I want to a little 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 them money, we can direct them to work one way, we 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 market looks like.
At the same time, if you think about it, there’s all kinds strange behaviors in the world around us. Think about like mountaineering and mountain climbing. If you read books people who climb mountains, difficult mountains, do you think those books are full of moments of joy and happiness? No, they are full of misery. fact, it’s all about frostbite and having difficulty walking, difficulty breathing — cold, challenging circumstances. And if people just trying to be happy, the moment they would get to the top, they say, “This was a terrible mistake. I’ll never do it again.”
(Laughter)
“Instead, let me sit on beach somewhere drinking mojitos.” But 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 we care reaching the end, a peak. It suggests that we care the fight, about the challenge. It suggests that there’s all kinds of other things motivate us to work or behave in all kinds ways.
And for me personally, I started thinking about this a student came to visit me. This was one of my students from a years earlier, and he came one day back to campus. And he me the following story: He said that for more than two weeks, he was on a 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, sent his PowerPoint presentation to his boss, and his boss him back and said, “Nice presentation, but the merger canceled.” And the guy was deeply depressed. Now at the when he was working, he was actually quite happy. night he was enjoying his work, he was staying late, he was perfecting this PowerPoint presentation. But that nobody would ever watch it made him quite depressed.
So started thinking about how do we experiment with this idea of the of our labor. And to start with, we created a little experiment which we gave people Legos, and we asked them to build Legos. And for some people, we gave them Legos and we said, “Hey, would you like to this Bionicle 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 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, at some point people said, “No more. It’s not worth it for me.” This was what we called meaningful condition. People built one Bionicle after another. After they finished every one of them, we put under the table. And we told them that at the of the experiment, we will take all these Bionicles, we disassemble them, we will put them back in the boxes, and we will use it for the 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 almost got to end, the rock would roll over, and he would have start again. And you can think about this as the of doing futile work. You can imagine that if pushed the rock on different hills, at least he would some sense of progress. Also, if you look at prison movies, sometimes the way that guards torture the prisoners is to get them to dig hole, and when the prisoner is finished, they ask him fill the hole back up and then dig again. There’s something about this cyclical version 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 like to build one Bionicle for three dollars?” And they said yes, they built it. Then we asked them, “Do you want to build another one for $2.70?” if they said yes, we gave them a new one, and they were building it, we 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 yes, we gave them the one that they built and we broke. So this an endless cycle of them building, and us destroying in front of their eyes.
Now happens when you compare these two conditions? The first thing that happened that people built many more Bionicles — eleven in meaningful condition, versus seven in the Sisyphus condition. And by 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 the would 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 version of experiment. In this other version of the experiment, we didn’t put people this situation, we just described to them the situation, much I am describing to you now, and we asked them predict what the result would be. What happened? People the right direction but not the right magnitude. People who just given the description of the experiment said that in the meaningful condition, people would probably build more Bionicle. So people understand that meaning is important, just don’t understand the magnitude of the importance, the to which it’s important.
There was one other piece of data we looked at. you think about it, there are some people who love Legos, some people who don’t. And you would speculate that people who love Legos would build more Legos, even for less money, because all, they get more internal joy from it. And the people who love Legos less build less Legos because the enjoyment that they derive from it is lower. that’s actually what 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? that condition, the correlation was zero — there was no relationship between the of Legos, and how much people built, which suggests to me that with this of breaking things in front of people’s eyes, we basically crushed any joy that they could get out this activity. We basically eliminated it.
Soon after I finished running this experiment, I to talk to a big software company in Seattle. can’t tell you who they were, but they were big company in Seattle. This was a group within software company that was put in a different building, and they asked them to innovate, and create next big product for this company. And the week before I showed up, the CEO of this software company went to that 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 just through that experiment. And I asked them, I said, “How many of now show up to work later than you used to?” And raised their hand. I said, “How many of you now home earlier 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 didn’t raise their hands, but they took me out to dinner and showed me they could do with expense reports. And then I asked them, I said, “What could CEO have done to make you not as depressed?” And they came up with 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 to do. He could have them to think about which aspect of their technology could fit with other of the organization. He could have asked them to build next-generation prototypes, and see how they would work. But the thing is that any one those would require some effort and motivation. And I think CEO basically did not understand the importance of meaning. the CEO, just like our participants, thought the essence meaning is unimportant, then he [wouldn’t] care. And he say, “At the moment I directed you in this way, now that I’m directing you in this way, everything will be okay.” if you understood 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 what they’re doing.
The next experiment was slightly different. We took a of paper with random letters, and we asked people to find pairs of that were identical next to each other. That was task. People did the first sheet, then we asked if they to do another for a little less money, the next for a little bit less, and so on and so forth. And we 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 second condition, people did not write their name on it. The experimenter looked it, took the sheet of paper, did not look it, did not scan it, and simply put it on the pile of pages. So you a piece, you just put it on the side. In the condition, the experimenter got the sheet of paper, and put it directly into shredder.
