I want to talk a little bit about labor and work.
When we think about how people work, the naive intuition we 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 to one way, we can direct them to work another way. This is why we give 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 all of strange behaviors in the world around us. Think about something mountaineering and mountain climbing. If you read books of people climb mountains, difficult mountains, do you think that those books 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. And if people just trying to be happy, the moment they would 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 after they recover, they go up again. And if think about mountain climbing as an example, it suggests all of things. It suggests that we care about reaching the end, a peak. suggests that we care about the fight, about the challenge. suggests that there’s all kinds of other things that motivate us to work or behave in all of ways.
And for me personally, I started thinking about after a student came to visit me. This was one my students from a few years earlier, and he one day back to campus. And he told me the following story: He said for more than two weeks, he was working on PowerPoint presentation. He was working in a big bank, and this was preparation for a merger and acquisition. And he was very hard on this presentation — graphs, tables, information. stayed late at 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 was deeply depressed. Now at the moment when he was working, he was quite happy. Every night he was enjoying his work, he staying late, he was perfecting 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 them to with Legos. And for some people, we gave them and we said, “Hey, would you like to build this for three dollars? We’ll pay you three dollars for it.” And said yes, and they built with these Legos. And when they finished, took it, we put it under the table, and said, “Would you like to build another one, this for $2.70?” If they said yes, we gave them another one, and they finished, we asked 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 not worth it for me.” This was we called the meaningful condition. People built one Bionicle after another. After they finished every of them, we put them under the table. And we 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 will use it for the next participant.
There was condition. This other condition was inspired by David, my student. And other condition we called the Sisyphic condition. And if you the story about Sisyphus, Sisyphus was punished by the gods push the same rock up a hill, and when almost 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 futile work. You can that if he pushed the rock on different hills, at least would have some sense of progress. Also, if you look prison 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 to fill the hole back up and then dig again. There’s something about this cyclical version of doing something and over 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 said yes, they it. Then we asked them, “Do you want to build another one $2.70?” And if they said yes, we gave them a new one, as they were building it, we took apart the one that they finished. And when they finished that, we said, “Would you like build another one, this time for 30 cents less?” And if they said yes, we gave them one that they built and we broke. So this was an endless cycle of them building, and destroying in front of their eyes.
Now what happens you compare these two conditions? The first thing that happened was that people many more Bionicles — eleven in the meaningful condition, versus in the Sisyphus condition. And by the way, we should out that this was not big meaning. People were not curing cancer or building bridges. were building Bionicles for a few cents. And not only that, everybody knew the Bionicles would be destroyed quite soon. So there not a real opportunity for big meaning. But even small meaning made a difference.
Now we had another of this 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 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 of the experiment said that in the meaningful condition, 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 piece of we looked at. If you think about it, there are people who love Legos, and some people who don’t. you would speculate that the people who love Legos would build more Legos, even for less money, after all, they get more internal joy from it. And people who love Legos less would build less Legos because the that they derive from it is lower. And that’s actually what found in the meaningful condition. There was a very nice between the love of Legos and the amount of Legos people built.
What in the Sisyphic condition? In that condition, the correlation was zero — there was no relationship between love of Legos, and how much people built, which to me that with this manipulation of breaking things front of people’s eyes, we basically crushed any joy that they could get out of activity. We basically eliminated it.
Soon after I finished running this experiment, I went to talk to big software company in Seattle. I can’t tell you who they were, but they a big company in Seattle. This was a group within the software company that was put a different building, and they asked them to innovate, and create the next product for 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 200 of the most depressed people I’ve ever talked to. And I described to some of these Lego experiments, and they said they felt like they had just 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 you go home earlier than you used to?” Everybody raised their hand. I asked them, “How many you now add not-so-kosher things to your expense reports?” And they didn’t their 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 the have done to make you not as depressed?” And they up with all kinds of ideas.
They said the CEO could have them to present 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 which aspect of their technology fit with other parts of the organization. He could have asked to build some next-generation prototypes, and see how they would work. the 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 our participants, thought essence of meaning is unimportant, then he [wouldn’t] care. And he would say, “At the moment directed you in this way, and now that I’m directing in this way, everything will be okay.” But if you understood 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 about they’re doing.
The next experiment was slightly different. We took a of paper with random letters, and we asked people to pairs of letters that were identical next to each other. That the task. People did the first sheet, then we asked they wanted to do another for a little less money, the next sheet for a little less, and so 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, it to the experimenter, the experimenter would look at it, it from top to bottom, say “Uh huh,” and put it on pile next to them. In the second condition, people did not write their name on it. The experimenter at it, took the sheet of paper, did not look at it, not scan it, and simply put it on the pile of pages. So you take piece, you just put it on the side. In the third condition, the experimenter got the sheet paper, and put it directly into a shredder.
