I want to talk a bit today about labor and work.
When we think how people work, the naive intuition we have is people are like rats in a maze — that all people care about is money, and moment we give them money, we can direct them to work one way, we can them to work another way. This is why we give bonuses to bankers and pay in all kinds ways. And we really have this incredibly simplistic view why people work, and what 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. Think about something like mountaineering mountain climbing. If you read 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 somewhere drinking mojitos.” But instead, people go down, and after recover, they go up again. And if you think about climbing as an example, it suggests all kinds of things. It that we care about reaching the end, a peak. It suggests that we care about the fight, the challenge. It suggests that there’s all kinds of other things that motivate to work or behave in all kinds of ways.
And for me personally, started thinking about this after a student came to me. This was one of my students from a few earlier, and he came one day back to campus. And he told me the following story: said that for more than two weeks, he was working on a PowerPoint presentation. He was working a big bank, and this was in preparation for a and acquisition. And he was working very hard on presentation — graphs, tables, information. He stayed late at night day. And the day before it was due, he sent his presentation to his boss, and his boss wrote him and said, “Nice presentation, but the merger is canceled.” And the guy was deeply depressed. Now the moment when he was working, he was actually quite happy. Every night he was enjoying work, he was staying late, he was perfecting this 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 our labor. And to start with, we created a little in which we gave people Legos, and we asked them build 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 people said yes, and built with these Legos. And when they finished, we took it, we put under the table, and we said, “Would you like to build another one, this time for $2.70?” they said yes, we gave them another one, and when finished, we asked them, “Do you want to build one?” for $2.40, $2.10, and so on, until at point 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 every one them, we put them under the table. And we told that at the end of the experiment, we will all these Bionicles, we will disassemble them, we will put back in the boxes, and we will use it the next participant.
There was another condition. This other condition was inspired by David, my student. And this condition we called the Sisyphic condition. And if you 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, he would have to start again. And you can think this as the essence of doing futile work. You 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 the is to get them to dig a hole, and when the prisoner is finished, they ask him fill the hole back up and then dig again. There’s something about cyclical version of doing something over and over and that seems to be particularly demotivating.
So in the second of this experiment, that’s exactly what we did. We people, “Would you like to build one Bionicle for three dollars?” if they said yes, they built it. Then we them, “Do you want to build another one for $2.70?” And if said yes, we gave them a new one, and as they building it, we took apart the one that they just finished. when they finished that, we said, “Would you like to build another one, time for 30 cents less?” And if they said yes, we them the one that they built and we broke. So this was endless cycle of them building, and us destroying in of their eyes.
Now what happens when you compare two conditions? The first thing that happened was that people built more Bionicles — eleven in the meaningful condition, versus seven in the Sisyphus condition. And by way, we should point out that this was not big meaning. People were not curing cancer or bridges. People were building Bionicles for a few cents. And only that, everybody knew that the Bionicles would be quite soon. So there was not a real opportunity for big meaning. even the small meaning made a difference.
Now we another version of this experiment. In this other version of experiment, we didn’t put people in this situation, we described to them the situation, much as I am to you now, and we asked them to predict what the would be. What happened? People predicted the right direction but not right magnitude. People who were just given the description of the experiment said 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 which it’s important.
There was one other piece of data we looked at. If you about it, there are some people who love Legos, some people who don’t. And you would speculate that the people love Legos would build more Legos, even for less money, because after all, get more internal joy from it. And the people who love Legos less would build less Legos the enjoyment that they derive from it is lower. And that’s actually we found in the meaningful condition. There was a nice correlation between the love of Legos and the of Legos people built.
What happened in the Sisyphic condition? In that condition, the was zero — there was no relationship between the love 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 joy that they could out of this activity. We basically eliminated it.
Soon after finished running this experiment, I went to talk to a software company in Seattle. I can’t tell you who they were, they were a big company in Seattle. This was group within the software company that was put in a different building, and asked them to innovate, and create the next big product for this company. And the week before showed up, the CEO of this big software company went to group, 200 engineers, and canceled the project. And I stood in front of 200 of the most depressed people I’ve ever talked to. And described to 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 you now show up to work later than you to?” And everybody raised their hand. I said, “How of you now go home earlier than you used to?” Everybody raised hand. I asked them, “How many of you now not-so-kosher things to your expense reports?” And they didn’t raise hands, but they took me out to dinner and showed what they could do with expense reports. And then asked them, I said, “What could the CEO have to make you not as depressed?” And they came up all kinds of ideas.
They said the CEO could have asked them present to the whole company about their journey over the last two and what they decided to do. He could have asked them to 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 see how would work. But the thing is that any one of those would require some effort motivation. And I think the CEO basically did not understand the of meaning. If the CEO, just like our participants, the essence of meaning is unimportant, then he [wouldn’t] care. And he would say, “At moment I directed you in this way, and now that I’m you in this way, everything will be okay.” But if you how important meaning is, then you would figure out that it’s actually important spend some time, energy and effort in getting people to care more about what they’re doing.
The experiment was slightly different. We took a sheet of paper with letters, and we asked people to find pairs of letters were identical next to each other. That was the task. People did the first sheet, we asked if they wanted to do another for a little money, the next sheet for a little bit less, and so on and so forth. we had three conditions. In the first condition, people their name on the sheet, found all the pairs letters, gave it to the experimenter, the experimenter would look at it, scan it from top bottom, say “Uh huh,” and put it on the pile next them. In the second condition, people did not write name on it. The experimenter looked at it, took sheet of paper, did not look at it, did not it, and simply put it on the pile of pages. So take a piece, you just put it on the side. In the condition, the experimenter got the sheet of paper, and it directly into a shredder.
