I want talk a little bit today about labor and work.
When we think about how work, the naive intuition we have is that people like rats in a maze — that all people care is money, and the moment we give them money, we can direct them to one way, we can direct them to work another way. This is why give bonuses to bankers and pay in all kinds ways. And we really have this incredibly simplistic view of why people work, and what labor market looks like.
At the same time, if think about it, there’s all kinds of strange behaviors in the world us. Think about something like mountaineering and mountain climbing. If you books of people who climb mountains, difficult mountains, do you think those books are full of moments of joy and happiness? No, they are full misery. In fact, it’s all about frostbite and having walking, and difficulty breathing — cold, challenging circumstances. And if were just trying to be happy, the moment they would to the top, they would say, “This was a mistake. I’ll never do it again.”
(Laughter)
“Instead, let sit on a beach somewhere drinking mojitos.” But instead, people go down, and they recover, they go up again. And if you think about mountain climbing as an example, it all kinds of things. It suggests that we care about reaching the end, a peak. It suggests we care about the fight, about the challenge. It suggests that there’s all of other things that motivate us to work or in all kinds of ways.
And for me personally, 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. And told me the following story: He said that for more than two weeks, he was working on PowerPoint presentation. He was working in a big bank, and this was in for a merger and acquisition. And he was working very on this presentation — graphs, tables, information. He stayed at night every day. And the day before it was due, he sent PowerPoint presentation to his boss, and his boss wrote him back and said, “Nice presentation, but merger is canceled.” And the guy was deeply depressed. Now at moment when he was working, he was actually quite happy. Every he was enjoying his work, he was staying late, he was this PowerPoint presentation. But knowing that nobody would ever it made him quite depressed.
So I started thinking about how we experiment with this idea of the fruits of our labor. And to start with, we created little experiment in which we gave people Legos, and we asked them build with Legos. And for some people, we gave them Legos and we said, “Hey, you like to build this Bionicle for three dollars? We’ll pay you 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 another one, this time $2.70?” If they said yes, we gave them another one, and they finished, we asked them, “Do you want to another one?” for $2.40, $2.10, and so on, until at some people said, “No more. It’s not worth it for me.” This was what we the meaningful condition. People built one Bionicle after another. they finished every one of them, we put them under the table. And we told that at the end of the experiment, we will all these Bionicles, we will disassemble them, we will them back in the boxes, and we will use for the next participant.
There was another condition. This other condition inspired by David, my student. And this other condition we called the Sisyphic condition. And you remember the story about Sisyphus, Sisyphus was punished by the gods to push same rock up a hill, and when he almost got to end, the rock would roll over, and he would to start again. And you can think about this as the essence of futile work. You can imagine that if he pushed the rock on different hills, at least he would some sense of progress. Also, if you look at prison movies, sometimes the way the guards torture the prisoners is to get them to dig a hole, and the 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 and over that seems to be particularly demotivating.
So in the second condition of this experiment, that’s what we did. We asked people, “Would you like to build one Bionicle for three dollars?” And they said yes, they built it. Then we asked them, “Do you to build another one for $2.70?” And if they yes, we gave them a new one, and as were building it, we took apart the one that just finished. And when they finished that, we said, “Would you like to another one, this time for 30 cents less?” And if they said yes, we gave them the one they built and we broke. So this was an endless of them building, and us destroying in front of eyes.
Now what happens when you compare these two conditions? The first thing that happened was that built many more Bionicles — eleven in the meaningful condition, versus seven in Sisyphus 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 Bionicles for a few cents. And only that, everybody knew that the Bionicles would be destroyed quite soon. there was not a real opportunity for big meaning. But the small meaning made a difference.
Now we had another version of this experiment. 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 predict what the result would be. What happened? predicted the right direction but not the right magnitude. People who were just given description of the experiment said that in the meaningful condition, people would probably build one more Bionicle. So understand that meaning is important, they just don’t understand the of the importance, the extent to which it’s important.
There was one other of data we looked at. If you think about it, are some people who love Legos, and some people who don’t. you would speculate that the people who love Legos build more Legos, even for less money, because after all, get more internal joy from it. And the people who Legos less would build less Legos because the enjoyment that they derive from it is lower. And that’s what we found in the meaningful condition. There was a nice correlation between the love of Legos and the of Legos people built.
What happened in the Sisyphic condition? In that condition, the was zero — there was no relationship between the love Legos, and how much people built, which suggests to me that this manipulation of breaking things in front of people’s eyes, we crushed any joy that they could get out of this activity. We basically 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 were big company in Seattle. This 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 I showed up, the CEO of this big software company went to group, 200 engineers, and canceled the project. And I stood there in front 200 of the most depressed people I’ve ever talked to. I described to them some of these Lego experiments, they said they felt like they had just been through that experiment. And asked them, I said, “How many of you now up to work later than you used to?” And everybody their hand. I said, “How many of you now go home earlier than you used to?” Everybody their hand. I asked them, “How many of you now add not-so-kosher to your expense reports?” And they didn’t raise their hands, they took me out to dinner and showed me what they could do with expense reports. And then asked them, I said, “What could the CEO have done make you not 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 their journey the last two years and what they decided to do. could have asked them to think about which aspect of their technology could fit with other parts the organization. He could have asked them to build some next-generation prototypes, see how they would work. But the thing is that one of those would require some effort and motivation. And I think the CEO basically not understand the importance of meaning. If the CEO, just like participants, thought the essence of meaning is unimportant, then [wouldn’t] care. And he would say, “At the moment I directed in this way, and now that I’m directing you this way, everything will be okay.” But if you understood how important is, then you would figure out that it’s actually important to some time, energy and effort in getting people to care more about what they’re doing.
