I to talk a little bit today about labor and work.
When we about how people work, the naive intuition we have that people are like rats in a maze — all people care about is money, and the moment we give money, we can direct them to work one way, we direct them to work another way. This is why we give bonuses to bankers pay in all kinds of ways. And we really have this incredibly view of why people work, and what the labor market looks like.
At the same time, you think about it, there’s all kinds of strange behaviors in world around us. Think about something like mountaineering and mountain climbing. If you read books of people climb mountains, difficult mountains, do you think that those are full of moments of joy and happiness? No, are full of misery. In fact, it’s all about frostbite and having 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 never it again.”
(Laughter)
“Instead, let me sit on a beach drinking mojitos.” But instead, people go down, and after recover, they go up again. And if you think about mountain climbing as example, it suggests all kinds of things. It suggests we care about reaching the end, a peak. It suggests that we care the fight, about the challenge. It suggests that there’s all kinds of other that motivate us to work or behave in all 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 earlier, and he came one day back to campus. 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 was working very hard on presentation — graphs, tables, information. He stayed late at night every day. And day before it was due, he sent his PowerPoint presentation his boss, and his boss wrote him back and said, “Nice presentation, but the merger is canceled.” the guy 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 this PowerPoint presentation. But knowing nobody would ever watch it 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 experiment in which we people Legos, and we asked them to build with Legos. And for some people, we gave them Legos we said, “Hey, would you like to build this Bionicle for three dollars? We’ll you three dollars for it.” And people said yes, and they built with Legos. And when they finished, we 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 one, and when they finished, we asked them, “Do you want build another one?” for $2.40, $2.10, and so on, until at point people said, “No more. It’s not worth it for me.” This was what we called the 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 take all these Bionicles, we will disassemble them, we will put them back the boxes, and we will use it for the next participant.
There another condition. This other condition was inspired by David, my student. this other condition we called the Sisyphic condition. And you remember the story about Sisyphus, Sisyphus was punished by the gods push the same rock up a hill, and when he almost got the end, the rock would roll over, and he would to start again. And you can think about this as the essence doing futile work. You can imagine that if he pushed the rock on different hills, least he would have some sense of progress. Also, if you look prison movies, sometimes the way that the guards torture the is to get them to dig a hole, and when prisoner 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 and over and that seems to be particularly demotivating.
So in the condition of this experiment, that’s exactly what we did. We asked people, “Would you like to build one for three dollars?” And if they said yes, they built it. Then we asked them, “Do you to build another one for $2.70?” And if they said yes, we gave them a one, and as they were building it, we took apart the that they just finished. And when they finished that, said, “Would you like to build another one, this for 30 cents less?” And if they said yes, we gave the one that they built and we broke. So was an endless cycle of them building, and us destroying front of their eyes.
Now what happens when you these two conditions? The first thing that happened was that people built many more — eleven in the meaningful condition, versus seven in the Sisyphus condition. And by the way, should 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 the Bionicles would be destroyed quite soon. So there was not real opportunity for big meaning. But even the small meaning made a difference.
Now had another version of this experiment. In this other version of the experiment, didn’t put people in this situation, we just described to the situation, much as I am describing to you now, we asked them to predict what the result would be. happened? People predicted the right direction but not the magnitude. People who were just given the description of the said that in the meaningful condition, people would probably build one more Bionicle. So people understand that is important, they just don’t understand the magnitude of the importance, the extent to which it’s important.
There one other piece of data we looked at. If you think about it, there are some who love Legos, and some people who don’t. And would speculate that the people who love Legos would more Legos, even for less money, because after all, they more internal joy from it. And the people who love less would build less Legos because the enjoyment that they derive from it lower. And that’s actually what we found in the meaningful condition. was a very nice correlation between the love of Legos and the amount of Legos built.
What happened in the Sisyphic condition? In that condition, the correlation was — there was no relationship between the love of Legos, and how much people built, which suggests me that with this manipulation of breaking things in front of people’s eyes, we basically crushed any joy they could get out of this activity. We basically it.
Soon after I finished running this experiment, I went talk to a big software company in Seattle. I can’t tell who they were, but they were a big company in Seattle. This was group within the software company that was put in a different building, and they them to innovate, and create the next big product this company. And the week before I showed up, the CEO of this big software company went that group, 200 engineers, and 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 just been through that experiment. And I asked them, said, “How many of you now show up to work later than you used to?” And raised their hand. I said, “How many of you 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 their hands, but they took me out to dinner and showed me what they do with expense reports. And then I asked them, 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 whole company about journey over the last two years and what they decided to do. could have asked them to think about which aspect their technology could fit with other parts of the organization. He could asked them to build some next-generation prototypes, and see how they work. But the thing is that any one of those would require some and motivation. And I think the CEO basically did not understand importance of meaning. If the CEO, just like our participants, thought the essence 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 you in this way, everything will be okay.” But you understood how important meaning is, then you would figure out that it’s actually important to some time, energy and effort in getting people to care more about they’re doing.
