I want to talk a bit today about labor and work.
When we think about how people work, the intuition we have is that people are like rats in a maze — all people care about is money, and the moment we give them money, we can direct to work one way, we can direct them to work another way. This is why give bonuses to bankers and pay in all kinds of ways. we really have 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 kinds of strange behaviors in the world around us. about something like mountaineering and mountain climbing. If you books of people who climb mountains, difficult mountains, do think that those books are full of moments of and happiness? No, they are full of misery. In fact, it’s all frostbite and having difficulty walking, and difficulty breathing — cold, challenging circumstances. And if people were just to be happy, the moment they would get to top, they would say, “This was a terrible mistake. I’ll do it again.”
(Laughter)
“Instead, let me sit on a beach somewhere drinking mojitos.” instead, people go down, and after they recover, they up again. And if you think about mountain climbing as example, it suggests all kinds of things. It suggests that care about reaching the end, a peak. It suggests that care about the fight, about the challenge. It suggests that there’s all of other things that motivate us to work or behave in all of ways.
And for me personally, I started thinking this after a 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 that for more than two weeks, he was working on PowerPoint presentation. He was working in a big bank, and this was in for a 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, he sent his PowerPoint to his boss, and his boss wrote him back said, “Nice presentation, but the merger is canceled.” And the guy deeply depressed. Now at the moment when he was working, he actually quite happy. Every night he was enjoying his work, he was staying late, was perfecting this PowerPoint presentation. But knowing that nobody would ever watch it made quite depressed.
So I started thinking about how do we experiment with this idea the fruits of our labor. And to start with, we created a little experiment in we gave people Legos, and we asked them to build with Legos. for some people, we gave them Legos and we said, “Hey, would you like to build this for three dollars? We’ll pay you three dollars for it.” And people said yes, and they with these Legos. And when they finished, we took it, we put under the table, and we said, “Would you like build another one, this time for $2.70?” If they yes, we gave them another one, and when they finished, we asked them, “Do want to 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 what we called the meaningful condition. People built one Bionicle after another. After they finished one of them, we put them under the table. And we told them that at the end the experiment, we will take all these Bionicles, we will disassemble them, we will put them in the boxes, and we will use it for the next participant.
There was condition. This other condition was inspired by David, my student. And this other we called the Sisyphic condition. And if you remember the about Sisyphus, Sisyphus was punished by the gods to push same rock up a hill, and when he almost got to the end, the would roll over, and he would have to start again. you can think about this as the essence of 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, sometimes the way that the torture the prisoners is to get them to dig 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 over that seems to be demotivating.
So in the second condition of this experiment, that’s exactly we did. We asked people, “Would you like to build one Bionicle for three dollars?” And if said yes, they built it. Then we asked them, “Do want to build another one for $2.70?” And if they said yes, we them a new one, and as they were building it, took apart the one that they just finished. And they finished that, we said, “Would you like to another one, this time for 30 cents less?” And if they said yes, we gave them the one they built and we broke. So this was an endless cycle of building, and us destroying in front of their eyes.
Now happens when you compare these two conditions? The first thing that happened was that people built many Bionicles — eleven in the meaningful condition, versus seven in Sisyphus condition. And by the way, we should point out that this was not big meaning. were not curing cancer or building bridges. People were building Bionicles for few cents. And not only that, everybody knew that the Bionicles be destroyed quite soon. So there was not a real for big meaning. But even the small meaning made a difference.
Now we had another of this experiment. In this other version of the experiment, didn’t put people in this situation, we just described to them the situation, 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 the right magnitude. People who were just given the description of the experiment said that the meaningful condition, people would probably build one more Bionicle. So people understand that meaning is important, just don’t understand 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 some people who love Legos, and some people who don’t. And would speculate that the people who love Legos would more Legos, even for less money, because after all, they more internal joy from it. And the people who Legos less would build less Legos because the enjoyment that 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 amount of Legos people built.
What happened in the Sisyphic condition? In that condition, correlation was zero — there was no relationship between the of Legos, and how much people built, which suggests to me that this manipulation of breaking things in front of people’s eyes, we basically crushed any that they could get out of this activity. We basically eliminated it.
Soon I finished running this experiment, I went to talk a big software company in Seattle. I can’t tell you who they were, they 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 create the next big product for this company. the week before I 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 I described them some of these Lego experiments, and they said they felt like they had been through that experiment. And I asked them, I said, “How many of you now show up to work 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, but they took me out to and showed me what they could do with expense reports. And then I asked them, said, “What could the CEO have done to make you not as depressed?” they came up with all kinds of ideas.
They said the CEO could have them to present to the whole company about their over the last two years and what they decided do. He could have asked them to think about which of their technology could fit with other parts of 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 those would require some effort and motivation. I think the CEO basically did not understand the importance of meaning. If the CEO, just our participants, thought the essence of meaning is unimportant, he [wouldn’t] care. And he would say, “At the moment I 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, you would figure out that it’s actually important to some time, energy and effort in getting people to care about what they’re doing.
