conditions. In the first condition, people wrote name on the sheet, found all the pairs of letters, it to the experimenter, the experimenter would look at it, scan it top to bottom, say “Uh huh,” and put it on the pile next them. In the second condition, people did not write their name on it. The looked at it, took the sheet of paper, did not look at it, did not it, and simply put it on the pile 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 pay rate people stopped. low numbers mean that people worked harder. They worked for much longer. In the condition, people worked all the way down to 15 cents. At 15 cents per page, basically stopped these efforts. In the shredder condition, it was twice much — 30 cents per sheet.
And this is the result we had before. You shred people’s efforts, output — you get them not to be 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 work, but then you see nobody is really testing it, you would do more and more and more. So in fact, in shredder condition, people could have submitted more work and more money, and put less effort into it. But what about ignored condition? Would the ignored condition be more like the or more like the shredder, or somewhere in the middle? turns out it was almost like the shredder.
Now there’s good news bad news here. The bad news is that ignoring the of people is almost as bad as shredding their effort in front of their eyes. Ignoring gets a 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 good news is that adding motivation doesn’t seem to be so difficult. bad news is that eliminating motivations seems to be incredibly easy, and if we don’t about it carefully, we might overdo it. So this all in terms of negative motivation, or eliminating negative motivation.
The next part I want show you is something about positive motivation. So there is a store the U.S. called IKEA. And IKEA is a store with kind of okay furniture that takes a 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 things the wrong way — I can’t say I enjoy those pieces. I can’t say I enjoy 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 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, and they would ask housewives to basically pour in, stir some water in it, mix it, put it in the oven, and — — you had cake. But it turns out they were unpopular. People did not want them, and they thought about all kinds of reasons for that. the taste was not good? No, the taste was great. What they out was that there was not enough effort involved. It was so easy that nobody serve cake to their guests and say, “Here is cake.” No, it was 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 milk out of the powder.
(Laughter)
Now you had to break the eggs and add them, you had measure the milk and add it, mixing it. Now it was your cake. Now everything fine.
(Laughter)
(Applause)
Now, I think a little bit like the effect, by getting people to work harder, they actually got them love what they’re doing to a higher degree.
So how do we look at 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, they built something that was really quite ugly — nothing like a or a crane. But then we told them, “Look, this origami really belongs to us. 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 willing to pay for it. And we had two types people: We had the people who built it, and people who did not build it, and just looked at as external observers. And what we found was that the builders thought these were beautiful pieces of origami —
(Laughter)
and they were to pay five times more for them than the who just evaluated them externally. Now you could say — you were a builder, do you think [you’d say], “Oh, I love this origami, but I know that else would love it?” Or “I love this origami, and everybody else will love it as well?” Which of those two is correct? Turns out the builders not loved the origami more, they thought that everybody would see world in their view. They thought everybody else would love 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 little diagrams how you fold origami. For some people, we just that. So now this was tougher. What happened? Well 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, 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 effort into it. And evaluators? They loved it even less. Because in reality, it was uglier than the first version.
(Laughter)
Of course, this you something about how we evaluate things.
Now think about kids. Imagine asked you, “How much would you sell your kids for?” Your memories 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 did not have your kids. And one day you to the park and you met some kids. They were just like kids, and you played with them for a few hours, and when you about 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 them now? people say not that much. And this is because kids are so valuable, not just because of who are, but because of us, because they are so connected to us, because of the time and connection. By the way, if you think IKEA instructions are not good, about the instructions that come with kids, those are really tough.
(Laughter)
By way, these are my kids, which, of course, are 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 our way.
Let me say one last comment. If you think about Adam Smith versus Karl Marx, Adam had a very important notion of efficiency. He gave an example of a pin factory. He said have 12 different steps, and if one person does 12 steps, production is very low. But if you one person to do step one, and one person to step two and step 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 connection what they are doing. And if you do all 12 steps, you about the pin. But if you do one step every time, maybe you don’t care much.
I think that in the Industrial Revolution, Adam was more correct than Karl Marx. But the reality is we’ve switched, and now we’re in the knowledge economy. You ask yourself, what happens in a knowledge economy? Is efficiency still more important than meaning? I think the is no. I think that as we move to situations in people have to decide on their own about how much effort, attention, caring, how they feel to it, are they thinking about labor on way to work, and in the shower and so on, all of sudden Marx has more things to say to us. when we think about labor, we usually think about motivation and payment as the same thing, the reality is that we should probably add all kinds of to it — meaning, creation, challenges, ownership, identity, pride, etc.
The news is that if we added all of those and thought about them — how do we create own meaning, pride, motivation, and how do we do in our workplace, and for the employees — I we could get people to be both more productive and happier.
Thank you much.