(Laughter)
What happened in those three conditions?
In this plot I’m you at what pay rate people stopped. So low mean that people worked harder. They worked for much longer. In the acknowledged condition, people worked all the down to 15 cents. At 15 cents per page, they 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, — you get them not to be as happy with they’re doing. But I should point out, by the way, in the shredder condition, people could have cheated. They could have done so good work, because they 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 submitted more work and gotten more money, and put less effort it. But what about the ignored condition? Would the condition be more like the acknowledged or more like the shredder, somewhere in the middle? It turns out it was almost the shredder.
Now there’s good news and bad news here. The bad news is that the performance of people is almost as bad as shredding their effort front of their eyes. Ignoring gets you a whole way out there. The good news that by simply looking at something that somebody has done, scanning it and saying “Uh huh,” that seems to quite sufficient to dramatically improve people’s motivations. So the news is that adding motivation doesn’t seem to be difficult. The bad news is that eliminating motivations seems be incredibly easy, and if we don’t think about it carefully, we might overdo it. this is all in terms of negative motivation, or eliminating motivation.
The next 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 takes a long time to assemble.
(Laughter)
I don’t know about you, every time I assemble one of those, it takes me much longer, it’s much more effortful, it’s much confusing, I put things in the wrong way — can’t say I enjoy those pieces. I can’t say enjoy the process. But when I finish it, I seem to like those pieces of furniture more than I like other ones.
(Laughter)
And there’s an old story about cake mixes. when they started cake mixes in the ’40s, they would take this powder they would put it in a box, and they would ask housewives to basically pour it in, some water in it, mix it, put it in the oven, and — — you had cake. But it turns out they were very unpopular. did not want them, and they thought about all of reasons for that. Maybe the 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 and say, “Here 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 eggs and the milk of the powder.
(Laughter)
Now you had to break the 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, actually got them to love what they’re doing to a higher degree.
So do we look at this question experimentally? We asked people to some origami. We gave them instructions on how to create origami, and we them a sheet of paper. And these were all novices, and built something that was really quite ugly — nothing like a frog or 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 measured how much they willing to pay for it. And we had two types of people: We had the people who 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 were beautiful pieces of origami —
(Laughter)
and they were willing pay five times more for them than the people who just them externally. Now you could say — if you were a builder, do think [you’d say], “Oh, I love this origami, but know that nobody else would love it?” Or “I this origami, and everybody else will love it as well?” Which one those two is correct? Turns out the builders not loved the origami more, they thought that everybody would see world in their view. They thought everybody else would love it as well.
In the next version, we tried to the IKEA effect. We tried to make it more difficult. So some people, we 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 this was tougher. happened? Well in an objective way, the origami now uglier, it was more difficult. Now when we looked at the easy origami, saw the same thing — builders loved it more, evaluators loved less. When you looked at the hard instructions, the was larger. Why? Because now the builders loved it even more.
(Laughter)
They put all extra effort into it. And evaluators? They loved it even less. in reality, it was even uglier than the first version.
(Laughter)
Of course, this tells you something how we evaluate things.
Now think about kids. Imagine asked you, “How much would you sell your kids for?” memories and associations and so on. Most people would say for lot, a lot of money.
(Laughter)
On good days.
(Laughter)
But imagine this was slightly different. if you did not have your kids. And one day you went the park and you met some kids. They were just your kids, and you played 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 would you pay for them now? Most people say not that much. And this because our kids are so valuable, not just because of who they are, but of us, because they are so connected to us, and because of the time and connection. the way, if you think IKEA instructions are not good, what about instructions that come with kids, those are really tough.
(Laughter)
By the way, these are my kids, which, of course, wonderful and so on. Which comes to tell you one more thing, is, much like our builders, when they look at creature of their creation, we don’t see that other people don’t see our way.
Let me say one last comment. If you think about Adam Smith versus Marx, Adam Smith had a very important notion of efficiency. He gave an example of pin factory. He 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 and step three and so on, can increase tremendously. And indeed, this is a great example, and the for the Industrial Revolution and efficiency. Karl Marx, on other hand, said that the alienation of labor is incredibly important how people think about the connection to what they are doing. And if you all 12 steps, you care about the pin. But if you do one every time, maybe you don’t care as much.
I think in the Industrial Revolution, Adam Smith was more correct than Karl Marx. But reality is that we’ve switched, and now we’re in knowledge economy. You can ask yourself, what happens in a knowledge economy? Is still more important than meaning? I think the answer is no. I that as we move to situations in which people have decide on their own about how much effort, attention, caring, how connected they feel to it, are they about labor on the way to work, and in the shower and so on, of a sudden Marx has more things to say to us. when we think about labor, we usually think about motivation payment as the 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 is that if we added all of those components and about them — how do we create our own meaning, pride, motivation, how do we do it in our workplace, and the employees — I think we could get people to be both more and happier.
Thank you very much.