The next experiment was slightly different. We a sheet of paper with random letters, and we asked people to find pairs of letters were identical next to each other. That was the task. did the first sheet, then we asked if they to do another for a little less money, the next sheet for a little bit less, and on and so forth. And we had three conditions. In the first condition, people wrote name on the sheet, found all the pairs of letters, gave it to experimenter, the experimenter would look at it, scan it from top to bottom, “Uh huh,” and put it on the pile next to them. In the condition, people did not write their name on it. The experimenter at it, took the sheet of paper, did not at it, did not scan it, and simply put on the pile of pages. So you take a piece, just put it on 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 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. 15 cents per page, they basically stopped these efforts. In the shredder condition, it twice as much — 30 cents per sheet.
And is basically the result we had before. You shred people’s efforts, output — get them not to be as happy with what they’re doing. I should point out, by the way, that in the shredder condition, people have cheated. They could have done not so good work, because realized people were just shredding it. So maybe the 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 somewhere in the middle? It turns out it was like the shredder.
Now there’s good news and bad news here. The bad news is that ignoring performance of people is almost as bad as shredding their in front of their eyes. Ignoring gets you a whole out there. The good news is that by simply looking at something somebody has done, scanning it and saying “Uh huh,” that to be quite sufficient to dramatically improve people’s motivations. the good news is that adding motivation doesn’t seem be so difficult. The bad news is that eliminating motivations seems to be incredibly easy, and we don’t think about it carefully, we might overdo it. So this all in terms of negative motivation, or eliminating negative motivation.
The part I want to show you is something about positive motivation. So there a store in the U.S. called IKEA. And IKEA is a with kind of okay furniture that takes a long 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 — 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 ones.
(Laughter)
And there’s an old story about cake mixes. So when they cake mixes in the ’40s, they would take this powder and would put it in a box, and they would housewives to basically pour it in, stir some water it, mix it, put it in the oven, and — voila — you had cake. But it out they were very unpopular. People did not want them, and they thought about all kinds of for that. Maybe the taste was not good? No, taste was great. What they figured out was that there not enough effort involved. It was so easy that nobody could serve cake their guests and say, “Here is my cake.” No, it was 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 eggs and the milk out of the powder.
(Laughter)
Now you had to the eggs and add them, you had to measure the milk and add it, mixing it. Now was your cake. Now everything was fine.
(Laughter)
(Applause)
Now, I think a little bit the IKEA effect, by getting people to work harder, they actually got to love what they’re doing to a higher degree.
So how do we look this question 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 belongs us. You worked for us, but I’ll tell you what, we’ll sell it to you. How do you want to pay for it?” And we measured how much were willing to pay for it. And we had two of people: We had the people who built it, and the people who did not it, and just looked at it as external observers. And we found was that the builders thought that these were beautiful pieces of —
(Laughter)
and they were willing to pay five times more them than the people who just evaluated them externally. Now you say — if you were a builder, do you [you’d say], “Oh, I love this origami, but I that nobody else 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 everybody would see the world in their view. They everybody else would love it more as well.
In the next version, we tried to do the effect. We tried to make it 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 little diagrams of how you fold origami. For some people, just eliminated 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, evaluators loved it less. you looked at the hard instructions, the effect was larger. Why? now the builders loved it even more.
(Laughter)
They put this extra effort into it. And evaluators? They loved it even less. Because in reality, it was uglier than the first version.
(Laughter)
Of course, this tells something about how we evaluate things.
Now think about kids. I asked you, “How much would you sell your for?” Your memories and associations and so on. Most people would say for a lot, lot of money.
(Laughter)
On good days.
(Laughter)
But imagine this was slightly different. Imagine if you did have your kids. And one day you went to the park and you met kids. They were just 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 you leave, you’re interested, they’re for sale.”
(Laughter)
How much would you for them now? Most 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 to us, and because of the time and connection. By the way, if you think IKEA instructions not good, what about the instructions that come with kids, are really tough.
(Laughter)
By the way, these are my kids, which, course, are wonderful and so on. Which comes to tell one more thing, which is, much like our builders, when they look the creature of their creation, we don’t see that people don’t see things our way.
Let me say one last comment. If you think about Adam Smith Karl Marx, Adam Smith had a very important notion 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 get one person to do one, and one person to do step two and step three and so on, production can increase tremendously. indeed, this is a great example, and the reason for the Industrial Revolution efficiency. Karl Marx, on the other hand, said that the of labor is incredibly important in how people think about connection to what they are doing. And if you do all 12 steps, you care the pin. But if you do one step every time, maybe you don’t care as much.
I think in the Industrial Revolution, Adam Smith was more correct than Karl Marx. the reality is that we’ve switched, and now we’re in the economy. You can ask yourself, what happens in a knowledge economy? Is still more important than meaning? I think the answer no. I think that as we move to situations in which people have to decide their own about how much effort, attention, caring, how they feel to it, are they thinking about labor the way to work, and in the shower and 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 as the thing, but the reality is that we should probably add kinds of things to it — meaning, creation, challenges, ownership, identity, pride, etc.
The good news is that if added all of 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 be both productive and happier.
Thank you very much.