I want to talk a little bit today about and work.
When we think about how people work, the naive intuition we have that people are like rats in a maze — that all people care is money, and the moment we give them money, can direct them to work one way, we can direct them to another way. This is why we give bonuses to bankers and pay all kinds of ways. And we really have this incredibly simplistic view of why work, and what the labor market looks like.
At the same time, you think about it, there’s all kinds of strange behaviors the world around us. Think about something like mountaineering and mountain climbing. If you read books of who climb mountains, difficult mountains, do you think that those books are full of moments joy and happiness? No, they are full of misery. In fact, it’s all about frostbite having difficulty walking, and difficulty breathing — cold, challenging circumstances. And if people were just to be happy, the moment they would get to the top, they would say, “This was terrible mistake. I’ll never do it again.”
(Laughter)
“Instead, me sit on a 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 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 us to work or behave all kinds of ways.
And for me personally, I started thinking about this after a student came to me. This was one of my students from a few years earlier, and he came one day to campus. And he told me the following story: He said that for more than weeks, he was working on a PowerPoint presentation. He 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, he sent his PowerPoint presentation his boss, and his boss wrote him back and said, “Nice presentation, but the is canceled.” And the guy was deeply depressed. Now the moment when he was working, he was actually happy. Every night he was enjoying his work, he was staying late, 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 of our labor. And to start with, we created little experiment in which 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 like to build this Bionicle for dollars? We’ll pay you three dollars for it.” And people said yes, and they built with these Legos. when they finished, we took it, we put it the table, and we said, “Would you like to another one, this time for $2.70?” If 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 some point people said, “No more. It’s not it for me.” This was what we called the meaningful condition. built one Bionicle after another. After they finished every one of them, we put them under table. And we told them that at the end of the experiment, we will take all Bionicles, we will disassemble them, we will put them back the boxes, and we will use it for the next participant.
There was another condition. This other condition inspired by David, my student. And this other condition we called Sisyphic condition. And if you remember the story about Sisyphus, was punished by the gods to push the same rock a hill, and when he almost got to the end, the rock would roll over, and he would have start again. And you can think about this as the essence of doing work. You can imagine that if he pushed the rock different hills, at least he would have some sense of progress. Also, you look at prison movies, sometimes the way that the guards torture the prisoners to get them to dig a hole, and when the is finished, they ask him to fill the hole back up and then again. There’s something about this cyclical version of doing something over and over and that seems to be particularly demotivating.
So in the second condition of this experiment, that’s what we did. We asked people, “Would you like build one Bionicle for three dollars?” And if they said yes, built it. Then we asked them, “Do you want to another one for $2.70?” And if they said yes, gave them a new one, and as they were 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 said yes, we gave the one that they built and we broke. So this was an endless cycle of building, and us destroying in front of their eyes.
Now what happens you compare these two conditions? The first thing that happened was that people built many Bionicles — eleven in the meaningful condition, versus seven in Sisyphus condition. And by the way, we should point that this was not big meaning. People were not cancer or building bridges. People were building Bionicles for a cents. And not only that, everybody knew that the Bionicles would be destroyed quite soon. So there was a real opportunity for big meaning. But even the small meaning made difference.
Now we had another version of this experiment. In this other version of the experiment, we didn’t people in this situation, we just described to them the situation, as I am describing to you now, and we them to predict what the result would be. What happened? People predicted the right but not the right magnitude. People who were just given description of the experiment said that in the meaningful condition, people would build one more Bionicle. So people understand that meaning is important, they just don’t the magnitude of the importance, the extent to which it’s important.
There was one other piece of data we at. If you think about it, there are some people love Legos, and some people who don’t. And you would speculate the people who love Legos would build more Legos, even for less money, because after all, they get internal joy from it. And 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 meaningful condition. There was a very nice correlation between the love of and the amount of Legos people built.
What happened in the Sisyphic condition? 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 in of people’s eyes, we basically crushed any joy that they get out of this activity. We basically eliminated it.
Soon 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 big company in Seattle. This was a group within software company that was put in a different building, and asked them to innovate, and create the next big for this company. And the week before I showed up, the CEO this big software company went to that group, 200 engineers, canceled the project. And I stood there in front of 200 the most depressed people I’ve ever talked to. And I described to them some these Lego experiments, and they said they felt like they had just been through that experiment. I asked them, I said, “How many of you now up to work later than you used to?” And everybody their hand. I said, “How many of you now go home earlier you used to?” Everybody raised their hand. I asked them, “How many of you now not-so-kosher things to your expense reports?” And they didn’t raise their hands, but they me out to dinner and showed me what they could do with expense reports. And then asked them, I said, “What could the CEO have done to make you as depressed?” And they came up with all kinds of ideas.
They the CEO could have asked them to present to the company about their journey over the last two years and what they decided to do. He could asked them to think about which aspect of their could fit with other parts of the organization. He have asked them to build some next-generation prototypes, and see they would work. But the thing is that any of 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 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 understood how important meaning is, then would figure out that it’s actually important to spend some time, energy effort in getting people to care more about what they’re doing.
