I want to talk little bit today about labor and work.
When we think about how people work, the naive intuition have is that people are like rats in a maze — all people care about is money, and the moment we give them money, can direct them to work one way, we can them to work another way. This is why we give bonuses bankers and pay in all kinds of ways. And we really have this simplistic view of why people work, and what the market looks like.
At the same time, if you about it, there’s all kinds of strange behaviors in the around us. Think about something like mountaineering and mountain climbing. If you read books of people who climb mountains, mountains, do you think that those books are full moments of joy and happiness? No, they are full misery. In fact, it’s all about frostbite and having difficulty walking, difficulty breathing — cold, challenging circumstances. And if people were just trying to happy, the moment they would get to the top, they say, “This was a terrible mistake. I’ll never do again.”
(Laughter)
“Instead, let me sit on a beach somewhere drinking mojitos.” But instead, go down, and after they recover, they go up again. And if you about mountain climbing as an example, it suggests all kinds of things. It that we care about reaching the end, a peak. It suggests we care about the fight, about the challenge. It that there’s all kinds of other things that motivate us to or behave in all kinds of ways.
And for me personally, I started thinking about after a student came to visit me. This was one my students from a few years earlier, and he came one back to campus. And he told me the following story: He that for more than two weeks, he was working a PowerPoint presentation. He was working in a big bank, this was in preparation for a merger and acquisition. And was working very hard on this presentation — graphs, tables, information. He stayed at night every day. And the day before it was due, he his PowerPoint presentation to his boss, and his boss him back and said, “Nice presentation, but the merger is canceled.” the guy was deeply depressed. Now at the moment 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 made him quite depressed.
So I started thinking about how do we experiment with this idea of the of our labor. And to start with, we created a little experiment in which gave people Legos, and we asked them to build with Legos. And for people, we gave them Legos and we said, “Hey, would like to build this Bionicle for three dollars? We’ll pay three dollars for it.” And people said yes, and they with these Legos. And when they finished, we took it, we put under the table, and we said, “Would you like build another one, this time for $2.70?” If they yes, we 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, until some point people said, “No more. It’s not worth for me.” This was what we 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 take all these Bionicles, we will disassemble them, we put them back in the boxes, and we will it for the next participant.
There was another condition. other condition was inspired by David, my student. And other condition we called the Sisyphic condition. And if you remember the story about Sisyphus, Sisyphus was punished the gods to push the same rock up a hill, 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 if he pushed the rock on different hills, at least he would have some sense progress. Also, if you look at prison movies, sometimes the way that the guards torture prisoners is to get them to dig a hole, and when the prisoner finished, they ask him to fill the hole back up and dig again. There’s something about this cyclical version of doing over and over and over that seems to be particularly demotivating.
So in the second of this experiment, that’s exactly what we did. We asked people, “Would like to build one Bionicle for three dollars?” And if said yes, they built it. Then we asked them, “Do you want to build another one $2.70?” And if they said yes, we gave them a new one, 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 time 30 cents less?” And if they said yes, we gave them the one that they built and broke. So this was an endless cycle of them building, us destroying in front of their eyes.
Now what when you compare these two conditions? The first thing that happened was that people built many more — eleven in the meaningful condition, versus seven in the condition. And by the way, we should point out that this was not big meaning. People not curing cancer or building bridges. People were building for a few cents. And not only that, everybody knew that the Bionicles would be destroyed soon. So there was 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 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? predicted the right direction but not the right magnitude. People who were given the description of the experiment said that in meaningful condition, people would probably build one more Bionicle. So people understand that meaning important, they just don’t understand the magnitude of the importance, the extent which it’s important.
There was one other piece of data looked at. If you think about it, there are some people who love Legos, some people who don’t. And you would speculate that the people who love Legos would more Legos, even for less money, because after all, 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 what we found in the meaningful condition. There was very nice correlation between the love of Legos and the of 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 much people built, which suggests to me that with this manipulation of things in front of people’s eyes, we basically crushed any joy that could get out of this activity. We basically eliminated it.
Soon after I finished running this experiment, I to talk to a big software company in Seattle. I can’t tell who they were, but they were a big company in Seattle. was a group within the software company that was put in different building, and they asked them to innovate, and the next big product for this company. And the week before I showed up, the of this big software company went to that group, 200 engineers, and canceled the project. And I there in front of 200 of the most depressed people I’ve ever to. And I described to them some of these Lego experiments, and they said they felt like had just been through that experiment. And I asked them, I said, “How of you now show up to work later than used to?” And everybody raised their hand. I said, “How many of you go home earlier than you used to?” Everybody raised their hand. I them, “How many of you now add not-so-kosher things 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 the have done to make you not as depressed?” And they came with all kinds of ideas.
They said the CEO could have asked them to present to whole 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 technology fit with other parts of the organization. He could have asked them build some next-generation prototypes, and see how they would work. But the thing is that any of those would require some effort and motivation. And think the CEO basically did not understand the importance meaning. If the CEO, just like our participants, thought the of meaning is unimportant, then he [wouldn’t] care. And would say, “At the 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 and effort in getting to care more about what they’re doing.
