I to talk a little bit today about labor and work.
When we think how people work, the naive intuition we have is that people are like in a maze — that all people care about is money, the moment we give them money, we can direct them to one way, we can direct them to work another way. is why we give bonuses to bankers and pay all kinds of ways. And we really have this incredibly simplistic of why people work, and what the labor market looks like.
At same time, if you think about it, there’s all of strange behaviors in the world around us. Think about like mountaineering and 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 about frostbite and having walking, and difficulty breathing — cold, challenging circumstances. And if people were trying to be happy, the moment they would get to the top, would say, “This was a terrible mistake. I’ll never do it again.”
(Laughter)
“Instead, let sit on a beach somewhere drinking mojitos.” But instead, go down, and after they recover, they go up again. if you think about mountain climbing as an example, suggests all kinds of things. It suggests that we about reaching the end, a peak. It suggests that care about the fight, about the challenge. It suggests that there’s all kinds of other things that us to work or behave in all kinds of ways.
And me personally, I started thinking about this after a came to visit me. This was one of my from a few years earlier, and he came one day back to campus. he told me the following story: He said that for more than weeks, he was working on a PowerPoint presentation. He was working in a big bank, and this in preparation for a merger and acquisition. And he working very hard on this presentation — graphs, tables, information. stayed late at night every day. And the day before was due, he sent his PowerPoint presentation to his boss, and his boss him back and said, “Nice presentation, but the merger is canceled.” And the was deeply depressed. Now at the moment when he was working, was actually quite happy. Every night he was enjoying his work, he was staying late, he was this PowerPoint presentation. But knowing that nobody would ever watch it made quite depressed.
So I started thinking about how do we with this idea of the fruits of our labor. And to start with, we a little experiment in 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 build Bionicle for three dollars? We’ll pay you three dollars it.” And people said yes, and they built with these Legos. And when they finished, took it, we put it under the table, and we said, “Would you like build another one, this time for $2.70?” If they said yes, we gave another one, and when they finished, we asked them, “Do you to build another one?” for $2.40, $2.10, and so on, until at some point 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 one of them, we put them under the table. we told them that at the end of the experiment, we take all these Bionicles, we will disassemble them, we will put back in the boxes, and we will use it for next participant.
There was another condition. This other condition was 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, rock would roll over, and he would have to start again. And you can think about this as 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 prison movies, the way that the guards torture the prisoners is to get them to dig a hole, and the prisoner is finished, they ask him to fill the back up and then dig again. There’s something about this cyclical of doing something over and over and over that seems be particularly demotivating.
So in the second condition of this experiment, that’s what we did. We asked people, “Would you like to one Bionicle for three dollars?” And if they said yes, they it. Then we asked them, “Do you want to build another one $2.70?” And if they said yes, we gave them new one, and as they were building it, we took apart one that they just 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 gave the one that they built and we broke. So this was an endless cycle of them building, and destroying in front of their eyes.
Now what happens you compare these two conditions? The first thing that was 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 meaning. People were not curing cancer or building bridges. were building Bionicles for a few cents. And not that, everybody knew that the Bionicles would be destroyed quite soon. So there not a real opportunity for big meaning. But even the meaning made a difference.
Now we had another version this experiment. In this other version of the experiment, we didn’t put people in situation, we just described to them the situation, much as I describing to you now, and we asked them to what the result would be. What happened? People predicted right direction but not the right magnitude. People who were just given the description the experiment said that in the meaningful condition, people probably build one more Bionicle. So people understand that 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 at. If you think about it, there are some who love Legos, and some people who don’t. And you would that the people who love Legos would build more Legos, even less money, because after all, they get more internal joy from it. And the people who Legos less would build less Legos because the enjoyment that they derive it is lower. And that’s actually what we found the meaningful condition. There was a very nice correlation the love of Legos 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 breaking things in front of people’s eyes, we basically crushed any joy that they could get out of activity. We basically eliminated it.
Soon after I finished this experiment, I went to talk to a big software company in Seattle. can’t tell you who they were, but they were a big company Seattle. This was a group within the software company that was put in a different building, and they 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 to that group, 200 engineers, and canceled the project. And I stood there in front of 200 of most depressed people I’ve ever talked to. And I described to them some these Lego experiments, and they said they felt like 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. I said, “How many of you now home earlier than you used to?” Everybody raised their hand. I asked them, “How of you now add not-so-kosher things to your expense reports?” And they didn’t their hands, but they took me out to dinner and me what they could do with expense reports. And then I them, I said, “What could the CEO have done to you not as depressed?” And they came up with all of ideas.
They said the CEO could have asked to present to the whole company about their journey over 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 how they would work. But the thing is that any one of those require some effort and motivation. And I think the basically did not understand the 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 I directed you in this way, and now that I’m directing you in way, everything will be okay.” But if you understood how important is, then you would figure out that it’s actually to 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 letters that were identical next to each other. That the task. People did the first sheet, then we if they wanted to do another for a little less money, next sheet for a little bit less, and so on and so forth. we had three conditions. In the first condition, people wrote their on the sheet, found all the pairs of letters, 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. experimenter looked at it, took the sheet of paper, not look at it, did not scan it, and simply put it on the of pages. So you take a piece, you just it on the side. In the third condition, the experimenter the sheet of paper, and put it directly into a shredder.