The next experiment 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. did the first sheet, then we asked if they wanted to do for a little less money, the next sheet for a little bit less, and on and so forth. And we had three conditions. In first condition, people wrote their name on the sheet, found all the of letters, gave it to the experimenter, the experimenter would look at it, scan from top to bottom, say “Uh huh,” and put it on the next to them. In the second condition, people did write their 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 the pile of pages. So you take a piece, 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 in those three conditions?
In this plot I’m showing you at what pay rate 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. 15 cents per page, they basically stopped these efforts. In shredder condition, it was twice as much — 30 cents per sheet.
And this basically the result we had before. You shred people’s efforts, output — you get them not to 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 they realized people were just shredding it. maybe the first sheet you’d do good work, but then see nobody is really testing it, so you would do more and more more. So in fact, in the shredder condition, people could have submitted more and gotten more money, and put less effort into it. But what about the ignored condition? Would the ignored be more like the acknowledged or more like the shredder, somewhere in the middle? It turns out it was almost like shredder.
Now there’s good news and bad news here. The bad news is ignoring the performance of people is almost as bad as shredding their effort in front their eyes. Ignoring gets you a whole way out there. The good news is that by simply looking something that somebody has done, scanning it and saying “Uh huh,” that seems to be quite sufficient dramatically improve people’s motivations. So the good news is adding motivation doesn’t seem to be so difficult. The bad is that eliminating motivations seems to be incredibly easy, and if we don’t think about it carefully, might overdo it. So this is all in terms of motivation, or eliminating negative motivation.
The next part I want to show is something about positive motivation. So there is a store in 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 you, but every time I assemble one of those, 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 I the process. But when I finish it, I seem like those IKEA pieces of furniture more than I other 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 would ask housewives basically pour it in, stir some water in it, mix it, put it in oven, and — voila — you had cake. But it turns out they were very unpopular. People did want them, and they thought about all kinds of reasons for that. Maybe the taste not good? No, the taste was great. What they figured out was there was not enough effort involved. It was so that nobody could serve cake to their guests and say, “Here my cake.” No, it was somebody else’s cake, as you bought it in the store. It didn’t really feel like own. So what did they do? They took the eggs and the milk out of 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 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 what they’re to a higher degree.
So how do we look at this question experimentally? 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, and built something that was really quite ugly — nothing like frog or a crane. But then we told them, “Look, this origami really belongs to us. You worked 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. And we had two of people: We had the people who built it, and people who did not build it, and just looked at as external observers. And what we found was that the builders thought that these were pieces of origami —
(Laughter)
and they were willing to pay five more for them than the people who just evaluated them externally. Now could say — if you were a builder, do you think [you’d say], “Oh, I love origami, but I know that nobody else would love it?” Or “I love origami, and everybody 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 everybody see the world in their view. They thought everybody else would love it more as well.
In the version, we tried to do the IKEA effect. We to make it more difficult. So for some people, we the 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 fold origami. some people, we just eliminated that. So now this was tougher. What happened? Well an objective way, the origami now was uglier, it was more difficult. Now when we looked at easy origami, we saw the same thing — builders it more, evaluators loved it less. When you looked the hard instructions, the effect was larger. Why? Because now the builders loved it more.
(Laughter)
They put all this 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 about we evaluate things.
Now think about kids. Imagine I asked you, “How much you sell your kids for?” Your memories and associations and so on. Most people say 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 and you met some kids. They just like your kids, and you played with them for a few hours, and when you were to leave, the parents said, “Hey, by the way, just before leave, if you’re interested, they’re for sale.”
(Laughter)
How much would you pay for them now? people say not that much. And this is because our kids so valuable, not just because of who they are, but of us, because they are so connected to us, and because the time and connection. By the way, if you think IKEA instructions not good, what about the instructions that come with kids, those really tough.
(Laughter)
By the way, these are my kids, which, of course, are wonderful 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 things our way.
Let me say one last comment. If you think about Smith versus Karl Marx, Adam Smith had a very important notion of efficiency. He gave an example a 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, production can increase tremendously. indeed, this is a great example, and the reason the Industrial Revolution and efficiency. Karl Marx, on the other hand, that the alienation of labor is incredibly important in people think about the connection to what they are doing. And if you do all 12 steps, care about the pin. But if you do one step every time, you don’t care as much.
I think that in Industrial Revolution, Adam Smith was more correct than Karl Marx. But the is that we’ve switched, and now we’re in the knowledge economy. You can ask yourself, happens in a knowledge economy? Is efficiency still more important than meaning? I the answer is no. I think that as we move to in 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 way work, and in the shower and so on, all of a sudden Marx has more things to say us. So when we think about labor, we usually think about motivation and payment 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 news is that if we added all those components and thought about them — how do we our own meaning, pride, motivation, and how do we do in our workplace, and for the employees — I think could get people to be both more productive and happier.
Thank you much.