The next experiment slightly different. We took a sheet of paper with random letters, we asked people to find pairs of letters that identical next to each other. That was the task. People the first sheet, then we asked if they wanted to do for a little less money, the next sheet for a little bit less, and so and so forth. And we had three conditions. In the first condition, people wrote their on the sheet, found all the pairs of letters, gave it the experimenter, the experimenter would look at it, scan from top to bottom, say “Uh huh,” and put on the pile next to them. In the second condition, people did not their name on it. The experimenter looked at it, took the sheet of paper, did not at it, did not scan it, and simply put it on pile of pages. So you take a piece, you put it on the side. In the third condition, the got 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 harder. They worked for much longer. In the acknowledged condition, worked all the way down to 15 cents. At 15 per page, they basically stopped these efforts. In the shredder condition, was twice as much — 30 cents per sheet.
And this is basically result we had before. You shred people’s efforts, output — you get them not be as happy with what they’re doing. But I should point out, by the way, in the shredder condition, people could have cheated. They could have done not so good work, they realized people were just shredding it. So maybe the sheet you’d do good work, but then you see is really testing it, so you would do more and more more. So in fact, in the shredder condition, people could have submitted work and gotten more money, and put less effort it. But what about the ignored condition? Would the ignored condition be more like the or more like the shredder, or somewhere in the middle? It turns out it 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 looking at something that somebody has done, scanning it and saying “Uh huh,” that seems be quite sufficient to dramatically improve people’s motivations. So the good news is adding motivation doesn’t seem to be so difficult. The bad news is that eliminating motivations to be incredibly easy, and if we don’t think it carefully, we might overdo it. So this is all terms of negative motivation, or eliminating negative motivation.
The next part I want to show you something about positive motivation. So there is a store in U.S. called IKEA. And IKEA is a store with kind okay furniture that takes a long time to assemble.
(Laughter)
I don’t about you, but every time I assemble one of those, it takes me 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. can’t say I enjoy the process. But when I finish it, 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 the ’40s, they would take this powder and they would it in a box, and they would ask housewives to basically pour it in, stir some water it, mix it, put it in the oven, and — voila — you had cake. it turns out they were very unpopular. People did not want them, and they thought all kinds of reasons for that. Maybe the taste was good? No, the taste was great. What they figured out was there was not 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 in store. It didn’t really feel like your own. So what did they do? They the eggs and the milk out of the powder.
(Laughter)
Now you had to break the eggs and add them, had to measure the milk and add it, mixing it. Now it was cake. Now everything was fine.
(Laughter)
(Applause)
Now, I a little bit like the IKEA effect, by getting to work harder, they actually got them to love what they’re doing to higher 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 gave them a sheet of paper. And these were novices, and they built something that was really quite — nothing like a frog or a crane. But then we told them, “Look, this origami really to us. You worked for us, but I’ll tell you what, we’ll sell it to you. How do you want to pay for it?” And we measured how much they were willing to for it. And we had two types of people: We had people who built 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 that these were pieces of origami —
(Laughter)
and they were willing to pay five times more for them the people who just evaluated them externally. Now you could say — if you a builder, do you think [you’d say], “Oh, I this origami, but I know that nobody else would it?” Or “I love this origami, and everybody else love it as well?” Which one of those two correct? Turns out the builders not only loved the more, they thought that everybody would see the world in their view. They thought else would love it more as well.
In the version, we tried to do the IKEA effect. We tried to make more difficult. So for some people, we gave the same task. For some people, we made harder by hiding the instructions. At the top of the sheet, we had little diagrams of you fold origami. For some people, we just eliminated that. So now this was tougher. What happened? Well in objective way, the origami now was uglier, it was more difficult. Now when we at the easy origami, we saw the same thing — builders loved it more, evaluators loved it less. you looked at the hard instructions, the effect was larger. Why? Because now the builders it even more.
(Laughter)
They put 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 how evaluate things.
Now think about kids. Imagine I asked you, “How much you sell your kids for?” Your memories and associations so on. Most people would say for a lot, a 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 park and you met some kids. They were just like your kids, you played with them for a few hours, and when you about to leave, the parents said, “Hey, by the way, just you leave, if you’re interested, they’re for sale.”
(Laughter)
How much would you for them now? Most people say not that much. And this is because kids are so valuable, not just because of who they are, but because of us, because are 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 come with kids, those are really tough.
(Laughter)
By the way, these are kids, which, of course, are wonderful and so on. Which comes to tell you one more thing, is, much like our builders, when they look at the creature of creation, we don’t see that other people don’t see things our way.
Let me one last comment. If you think about Adam Smith versus Karl Marx, Adam Smith had very important notion of efficiency. He gave an example of a pin factory. said pins have 12 different steps, and if one person all 12 steps, production is very low. But if get one person to do step one, and one person to do step and step three and so on, production can increase tremendously. And indeed, this 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 about the connection to what are doing. And if you do all 12 steps, care about the pin. But if you do one step time, maybe you don’t care as much.
I think that in the Revolution, Adam Smith was more correct than Karl Marx. the reality is that we’ve switched, and now we’re the knowledge economy. You can ask yourself, what happens in knowledge economy? Is efficiency still more important than meaning? I think the answer is no. I think that we move to situations in which people have to decide on their own about how 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 a sudden Marx has more things say to us. So when we think about labor, we usually about motivation and payment as the same thing, but the reality 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 — I think we could people to be both more productive and happier.
Thank you much.