(Laughter)
What happened in three conditions?
In this plot I’m showing you at what pay rate people stopped. low numbers mean that people worked harder. They worked for much longer. In the acknowledged condition, worked all the way down to 15 cents. At 15 cents per page, they basically stopped efforts. In the shredder condition, it was twice as much — 30 cents sheet.
And this is basically the result we had before. You shred people’s efforts, output — you get not to be as happy with what they’re doing. But I should point out, the way, that in the shredder condition, people could have cheated. They could have done so good work, because they realized people were just shredding it. So 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 shredder condition, could have submitted more work and gotten more money, and put less effort into it. But what the ignored condition? Would the ignored condition be more the acknowledged or more like the shredder, or somewhere the middle? It turns out it was almost like the shredder.
Now there’s good news bad news here. The bad news is that ignoring the of people is almost as bad as shredding their 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 sufficient to dramatically people’s motivations. So the good news is that adding motivation doesn’t seem to be difficult. The bad news is that eliminating motivations seems to be easy, and if we don’t think about it carefully, might overdo it. So this is all in terms of negative motivation, or eliminating negative motivation.
The part I want to show you is something about positive motivation. there is a store in the U.S. called IKEA. IKEA is a store with kind of okay furniture that takes a long time assemble.
(Laughter)
I don’t know about you, but every time I one of those, it takes me much longer, it’s more effortful, it’s much more confusing, I put things in wrong way — I can’t say I enjoy those pieces. can’t say I enjoy the process. But when I finish it, seem to like those IKEA pieces of furniture more I like other ones.
(Laughter)
And there’s an old story cake mixes. So when they started cake mixes in ’40s, they would take this powder and they would put in a box, and they would ask housewives to pour it in, stir some water in it, mix it, put it in the oven, and — — you had cake. But it turns out they were very unpopular. People did not 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 was not 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, as if bought it in the store. It didn’t really feel like own. So what did they do? They took the and the milk out of the powder.
(Laughter)
Now you had 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, I a little bit like the IKEA effect, by getting people work harder, they actually got them to love what they’re doing to a degree.
So how do we look at this question experimentally? We asked to build some origami. We gave them instructions on how to create origami, 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 tell what, we’ll sell it to you. How much do want to pay for it?” And we measured how much they were willing to for it. And we had two types of people: We had people who built it, and the people who did not build it, and just at it as external observers. And 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 than the people who just evaluated them externally. Now 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, and everybody will love it as well?” Which one of those two is correct? Turns the builders not only loved the origami more, they thought that everybody see the world in their view. They thought everybody would love it more as well.
In the next version, we tried do the IKEA effect. We tried to make it more difficult. So for people, we gave the same task. For some people, we it harder by hiding the instructions. At the top of the sheet, had little diagrams of how you fold origami. For some people, just eliminated that. So now this was tougher. What happened? Well in an objective way, origami now was uglier, it was more difficult. Now when we looked at the easy origami, we saw same thing — builders loved it more, evaluators loved it less. When you looked at hard instructions, the effect was larger. Why? Because now the builders it even more.
(Laughter)
They put all this extra effort into it. And evaluators? They it even less. Because in reality, it was even uglier than first version.
(Laughter)
Of course, this tells you something about we evaluate things.
Now think about kids. Imagine I asked you, “How would you sell your kids for?” Your memories and and so on. Most people would say for a lot, lot of money.
(Laughter)
On good days.
(Laughter)
But imagine this was different. Imagine if you did not have your kids. And day you went to the park and you met kids. They were just like your kids, and you with them for a few hours, and when you were about leave, the parents said, “Hey, by the way, just you leave, if you’re interested, they’re for sale.”
(Laughter)
How much would you pay for them now? Most say 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 because the time and connection. By the way, if you IKEA instructions are not good, what about the instructions come with kids, those are really tough.
(Laughter)
By way, these are my kids, which, of course, are and so on. Which comes to tell you one more thing, is, much like our builders, when they look at the of their creation, we don’t see that other people don’t see things way.
Let me say one last comment. If you think about Adam Smith versus Karl Marx, Adam had a very important notion of efficiency. He gave an example of a pin factory. He said have 12 different steps, and if one person does all 12 steps, is very low. But if you get one person do step one, and one person to do step two and step three and so on, production can tremendously. And indeed, this is a great example, and the for the Industrial Revolution and 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 12 steps, you care about the pin. But if you do one step every time, maybe don’t care as much.
I think that in the Industrial Revolution, Adam Smith more correct than Karl Marx. But the reality is that we’ve switched, now we’re in the knowledge economy. You can ask yourself, what happens in a economy? Is efficiency still more important than meaning? I 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 connected feel 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 to us. So we think about labor, we usually think about motivation and payment as same thing, but the reality is that we should probably all kinds of things to it — meaning, creation, challenges, ownership, identity, pride, etc.
The good news is that if we added all of components and thought about them — how do we our own meaning, pride, motivation, and how do we it in our workplace, and for the employees — I think we could get to be both more productive and happier.
Thank you much.