(Laughter)
What happened in three conditions?
In this plot I’m showing you at what pay rate people stopped. So low mean that people worked harder. They worked for much longer. the acknowledged condition, people worked all the way down to 15 cents. At 15 cents page, they basically stopped these efforts. In the shredder condition, it was as much — 30 cents per sheet.
And this basically the result we had before. You shred people’s efforts, output — get them not to be as happy with what they’re doing. But I point out, by the way, that in the shredder condition, could have cheated. They could have done not so work, because they realized people were just shredding it. maybe the first sheet you’d do good work, but then you see is really testing it, so you would do more more 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 about the ignored condition? Would the ignored condition be more like the or more like the shredder, or somewhere in the middle? It out it was almost like the shredder.
Now there’s news and bad news here. The bad news is that ignoring the performance of is almost as bad as shredding their effort in front of their eyes. Ignoring you a whole way out there. The good news is that by simply looking at something that somebody done, scanning it and saying “Uh huh,” that seems be quite sufficient to dramatically improve people’s motivations. So good news is that adding motivation doesn’t seem to be so difficult. The bad news that eliminating motivations seems to be incredibly easy, and we don’t think about it carefully, we might overdo it. 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 store the U.S. called IKEA. And IKEA is a store with kind of okay furniture takes a long time to assemble.
(Laughter)
I don’t know about you, but time I assemble one of those, it takes me much longer, it’s much more effortful, it’s more confusing, I put things in the wrong way — can’t say I enjoy those pieces. I can’t say I enjoy the process. when I finish it, I seem to like those IKEA pieces of more than I like other ones.
(Laughter)
And there’s an old story about mixes. So when they started cake mixes in the ’40s, they would take this powder and they would it in a box, and they would ask housewives basically pour it in, stir some water in it, mix it, 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 reasons that. Maybe the taste was not good? No, the was great. What they figured out was that there not enough effort involved. It was so easy that nobody could cake to their guests and say, “Here is my cake.” No, it was somebody else’s cake, if you bought it in the store. It didn’t really feel like your own. So did they do? They took the eggs and the milk out the powder.
(Laughter)
Now you had to break the eggs and add them, had to measure the milk and add it, mixing it. Now it was your cake. Now was fine.
(Laughter)
(Applause)
Now, I think a little bit like the IKEA effect, getting people to work harder, they actually got them to love 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 gave 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 to us. You worked for us, but I’ll tell you what, we’ll sell it you. How much do you want to pay for it?” And we how much they were willing to pay for it. we had two types of people: We had the people who built it, and the people who did build it, and just looked at it as external observers. And we found was that the builders thought that these were pieces of origami —
(Laughter)
and they were willing pay five times more for them than the people who evaluated them externally. Now you could 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, 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 the world in their view. They thought everybody else would love it as well.
In the next version, we tried to do the effect. We tried to make it more difficult. So for some people, gave the same task. For some people, we made it harder by hiding the instructions. At top of the sheet, we had little diagrams of you fold origami. For some people, we just eliminated that. So now was tougher. What happened? Well in an objective way, the origami now was uglier, it more difficult. Now when we looked at the easy origami, we saw same thing — builders loved it more, evaluators loved less. When you looked at the hard instructions, the effect was larger. Why? now the builders loved it 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 you something about how we evaluate things.
Now think kids. Imagine I asked you, “How much would you sell your kids for?” Your memories associations and so on. Most people would say for a lot, a of money.
(Laughter)
On good days.
(Laughter)
But imagine was slightly different. Imagine if you did not have your kids. one day you went to the park and you met some kids. They just like your kids, and you played with them for a few hours, and when you 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 pay for them now? Most people say not that much. And this is because kids are so valuable, not just because of who they are, but of us, because they are so connected to us, and because of time and connection. By the way, if you think instructions are not good, what about the instructions that come kids, those are really tough.
(Laughter)
By the way, these are my kids, which, course, are wonderful and so on. Which comes to you one 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 about Adam Smith versus Karl Marx, Adam Smith had a very important of efficiency. He gave an example of a pin factory. He said pins have 12 different steps, and one person does all 12 steps, production is very low. But if you get person to do step one, and one person to do step two and step 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, said that the of labor is incredibly important in how people think about the connection to 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 that in 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? Is efficiency still important than meaning? I think the answer is no. I think that as we move situations in which people have to decide on their own about how much effort, attention, caring, how they feel 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 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 our workplace, and for the employees — I think we could get people be both more productive and happier.
Thank you very much.