I want to a little bit today about labor and work.
When we about how people work, the naive intuition we have is that people like rats in a maze — that all people care 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 in all of ways. And we really have this incredibly simplistic view of why people work, and the labor market looks 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 read of people who climb mountains, difficult mountains, do you that those books are full of moments of joy happiness? No, they are full of misery. In fact, it’s all about frostbite and having difficulty walking, and breathing — cold, challenging circumstances. And if people were just trying to happy, the moment they would get to the 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.” But instead, people down, and after they recover, they go up again. And if you think about mountain climbing as 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 of other that motivate us to work or behave in all kinds ways.
And for me personally, I started thinking about this after student came to visit me. This was one of my students a few years earlier, and he came one day back campus. And 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 was in preparation for a merger and acquisition. And he working very hard on this presentation — graphs, tables, information. He late at night every day. And the day before it due, he sent his PowerPoint presentation 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 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 do we experiment with this idea of the fruits of labor. And to start with, we created a little experiment in we gave people Legos, and we asked them to build with Legos. And some people, we gave them Legos and we said, “Hey, would you to build this Bionicle for three dollars? We’ll pay you three for it.” And people said yes, and they built with these Legos. when they finished, we took it, we put it under the table, we said, “Would you like to build another one, time for $2.70?” If they said yes, we gave them another one, when they finished, we asked them, “Do you want build another one?” for $2.40, $2.10, and so on, until some point people said, “No more. It’s not worth it for me.” 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. we told them that at the end of the experiment, we will take all these Bionicles, we will them, we will put them back in the boxes, we will use it for the next participant.
There was another condition. This other condition was inspired David, my student. And this other condition we called Sisyphic condition. And if you remember the story about Sisyphus, Sisyphus was punished by gods to push the same rock up a hill, and when he almost got the end, the rock would roll over, and he have to start again. And you can think about this as essence of doing futile work. You can imagine that if he the rock on different hills, at least he would have some sense of progress. Also, you look at prison movies, sometimes the way that the torture the prisoners is to get them to dig a hole, and when the is finished, they ask him to fill the hole back up and dig again. There’s something about this cyclical version of doing something over over and over that seems to be particularly demotivating.
So in the second condition this experiment, that’s exactly what we did. We asked people, “Would you to 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 them a new one, and as they were building it, we apart the one that they just finished. And when finished that, we said, “Would you like to build another one, time for 30 cents less?” And if they said yes, gave them the one that they built and we broke. So this an endless cycle of them building, and us destroying front of their eyes.
Now what happens when you compare these two conditions? The first thing that was that people built many more Bionicles — eleven in meaningful condition, versus seven in the Sisyphus condition. And by the way, we point out that this was not big meaning. People were not curing cancer building bridges. People were building 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 meaning made a difference.
Now we had another version of experiment. In this other version of the experiment, we didn’t put in this situation, we just described to them the situation, much I am describing to 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 is important, they don’t understand the magnitude of the importance, the extent which it’s important.
There was one other piece of data looked at. If you think about it, there are some who love Legos, and some people who don’t. And you speculate that the people who love Legos would build Legos, even for less money, because after all, they get more joy from it. And the people who love Legos less would build less Legos because the that they derive from it is lower. And that’s actually we found in the meaningful condition. There was a very nice correlation between the love of and the amount of Legos people built.
What happened in the condition? In that condition, the correlation was zero — there was no relationship between the love of Legos, how much people built, which suggests to me that with this of breaking things in front of people’s eyes, we basically crushed any that they could get out of this activity. We basically 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 were a company in Seattle. This was a group within the software that was put in a different building, and they asked to innovate, and create the next big product for this company. the week before I showed up, the CEO of this software company went to that group, 200 engineers, and canceled 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 felt like had just been through that experiment. And I asked them, I said, “How of you now show up to work later than used to?” And everybody raised their hand. I said, “How many of you now go home than you used to?” Everybody raised their hand. I asked them, “How many of 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 me what they do with expense reports. And then I asked them, I said, “What could the CEO have done to you not as depressed?” And they came up with kinds of ideas.
They said the CEO could have asked them present to the whole company about their journey over the last two years and they decided to do. He could have asked them think about which aspect of their technology could fit with other parts of the organization. He have asked them to build some next-generation prototypes, and how they would work. But the thing is that any of those 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 moment I directed you in this way, now that I’m directing you in this way, everything be okay.” But if you understood how important meaning is, then would figure out that it’s actually important to spend some time, energy and effort in getting to care more about what they’re doing.
The next experiment slightly different. We took a sheet of paper with random letters, we asked people to find pairs of letters that were next to each other. That was the task. People did the first sheet, then we if they wanted to do another for a little less money, the sheet for a little bit less, and so on so forth. And we had three conditions. In the condition, people wrote their name on the sheet, found the pairs of letters, gave it to the experimenter, the experimenter look at it, scan it from top to bottom, say “Uh huh,” and put it on pile next to them. In the second condition, people did not write name on it. The experimenter 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 put it on the side. In the third condition, experimenter got the sheet of 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 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 per page, they basically stopped these efforts. In the shredder condition, was twice as much — 30 cents per sheet.
