I to talk a little bit today about labor and work.
When we about how people work, the naive intuition we have is people are like rats in a maze — that all care about is money, and the moment we give them money, we direct them to work one way, we can direct them work another way. This is why we give bonuses to bankers and pay in kinds of ways. And we really have this incredibly view of why people work, and what the labor market like.
At the same time, if you think about it, there’s all kinds 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 books are full of moments of joy and happiness? No, they full of misery. In fact, it’s all about frostbite having difficulty walking, and difficulty breathing — cold, challenging circumstances. And people were just trying 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 climbing as an example, it suggests all kinds of things. It suggests that care about reaching the end, a peak. It suggests that we care the fight, about the challenge. It suggests that there’s all of other things that motivate us to work or behave all kinds of ways.
And for me personally, I started about this after a student came to visit me. This was of my students from a few years earlier, and he came one day back to campus. And he me the following story: He said that for more two weeks, he was working on a PowerPoint presentation. was working in a big bank, and this was in preparation for a and acquisition. And he was working very hard on this — graphs, tables, information. He stayed late at night every day. And the day it was due, he sent his PowerPoint presentation to his boss, and his boss wrote him and said, “Nice presentation, but the merger is canceled.” And the was deeply depressed. Now at the moment when he was working, he was actually quite happy. Every night was enjoying his work, he was staying late, he was perfecting PowerPoint presentation. But knowing that nobody would ever watch it made him quite depressed.
So I started about how do we experiment with this idea of the fruits of our labor. And to with, we created a little experiment in which we people Legos, and we asked them to build with Legos. And for people, we gave them Legos and we said, “Hey, you like to build this Bionicle for three dollars? We’ll you three dollars for it.” And people said yes, and they built with these Legos. And they finished, we took it, we put it under table, and we said, “Would you like to build one, this time for $2.70?” If they said yes, gave them another one, and 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 of them, we put them under the table. And told them that at the end of the experiment, we will take all these Bionicles, will disassemble them, we will put them back in the boxes, and we will use it the next participant.
There was another condition. This other was inspired by David, my student. And this other condition we called the condition. And if you remember the story about Sisyphus, Sisyphus was punished by the to push the same rock up a hill, and when he almost got to the end, the would roll over, and he would have to start again. And you can think this as the essence of doing futile work. You can imagine that if he pushed the on different hills, at least he would have some sense of progress. Also, if you at prison movies, sometimes the way that the guards torture the prisoners is to get them to a hole, and when the prisoner is finished, they 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 condition of this experiment, that’s exactly what we did. asked people, “Would you like to build one Bionicle for three dollars?” 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 them a new one, and as they were building it, took apart the one that they just finished. And when finished that, we said, “Would you like to build one, this time for 30 cents less?” And if said 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 their eyes.
Now what happens when you compare these two conditions? The first thing happened was that people built many more Bionicles — eleven in the meaningful condition, versus seven the 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 few cents. not only that, everybody knew that the Bionicles would be destroyed soon. So there was not a real opportunity for big meaning. even the small meaning made a difference.
Now we another version of this experiment. In this other version the experiment, we didn’t put people in this situation, just described to them the situation, much as I describing to you now, and we asked them to predict what the result be. What happened? People predicted the right direction but the right magnitude. People who were just given the description of experiment said that in the meaningful condition, people would build one more Bionicle. So people understand that meaning is important, they just don’t understand the magnitude of importance, the extent to which it’s important.
There was one other piece of we looked at. If you think about it, there are some who 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, after 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 we found in the meaningful condition. There was a nice correlation between the love of Legos and the amount Legos people built.
What happened in the Sisyphic condition? In that condition, correlation was zero — there was no relationship between the love of Legos, and how much people built, suggests to me that with this manipulation of breaking things in of people’s eyes, we basically crushed any joy that they could out of this activity. We basically eliminated it.
Soon after I finished running this experiment, went 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, they asked them to innovate, and create the next big product for this company. the week before I showed up, the CEO of big software company went to that group, 200 engineers, canceled the project. And I stood there in front of 200 of the most depressed people I’ve talked to. And I described to them some of these Lego experiments, and they said felt like they had just been through that experiment. I asked them, I 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 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, they took me out to dinner and showed me what they could 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 asked them to think about which aspect of their technology could with other parts of the organization. He could have asked them to build next-generation prototypes, and see how they would work. But the thing that any one of those would require some effort and motivation. And think the CEO basically did not understand the importance of meaning. If CEO, just like our participants, thought the essence of 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 to spend some time, energy and effort in getting people care more about what they’re doing.
The next experiment was slightly different. took a sheet of paper with random letters, and we asked people to find pairs of that were identical next to each other. That was the task. People did the first sheet, then asked if they wanted to do another for a little less money, the next sheet for a little less, and so on and so forth. And we three conditions. In the first condition, people wrote their on the sheet, found all the pairs of letters, gave it to the experimenter, experimenter would look at it, scan it from top bottom, say “Uh huh,” and put it on the pile next them. In the second condition, people did not write their name it. The experimenter looked at it, took the sheet of paper, did look at it, did not scan it, and simply put on the pile of pages. So you take a piece, you just put it on side. In the third condition, the experimenter got the sheet of paper, and put it directly into shredder.
