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