I to talk a little bit today about labor and work.
When we think about how people work, the naive we have is that people are like rats in a maze — that all people care about money, and the moment we give 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. And we 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 of strange behaviors in the world around us. Think about something like mountaineering and mountain climbing. If you books of people who climb mountains, difficult mountains, do you think that those books full of moments of joy and happiness? No, they are full of misery. In fact, it’s about frostbite and having difficulty walking, and difficulty breathing — cold, circumstances. And if people were just trying to be happy, the moment would get to the top, they would say, “This a terrible mistake. I’ll never do it again.”
(Laughter)
“Instead, let me sit on a beach somewhere mojitos.” But instead, people go down, and after they recover, they go up again. And you think about mountain 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 motivate us to work or behave in all kinds of ways.
And for personally, I started thinking about this after a student to visit me. This was one of my students from a few years earlier, and came one day back to campus. And he told me the following story: He said that for than two weeks, he was working on a PowerPoint presentation. was working in a big bank, and this was preparation for a merger and acquisition. And he was working very hard this presentation — graphs, tables, information. He stayed late at night every day. And the before it was due, he sent his PowerPoint presentation to boss, and his boss wrote him back and said, “Nice presentation, but merger is canceled.” And the guy was deeply depressed. Now at the moment when he was working, he actually quite happy. Every night he was enjoying his work, he was staying late, was perfecting this PowerPoint presentation. But knowing that nobody would watch it made him quite depressed.
So I started thinking about how do we experiment this idea of the fruits of our labor. And start with, we created a little experiment in which we gave people Legos, and we asked to build with Legos. And for some people, we gave them and we said, “Hey, would you like to build this Bionicle for three dollars? We’ll pay you three for it.” And people said yes, and they built with these Legos. And they finished, we took it, we put it under the table, we said, “Would you like to build another one, this time for $2.70?” If they said yes, gave them another one, and when they finished, we asked them, “Do you to 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.” This was what called the meaningful condition. People built one Bionicle after another. they finished every one of them, we put them under the table. we told them that at the end of the experiment, we will take all Bionicles, we will disassemble them, we will put them in the boxes, and we will use it for 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 remember story about Sisyphus, Sisyphus was punished by the gods to push the same rock a hill, and when he almost got to the end, the rock would over, and he would have to start again. And you can about this as the essence of doing futile work. You can imagine that he pushed the rock on different hills, at least he have some sense of progress. Also, if you look at movies, sometimes the way that the guards torture the is to get them to dig a hole, and when the prisoner is finished, they him to 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 to be particularly demotivating.
So in second condition of this experiment, that’s exactly what we did. asked people, “Would you like to build one Bionicle for dollars?” And if they said yes, they built it. we asked them, “Do you want to build another one for $2.70?” And if they yes, we gave them a new one, and as they building it, we took apart the one that they finished. And when they finished that, we said, “Would you like to build one, this time for 30 cents less?” And if they said yes, we 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 what happens you compare these two conditions? The first thing that happened was that people built more Bionicles — eleven in the meaningful condition, versus seven in the Sisyphus condition. by the way, we should point out that this was not meaning. People were not curing cancer or building bridges. People were building Bionicles for few cents. And not only that, everybody knew that the Bionicles would be destroyed quite soon. So was not a real opportunity for big meaning. But even the small meaning made difference.
Now we had another version of this experiment. this other version of the experiment, we didn’t put people in this situation, we just to them the situation, much as I am describing to you now, and asked them to predict what the result would be. What happened? predicted the right direction but not the right magnitude. People were just given the description of the experiment said that in meaningful condition, people would probably build one more Bionicle. So people understand that meaning is important, they don’t understand the magnitude of the importance, the extent to which it’s important.
There was one piece of data we looked at. If you think about it, there are people who love Legos, and some people who don’t. And you would speculate that the who love Legos would build more Legos, even for less money, because all, they get more internal joy from it. And the people love Legos less would build less Legos because the 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 Sisyphic condition? In that condition, the correlation was zero — there was relationship between the love of Legos, and how much built, which suggests to me that with this manipulation of things in front of people’s eyes, we basically crushed joy that they could get out of this activity. We eliminated 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 a big company in Seattle. This was a group the software company that was put in a different building, and they asked them to innovate, create the next big product for this company. And the before I showed up, the CEO of this big software company to that group, 200 engineers, and canceled the project. And I stood there in of 200 of the most depressed people I’ve ever talked to. And I described them some of these Lego experiments, and they said felt like they had just been through that experiment. And I asked them, said, “How many of you now show up to later than you used to?” And everybody raised their hand. said, “How many of you now go home earlier than you used to?” Everybody raised their hand. asked them, “How many of you now add not-so-kosher things to your expense reports?” they didn’t raise their hands, but they took me out to dinner and me what 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 journey over last two years and what they decided to do. He could have asked them to think 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 they would work. But the thing is that any one of those require some effort and motivation. And I think the CEO basically did not understand the of meaning. If the CEO, just like our participants, thought the of meaning is unimportant, then he [wouldn’t] care. And he would say, “At the moment I directed in this way, and now that I’m directing you in this way, 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 and effort getting people to care more about what they’re doing.