(Laughter)
What happened in those three conditions?
In this I’m showing you at what pay rate people stopped. So numbers mean that people worked harder. They worked for much longer. the acknowledged condition, people worked all the way down to 15 cents. At 15 cents page, they basically stopped these efforts. In the shredder condition, it was twice much — 30 cents per sheet.
And this is basically result we had before. You shred people’s efforts, output — you get not to be as happy with what they’re doing. 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 then you see nobody is really it, so you would do more and more and more. So in fact, in shredder condition, people could have submitted more work and more money, and put less effort into it. But what about the ignored condition? Would the condition be more like the acknowledged or more like the shredder, or somewhere in the middle? It turns it was almost like the shredder.
Now there’s good news and bad news here. bad news is that ignoring the performance of people is almost as bad as shredding effort in front of their eyes. Ignoring gets you a whole out there. The good news is that by simply at something that somebody has done, scanning it and saying “Uh huh,” that seems to be sufficient to dramatically improve people’s motivations. So the good is that adding motivation doesn’t seem to be so 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. So this is in terms of negative motivation, or eliminating negative motivation.
The part I want to show you is something about motivation. So there is a store in the U.S. IKEA. And IKEA is a store with kind of okay that takes a long time to assemble.
(Laughter)
I don’t about you, but every time I assemble one of those, it me much longer, it’s much more effortful, it’s much confusing, I put things in the wrong way — I can’t I enjoy those pieces. I can’t say I enjoy the process. But I finish it, I seem to like those IKEA pieces of furniture more I like other ones.
(Laughter)
And there’s an old about cake mixes. So when they started cake mixes in ’40s, they would take this powder and they would put it in a box, and would ask housewives to basically pour it in, stir some water in it, mix it, it in the oven, and — voila — you cake. But it turns out they were very unpopular. did not want them, and they thought about all kinds of reasons for that. the taste was not good? No, the taste was great. What they out was that there was not enough effort involved. was so easy that nobody could serve cake to their and say, “Here is my cake.” No, it was somebody else’s cake, if you bought it in the store. It didn’t really feel like your own. So did they do? They took the eggs and the milk out of powder.
(Laughter)
Now you had to break the eggs and add them, you to measure the milk and add it, mixing it. Now it was your cake. everything was fine.
(Laughter)
(Applause)
Now, I think a bit like the IKEA effect, by getting people to harder, they actually got them to love what they’re doing a higher degree.
So how do 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 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 do you want to pay for it?” And we how much they were willing to pay for it. And we had types of people: We had the people who built it, the people who did not build it, and just looked it as external observers. And what we found was that builders thought that these were beautiful pieces of origami —
(Laughter)
and they were willing to pay five times for them than the people who just evaluated them externally. you could say — if you were a builder, do you [you’d say], “Oh, I love this origami, but I know that nobody else would it?” Or “I love this origami, and everybody else will love it as well?” Which of those two is correct? Turns out the builders not only loved the origami more, they thought everybody would see the world in their view. They everybody else would love it more as well.
In next version, we tried to do the IKEA effect. We tried to make it more difficult. for some people, we gave the same task. For people, we made it harder by hiding the instructions. the top of the sheet, we had little diagrams how you fold origami. For some people, we just eliminated that. So now this was tougher. happened? Well in an objective way, the origami now was uglier, was more difficult. Now when we looked at the easy origami, we saw same thing — builders loved it more, evaluators loved less. When you looked at the hard instructions, the effect was larger. Why? now the builders loved it even more.
(Laughter)
They all this extra effort into it. And evaluators? They loved even less. Because in reality, it was even uglier than the 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 on. Most people would say for a lot, a lot money.
(Laughter)
On good days.
(Laughter)
But imagine this was slightly different. Imagine if you 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 few hours, and you were about 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 are so valuable, not just because who they are, but because of us, because they are connected to us, and because of the time and connection. By way, if you think IKEA instructions are not good, what 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. comes to tell you one more thing, which is, much like our builders, when they look at creature of their creation, we don’t see that other people don’t see things our way.
Let me say last comment. If you think about Adam Smith versus Marx, Adam Smith had a very important notion of efficiency. gave an example of a pin factory. He said pins have 12 different steps, and if person does all 12 steps, production is very low. if you get one person to do step one, and person to do step two and step three and on, production can increase tremendously. And indeed, this is great example, and the reason for the Industrial Revolution 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 do all 12 steps, you care about the pin. But if you do step every time, maybe you don’t care as much.
I that in the Industrial Revolution, Adam Smith was more correct than Karl Marx. But the reality that we’ve switched, and now we’re in the knowledge economy. You ask yourself, what happens in a knowledge economy? Is still more important than meaning? I think the answer is no. I think that as we to situations in which people have to decide on their about how much effort, attention, caring, how connected they feel to it, are they thinking labor on the way to work, and in the shower and so on, all of a sudden Marx more things to say to us. So when we think about labor, we usually think about and payment as the same thing, but the reality is that we probably add 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 thought about them — how we create our own meaning, pride, motivation, and how do we do it our workplace, and for the employees — I think we could get people to be more productive and happier.
Thank you very much.