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