The next experiment was slightly different. We took sheet of paper with random letters, and we asked people to find of letters that were identical next to each other. That was the task. People did first sheet, then we asked if they wanted to do for a little less money, the next sheet for a bit less, and so on and so forth. And had three conditions. In the first condition, people wrote their name on the sheet, found the pairs of letters, gave it to the experimenter, the experimenter would look at it, scan it from to bottom, say “Uh huh,” and put it on the pile next them. In the second condition, people did not write their name on it. The experimenter looked at it, the sheet of paper, did not look at it, did not scan it, and simply put on the pile of pages. So you take a piece, you just it on the side. In the third condition, the experimenter got the of paper, and put it directly into a shredder.
(Laughter)
What in those three conditions?
In this plot I’m showing at what pay rate people stopped. So low numbers mean 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 the shredder condition, it was twice much — 30 cents per sheet.
And this is the result we had before. You shred people’s efforts, — you get them not to be as happy what they’re doing. But I should point out, by way, that in the shredder condition, people could have cheated. They have done not so good work, because they realized people were just shredding it. So the first sheet you’d do good work, but then see nobody is really testing it, so you would do more and more and more. in fact, in the shredder condition, people could have more work and gotten more money, and put less effort into it. But what the ignored condition? Would the ignored condition be more like the or more like the shredder, or somewhere in the middle? It turns out was almost like the shredder.
Now there’s good news bad news here. The bad news is that ignoring performance of people is almost as bad as shredding their effort in front of 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 to be quite sufficient to dramatically improve people’s motivations. So the good is that adding motivation doesn’t seem to be so difficult. The news is that eliminating motivations seems to be incredibly easy, and we don’t think about it carefully, we might overdo it. So this is in terms of negative motivation, or eliminating negative motivation.
The next part I want show you is something about positive motivation. So there a store in the U.S. called IKEA. And IKEA is store with kind of okay furniture that takes a long to assemble.
(Laughter)
I don’t know about you, but every time I assemble one of those, it takes much longer, it’s much more effortful, it’s much more confusing, I put things the wrong way — I can’t say I enjoy those pieces. I can’t I enjoy the process. But when I finish it, I seem to like those IKEA pieces furniture more than I like other ones.
(Laughter)
And there’s an story about cake mixes. So 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 it in, stir some water in it, mix it, put it the oven, and — voila — you had cake. But 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 was that there not enough effort involved. It was so easy that nobody serve cake to their guests and say, “Here is cake.” No, it was somebody else’s cake, as if bought it in the store. It didn’t really feel like your own. what did they do? They took the eggs and the milk out of the powder.
(Laughter)
Now you to break the eggs and add them, you had to measure milk and add it, mixing it. Now it was cake. Now 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 on to create origami, and we gave them a sheet of paper. And were all novices, and they built something that was quite ugly — nothing like a 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 you want to for it?” And we measured how much they were willing to pay for it. And had two types of people: We had the people who built it, and people who did not build it, and just looked at it as external observers. And what found was that the builders thought that these were beautiful pieces of —
(Laughter)
and they were willing to pay five times more for them than the people who just them externally. Now you could say — if you a builder, do you think [you’d say], “Oh, I love this origami, but know that nobody else would love it?” Or “I love this origami, and everybody else will love as well?” Which one of those two is correct? Turns out the builders not only loved the more, they thought that everybody would see the world in their view. thought everybody else would love it more 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 hiding the instructions. At the top of the sheet, we had little diagrams of how fold origami. For some people, we just eliminated that. now this was tougher. What happened? Well in an way, the origami now was uglier, it was more difficult. Now when we looked the easy origami, we saw the same thing — builders loved more, evaluators loved it less. When you looked at the hard instructions, effect was larger. Why? Because now the builders loved it even more.
(Laughter)
They put all this effort into it. And evaluators? They loved it even less. Because in reality, it was even uglier than first version.
(Laughter)
Of course, this tells you something about how we things.
Now think about kids. Imagine I asked you, “How much would you sell your kids for?” memories and associations and so on. Most people would say a lot, a lot of money.
(Laughter)
On good days.
(Laughter)
But imagine this was slightly different. Imagine if you did 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, before you leave, if you’re interested, they’re for sale.”
(Laughter)
How much would you pay them now? Most people say not that much. And this is because our kids are valuable, not just because of who they are, but because of us, because they so connected to us, and because of the time and connection. By the way, if you IKEA instructions are 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 and so on. comes to tell you one more thing, which is, much like our builders, when they look the creature of their creation, we don’t see that other don’t see things our way.
Let me say one last comment. If you think about Adam versus Karl Marx, Adam Smith had a very important notion of efficiency. He gave 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 one person to 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 reason for the Industrial and efficiency. Karl Marx, on the other hand, said that the of labor is incredibly important in how people think the connection to what they are doing. And if you do all 12 steps, you care 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 ask yourself, what happens in a knowledge economy? Is efficiency more important than meaning? I think the answer is no. I think as we move to situations in which people have to on their own about how much effort, attention, caring, how connected feel to it, are they thinking about labor on the way to work, and in the shower so on, all of a sudden Marx has more to say to us. So when we think about labor, we think about motivation and payment as the same thing, the reality is that we should probably add all of things to it — meaning, creation, challenges, ownership, identity, pride, etc.
The good news is that if we added of those components and thought about them — how do we create our own meaning, pride, motivation, and do we do it in our workplace, and for the employees — I think could get people to be both more productive and happier.
Thank you much.