The next experiment was slightly different. We a sheet of paper with random letters, and we asked people to pairs of letters that were identical next to each other. was the task. People did the first sheet, then we asked if they wanted do another for a little less money, the next sheet for little bit less, and so on and so forth. And 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 on the pile next to them. In second condition, people did not write their name on it. experimenter looked at it, took the sheet of paper, did not at 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 got the sheet of paper, and put it directly into a shredder.
(Laughter)
What in those three conditions?
In this plot I’m showing you at what pay people stopped. So low numbers mean that people worked harder. They for much longer. In the acknowledged condition, people worked the way down to 15 cents. At 15 cents per page, they basically these efforts. In the shredder condition, it was twice as much — 30 per sheet.
And this is basically the result we had before. You people’s efforts, output — you get them not to be as happy with what they’re doing. But I point out, by the way, that in the shredder condition, people could cheated. They could have done not so good work, because they people were just shredding it. So maybe the first sheet you’d good work, but then you see nobody is really testing it, you would do more and more and more. So in fact, in the shredder condition, people have submitted more work and gotten more money, and put less effort into it. what about the ignored condition? Would the ignored condition be more like acknowledged or more like the shredder, or somewhere in the middle? It turns out it was like the shredder.
Now there’s good news and bad news here. The bad news is that ignoring the of people is almost as bad as shredding their effort in front of their eyes. gets you a whole way out there. The good news is that by looking at something that somebody has done, scanning it and “Uh huh,” that seems to be quite sufficient to improve people’s motivations. So the good news is that motivation doesn’t seem to be so difficult. The bad news 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 part I want to show you is something about positive motivation. So is a store in the U.S. called IKEA. And IKEA is a store with kind okay furniture that takes a long time to assemble.
(Laughter)
I don’t know about you, but every time I assemble one those, it takes me much longer, it’s much more effortful, it’s much more confusing, I put things in wrong way — I can’t say I enjoy those pieces. I can’t say enjoy the process. But when I finish it, I seem to like those pieces of furniture more than I like other ones.
(Laughter)
And there’s an story about cake mixes. So when they started cake in the ’40s, they would take this powder and would put it in a box, and they would ask housewives to pour it in, stir some water in it, mix it, put it in the oven, and — — you had cake. But it turns out they very unpopular. People did not want them, and they about all kinds of reasons for that. Maybe the taste was not good? No, taste was great. What they figured out was that there was enough effort involved. It was so easy that nobody could serve cake to their guests say, “Here is my cake.” No, it was somebody else’s cake, as if bought it in the store. It didn’t really feel your own. So what did they do? They took the and the milk out of the powder.
(Laughter)
Now you had to break the eggs add them, you had to measure the milk and add it, mixing it. it was your cake. Now everything was fine.
(Laughter)
(Applause)
Now, I a little bit like the IKEA effect, by getting people work harder, they actually got them to love what they’re doing to a degree.
So how do we look at this question experimentally? We asked to build some origami. We gave them instructions on how to create origami, and we gave them a of paper. And these were all novices, and they built something was really quite ugly — nothing like a frog or a crane. 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 you want to pay for it?” And we measured how much they were willing to pay for it. we had two types of people: We had the people who it, and the people who did not build it, and just at it as external observers. And what we found was that the builders thought these were beautiful pieces of origami —
(Laughter)
and they were to pay five times more for them than the who just evaluated them externally. Now you could say — you were a builder, do you think [you’d say], “Oh, love this origami, but I know that nobody else love it?” Or “I love this origami, and everybody else will love it as well?” Which one of 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 else love it more as well.
In the next version, we to do the IKEA effect. We tried to make it more difficult. So for people, we gave the same task. For some people, we made it harder by the instructions. At the top of the sheet, we had diagrams of how you fold origami. For some people, we eliminated that. So now this was tougher. What happened? in an objective way, the origami now was uglier, was more difficult. Now when we looked at the easy origami, we saw the same — builders loved it more, evaluators loved it less. When you looked at the hard instructions, the effect 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, 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 would you your kids for?” Your memories and associations and so on. Most people say for 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 went to the park and you met some kids. They were just like your kids, and you with them for a few hours, and when you about 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 for now? Most people say not that much. And this is our kids are so valuable, not just because of who they are, but because us, because they are so connected to us, and because the time and connection. By the way, if you think IKEA instructions are not good, what the 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 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. you think about Adam Smith versus Karl Marx, Adam had a very important notion of efficiency. He gave an example of a factory. He said pins have 12 different steps, and one person does all 12 steps, production is very low. But if you one person to do step one, and one person to do step two and step three so on, production can increase tremendously. And indeed, this is a great example, the reason for 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. if you do all 12 steps, you care about the pin. if you do one step every time, maybe you don’t care as much.
I think that the Industrial Revolution, Adam Smith was more correct than Karl Marx. But reality is 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 move to situations in which people have to decide on own about how much effort, attention, caring, how connected they to it, are they thinking about labor on the way to work, and the shower and so on, all of a sudden Marx has things to say to us. So when we think labor, we usually think about motivation and payment as the 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 it our workplace, and for the employees — I think could get people to be both more productive and happier.
Thank you much.