(Laughter)
What happened those three conditions?
In this plot I’m showing you at what rate people stopped. So low numbers mean that people worked harder. worked for much longer. In the acknowledged condition, people worked all the down to 15 cents. At 15 cents per page, they basically stopped these efforts. the shredder condition, it was twice as much — 30 cents per sheet.
And is basically 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 the way, that the shredder condition, people could have cheated. They could have done so good work, because they realized people were just shredding it. maybe the first sheet you’d do good work, but then you see nobody really testing it, so you would do more and more and more. in fact, in the shredder condition, people could have submitted more work gotten more money, and put less effort into it. But about the ignored condition? Would the ignored condition be like the acknowledged or more like the shredder, or somewhere in the middle? turns out it was almost like the shredder.
Now there’s good 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 news is that by simply looking at something that somebody has done, it and saying “Uh huh,” that seems to be sufficient to dramatically improve people’s motivations. So the good news that adding motivation doesn’t seem to be so difficult. The bad news that eliminating motivations seems to be incredibly easy, and if 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 is a store in the U.S. IKEA. And IKEA is a store with kind of okay furniture that takes a long time assemble.
(Laughter)
I don’t know about you, but every 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 I enjoy the process. But when finish it, I seem to like those IKEA pieces of furniture more than 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 basically it in, stir some water in it, mix it, put in the oven, and — voila — you had cake. it turns out they were very unpopular. People did not 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 easy that could serve cake to their guests and say, “Here is my cake.” No, it somebody else’s cake, as if you bought it in the store. It didn’t really feel like own. So what did they do? They took the eggs and milk out of the powder.
(Laughter)
Now you had to break the eggs and add them, you to measure the milk and add it, mixing it. Now was your cake. Now everything was fine.
(Laughter)
(Applause)
Now, I a little bit like the IKEA effect, by getting people to work harder, they actually them to love what they’re doing to a higher degree.
So how we look at this question experimentally? We asked people build some origami. We gave them instructions on how to origami, and we gave them a sheet of paper. And these were novices, and they built something that was really quite ugly — nothing like a frog 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 to you. How much do you want to for it?” And we measured how much they were willing to pay it. And we had two types of people: We the people who built it, and the people who did build it, and just looked at it as external observers. 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 evaluated them externally. 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 love this origami, and everybody will love it as well?” Which one of those two correct? Turns out the builders not only loved the origami more, they thought that would see the world in their view. They thought everybody else would love it more well.
In the next version, we tried to do the IKEA effect. We to make it more difficult. So for some people, we gave the same task. For some people, we it harder by hiding the instructions. At the top of the sheet, we had little diagrams of how fold origami. For some people, we just eliminated that. So now this tougher. What happened? Well in an objective way, the origami now was uglier, it more difficult. Now when we looked at the easy origami, saw the same thing — builders loved it more, evaluators it less. When you looked at the hard instructions, effect was larger. Why? Because now the builders loved even more.
(Laughter)
They put all this extra effort it. And evaluators? They loved it even less. Because in reality, it was even uglier the first version.
(Laughter)
Of course, this tells you something about we evaluate things.
Now think about kids. Imagine I asked you, “How much would you sell kids for?” Your memories and associations and so on. Most people would say a lot, a lot of money.
(Laughter)
On good days.
(Laughter)
But imagine was slightly different. Imagine if you did not have your kids. And one day you went the park and you met some kids. They were just like your kids, and you played with 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 you pay for them now? Most people say not that much. And is because our kids are so valuable, not just because of they are, but because of us, because they are so to us, and because of the time and connection. By the way, you think IKEA instructions are not good, what about instructions that come with kids, those are really tough.
(Laughter)
By the way, these are kids, which, of course, are wonderful and so on. Which to tell you one more thing, which is, much like our builders, when look at the creature of their creation, we don’t that other people don’t see things our way.
Let me say last comment. If you think about Adam Smith versus Karl Marx, Smith had a very important notion of efficiency. He gave an of a pin factory. He said pins have 12 different steps, if one person does all 12 steps, production is very low. But if you get person to do step one, and one person to do step and step three and so on, production can increase tremendously. And indeed, this is great example, and the reason for the Industrial Revolution and efficiency. Karl Marx, on the hand, said that the alienation of labor is incredibly important how people think about the connection to what they are doing. And you do all 12 steps, you care about the pin. But if you do one step time, maybe you don’t care as much.
I think that in the Industrial Revolution, Adam was more correct than Karl Marx. But the reality that we’ve switched, and now we’re in the knowledge economy. You can ask yourself, what in a knowledge economy? Is efficiency still more important than meaning? I think the answer no. I think that as we move to situations in which people have to decide on their own how much effort, attention, caring, how connected they feel to it, are thinking about labor on the way to work, and in shower and so on, all of a sudden Marx more things to say to us. So when we think labor, we usually think about motivation and payment as the same thing, but the reality is we should probably add all kinds of things to — meaning, creation, challenges, ownership, identity, pride, etc.
The good news is that if we all of those components and thought about them — how do create our own meaning, pride, motivation, and how do do it in our workplace, and for the employees — I think we could get people be both more productive and happier.
Thank you very much.