The next experiment was slightly different. We took a sheet paper with random letters, and we asked people to find of letters that were identical next to each other. That was task. People did the first sheet, then we asked if they wanted do another for a little less money, the next sheet for a little bit less, so on and so forth. And we had three conditions. In the first condition, people wrote name on the sheet, found all the pairs of letters, it to the experimenter, the experimenter would look at it, it from top to bottom, say “Uh huh,” and put it the pile next to them. In the second condition, people did not write their name on it. The looked at it, took the sheet of paper, did look at it, did not scan it, and simply it on the pile of pages. So you take piece, you just put it on the side. In the third condition, the got the sheet of paper, and put it directly a shredder.
(Laughter)
What happened in those three conditions?
In this plot I’m showing at what pay rate people stopped. So low numbers that people worked harder. They worked for much longer. In the acknowledged condition, worked all the way down to 15 cents. At 15 cents page, they basically stopped these efforts. In the shredder condition, it twice as much — 30 cents per sheet.
And is basically the result we had before. You shred people’s efforts, output — you get them not to be as with what they’re doing. But I should point out, by the way, that in the condition, people could have cheated. They could have done so good work, because they realized people were just it. So maybe the first sheet you’d do good work, but you see nobody is really testing it, so you would do more and more and more. So fact, in the shredder condition, people could have submitted more and gotten more money, and put less effort into it. what about the ignored condition? Would the ignored condition be like the acknowledged or more like the shredder, or in the middle? It turns out it was 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 in front of their eyes. Ignoring gets you a way out there. The good news is that by simply looking at that somebody has done, scanning it and saying “Uh huh,” that seems be quite sufficient to dramatically improve people’s motivations. So good news is that adding motivation doesn’t seem to so difficult. The bad news is that eliminating motivations seems to be incredibly easy, and if we don’t about it carefully, we might overdo it. So this is in terms of negative motivation, or eliminating negative motivation.
The next part I to show you is something about positive motivation. So there is a store in the U.S. called IKEA. IKEA is a store with kind of okay furniture that a long time to assemble.
(Laughter)
I don’t know you, but every time I assemble one of those, it takes me much longer, it’s much effortful, it’s much more confusing, I put 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. So when started cake mixes in the ’40s, they would take this powder and they put it in a box, and they would ask to basically pour 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 the taste was not good? No, the was great. What they figured out was that there was enough effort involved. It was so easy that nobody serve cake to their guests and say, “Here is my cake.” No, was somebody else’s cake, as if you bought it the store. It didn’t really feel like your own. what did they do? They took the eggs and the milk out the powder.
(Laughter)
Now you had to break the eggs and them, you 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 like the IKEA effect, by people to work harder, they actually got them to love they’re doing to a higher degree.
So how do we look at question experimentally? We asked people to build some origami. We gave instructions on how to create origami, and we gave them sheet of paper. And these were all novices, and built something that was really quite ugly — nothing like a or a crane. But then we told them, “Look, origami really belongs to us. You worked for us, I’ll tell you what, we’ll sell it to you. How much do want to pay for it?” And we measured how much they were to pay for it. And we had two types people: We had the people who built it, and the people who did not it, and just looked at it as external observers. And we found 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 them externally. Now you say — if you were a builder, do you [you’d say], “Oh, I love this origami, but I know that nobody else would love it?” “I love this origami, and everybody else will love it as well?” Which one those two is correct? Turns out the builders not only loved the origami more, thought that everybody would see the world in their view. They thought everybody would love it more as well.
In the next version, tried to do the IKEA effect. We tried to make it more difficult. So some people, we gave the same task. For some people, made it harder by hiding the instructions. At the top the sheet, we had little diagrams of how you fold origami. For 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. when 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? now the builders loved it even more.
(Laughter)
They put all extra effort into it. And evaluators? They loved it even less. Because in reality, it was uglier than the first version.
(Laughter)
Of course, this you something about how we evaluate things.
Now think about kids. I asked you, “How much would you sell your for?” Your 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 different. Imagine if you did not have your kids. And one day you went the park and you met some kids. They were like your kids, and you played with them for a 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 say not much. And this is because our kids are so valuable, not just of who they are, but because of us, because they so connected to us, and because of the time connection. By the way, if you think IKEA instructions are good, what about the instructions that 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 tell one more thing, which is, much like our builders, when they look at the 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 notion of efficiency. He gave an example of a pin factory. said pins have 12 different steps, and if one person does 12 steps, production is very low. But if you get person to do step one, and one person to do step two step three and so on, production can increase tremendously. indeed, this is a great example, and the reason for the Industrial Revolution and efficiency. Karl Marx, on other hand, said that the alienation of labor is incredibly important in how people think about the to what they are doing. And if you do 12 steps, you care about the pin. But if you do step every time, maybe you don’t care as much.
I think that in the Revolution, Adam Smith was more correct than Karl Marx. But reality is that we’ve switched, and now we’re in the economy. You can ask yourself, what happens in a knowledge economy? efficiency still more important than meaning? I think the answer is no. think that as we move to situations in which people have to decide on their own about much effort, attention, caring, how connected they feel to it, are they thinking about labor on way to work, and in the shower and so on, all of sudden Marx has more things to say to us. when we think about labor, we usually think about motivation and payment as the thing, but the reality is that we should probably add all kinds of things 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 — think we could get people to be both more and happier.
Thank you very much.