And this is basically the we had before. You shred people’s efforts, output — you them not to be as happy with what they’re doing. But I should point out, the way, that in the shredder condition, people could cheated. They could have done not so good work, because realized people were just shredding it. So maybe the first 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 have submitted more work and gotten more money, and less effort into it. But what about the ignored condition? Would ignored condition be more like the acknowledged or more like shredder, or somewhere in the middle? It turns out it almost like the shredder.
Now there’s good news and news here. The bad news is that ignoring the of people is almost as bad as shredding their effort in front of eyes. Ignoring gets you a whole way out there. good news is that by simply looking at something that somebody has done, scanning it and “Uh huh,” that seems to be quite sufficient to dramatically people’s motivations. So the good news is that adding 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. So this is all in of negative motivation, or eliminating negative motivation.
The next part want to show you is something about positive motivation. So there a store in the U.S. called IKEA. And IKEA is a store with of okay 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 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 those IKEA pieces of furniture more than I like ones.
(Laughter)
And there’s an old story about cake mixes. when they started cake mixes in the ’40s, they take this powder and they would put it in a box, and they ask housewives to basically pour it in, stir some in it, mix it, put it in the oven, and — — you had cake. But it turns out they were very unpopular. People did not want them, and thought about all kinds of reasons for that. Maybe taste was not good? No, the taste was great. What they figured out that there was not enough effort involved. It was easy that nobody could serve cake to their guests say, “Here is my cake.” No, it was somebody else’s cake, as if you bought in the store. It didn’t really feel like your own. So did they do? They took the eggs and the milk of the powder.
(Laughter)
Now you had to break the and add them, you had to measure the milk add it, mixing it. Now it was your cake. everything was fine.
(Laughter)
(Applause)
Now, I think a little bit like the IKEA effect, by people to work harder, they actually got them to love what they’re to a higher degree.
So how do we look this question experimentally? We asked people to build some origami. We gave them instructions how to create origami, and we gave them a sheet of paper. And these were all novices, they built something that was really quite ugly — nothing like a frog or a crane. then we told them, “Look, this origami really belongs 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 measured how much they were willing to pay for it. And we two types of people: We had the people who it, and the people who did not build it, just looked at it as external observers. And what we was that the builders thought that these were beautiful of origami —
(Laughter)
and they were willing to five times more for them than the people who just evaluated externally. Now you could say — if you were builder, do you think [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 those two is correct? Turns out 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 next version, we tried to the IKEA effect. We tried to make it more difficult. for some people, we gave the same task. For 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 this was tougher. What happened? Well in an objective way, origami now was uglier, it was more difficult. Now we looked at the easy origami, we saw the same thing — loved it more, evaluators loved it less. When you at the hard instructions, the effect was larger. Why? Because the builders loved it even more.
(Laughter)
They put this extra effort into it. And evaluators? They loved even less. Because in reality, it was even uglier the first version.
(Laughter)
Of course, this tells you something about how we evaluate things.
Now about kids. Imagine I asked you, “How much would you sell your for?” Your memories and associations and so on. Most people would for a lot, a lot of money.
(Laughter)
On days.
(Laughter)
But imagine this was slightly different. Imagine if you not have your kids. And one day you went to the park you met some kids. They were just like your kids, and played with them for a few hours, and when you were about to leave, the said, “Hey, by the way, just before you leave, you’re interested, they’re for sale.”
(Laughter)
How much would you pay for them now? Most people not that much. And this is because our kids are valuable, not just because of who they are, but because us, because they are so connected to us, and of the time and connection. By the way, if think IKEA instructions are not good, what about the instructions come with kids, those are really tough.
(Laughter)
By the way, are my kids, which, of 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 of 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 pin factory. He said pins have 12 different steps, and if one person does all 12 steps, is very low. But if you get one person to do step one, and one to do step two and step three and so on, can increase tremendously. And indeed, this is a great example, and the reason the Industrial Revolution and efficiency. Karl Marx, on the other hand, said that the alienation labor is incredibly important in how people think about the connection to what are doing. And if you do all 12 steps, you care about the pin. But if you one step every time, maybe you don’t care as much.
I that in the Industrial Revolution, Adam Smith was more than Karl Marx. But the reality is that we’ve switched, and we’re in the knowledge economy. You can ask yourself, what happens in a economy? Is efficiency still more important than meaning? I think answer is no. I think that as we move to situations in which people have to decide on 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, all of a Marx has more things to say to us. So when we 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 it in our workplace, and for employees — I think we could get people to be both more and happier.
Thank you very much.