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 money, we can direct them to work one way, can direct them to work another way. This is we give bonuses to bankers and pay in all of ways. And we really have this incredibly simplistic of why people work, and what the labor market looks like.
At the time, if you think about it, there’s all kinds of strange behaviors in world around us. Think about something like mountaineering and mountain climbing. If you read books people who climb mountains, difficult mountains, do you think that books are full of moments of joy and happiness? No, are full of misery. In fact, it’s all about frostbite and having difficulty walking, and difficulty — cold, challenging circumstances. And if people were just trying to happy, the moment they would get to the top, they would say, “This was terrible mistake. I’ll never do 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 mountain climbing as example, it suggests all kinds of things. It suggests that we care about reaching the end, peak. It suggests that we care about the fight, about the challenge. suggests that there’s all kinds of other things that motivate us to work or behave all kinds of ways.
And for me personally, I started thinking about this after a student came to me. This was one of my students from a few years earlier, he came one day back to campus. And he told me the story: He said that for more than two weeks, he was working on a PowerPoint presentation. He was in a big bank, and this was in preparation for merger and acquisition. And he was working very hard on presentation — graphs, tables, information. He stayed late at night every day. And day before it was due, he sent his PowerPoint presentation to his boss, and boss wrote him back and said, “Nice presentation, but the merger canceled.” And the guy was deeply depressed. Now at the moment when was working, he was actually quite happy. Every night he was his work, he was staying late, he was perfecting this PowerPoint presentation. But knowing that nobody would ever it made him quite depressed.
So I started thinking about how do we experiment with idea of the fruits of our labor. And to start with, we created little experiment in which we gave people Legos, and asked them to 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 you three dollars for it.” And people said yes, and built with these Legos. And when they finished, we took it, 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 them another one, 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 it for me.” This was what we called the meaningful condition. People built Bionicle after another. After they finished every one of them, we put them the table. And we told them that at the end the experiment, we will take all these Bionicles, we will disassemble them, we will put them back the boxes, and we will use it for the next participant.
There was another condition. This other was inspired by David, my student. And this other condition we the Sisyphic condition. And if you remember the story about Sisyphus, Sisyphus was punished by the gods to the same rock up a hill, and when he almost to the end, the rock would roll over, and he have to start again. And you can think about 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 that the guards torture the prisoners is to get them to dig hole, and when the prisoner is finished, they ask him to fill the hole back and then dig again. There’s something about this cyclical version of doing something over and and over that seems to be particularly demotivating.
So in second condition of this experiment, that’s exactly what we did. We asked people, “Would you like build one Bionicle for three dollars?” And if they said yes, they it. Then we asked them, “Do you want to build another one for $2.70?” if they said yes, we gave them a new one, and as they were building it, took apart the one that they just finished. And they finished that, we said, “Would you like to build another one, time for 30 cents less?” And if they said yes, we gave them the one that built and we broke. So this was an endless cycle of them building, us destroying in front of their eyes.
Now what happens when you compare two conditions? The first thing that happened was that people built many Bionicles — eleven in the 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. People were building Bionicles a few cents. And not only that, everybody knew that Bionicles would be destroyed quite soon. So there was not a real opportunity big meaning. But even the small meaning made a difference.
Now we had another version this experiment. In this other version of the experiment, didn’t put people in this situation, we just described them the situation, much as I am describing to now, and we asked them to predict what the result be. What happened? People predicted the right direction but not the right magnitude. People who just given the description of the experiment said that in the meaningful condition, people probably build one more Bionicle. So people understand that meaning is important, they don’t understand the magnitude of the importance, the extent to it’s important.
There was one other piece of data we looked at. If you think it, there are some people who love Legos, and people who don’t. And you would speculate that the people who Legos would build more Legos, even for less money, because after all, they get internal joy from it. And the people who love Legos less would less Legos because the enjoyment that they derive from it is lower. that’s actually what we found in the meaningful condition. There was a very nice correlation between love of Legos and the amount of Legos people built.
What in the Sisyphic condition? In that condition, the correlation was — 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 front of people’s eyes, we crushed any joy that they could get out of 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 a company in Seattle. This was a group within the company that was put in a different building, and they them to innovate, and 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. I stood 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 they just been through that experiment. And I asked them, said, “How many 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 asked them, “How of you now add not-so-kosher things to your expense reports?” they didn’t raise their hands, but they took me to dinner and showed me what they could do with reports. And then I asked them, I said, “What could the CEO have done to make not as depressed?” And they came up with all kinds of ideas.
They said the CEO have asked them to present to the whole company about their over 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 parts of the organization. He could have asked them to build next-generation prototypes, and see how they would work. But the is that any one of those would require some effort and motivation. And I the CEO basically did not understand the importance of meaning. If the CEO, just our participants, thought the essence of meaning is unimportant, then [wouldn’t] care. And he would say, “At the moment directed you in this way, and now that I’m you in this way, everything will be okay.” But if understood how important meaning is, then you would figure that it’s actually important 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 sheet of with random letters, and we asked people to find pairs of letters that were identical next to other. That was the task. People did the first sheet, then asked if they wanted to do another for a less money, the next sheet for a little bit less, and so on and forth. And we had three conditions. In the first condition, people wrote their name on the sheet, found the pairs of letters, gave it to the experimenter, experimenter would look at it, scan it from top to bottom, “Uh huh,” and put it on the pile next to them. In the second condition, people did write their name on it. The experimenter looked at it, took the sheet of paper, not look at it, did not scan it, and simply it on the pile of pages. So you take a piece, you just put on the side. In the third condition, the experimenter got the sheet of paper, and put directly into a shredder.
(Laughter)
What happened in those three conditions?
In this plot I’m you at what pay rate people stopped. So low numbers mean people worked harder. They worked for much longer. In the acknowledged condition, people all the way down to 15 cents. At 15 cents per page, they stopped 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 as happy with what they’re doing. But I should point out, by way, that 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 first sheet you’d do good work, but then you see nobody really testing it, so you would do more and more and more. So fact, in the shredder condition, people could have submitted more work and gotten more money, put less effort into it. But what about the ignored condition? Would the ignored condition more like the acknowledged or more like the shredder, or in the middle? It turns out it was almost like shredder.
Now there’s good news and bad news here. The bad news is that ignoring performance of people is almost as bad as shredding their effort in front of their eyes. gets you a whole way out there. The good is that by simply looking at something that somebody has done, scanning it and saying “Uh huh,” that to be quite sufficient to dramatically improve people’s motivations. So the good news that adding motivation doesn’t seem to be so difficult. bad news is that eliminating motivations seems to be incredibly easy, and if we don’t think it carefully, we might overdo it. So this is all in terms of negative motivation, or eliminating motivation.
The next part I want to show you is something about positive motivation. So there a store in the U.S. called IKEA. And IKEA is a store kind of okay furniture that takes a long time to assemble.
(Laughter)
I don’t know about you, 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 wrong way — I 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 furniture more than I like other ones.
(Laughter)
And there’s an story about cake mixes. So when they started cake mixes the ’40s, they would take this powder and they would put it 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. But turns out they were very unpopular. People did not want them, and thought about all kinds of reasons for that. Maybe taste was not good? No, the taste was great. What they figured was that there was not enough effort involved. It was easy that nobody could serve cake to their guests say, “Here is my cake.” No, it was somebody else’s cake, as if you bought it in store. It didn’t really feel like your own. So what did do? They took the eggs and the milk out of 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 your cake. Now was fine.
(Laughter)
(Applause)
Now, I think a little bit like the IKEA effect, by getting people to harder, they actually got them to love what they’re doing to a higher degree.
So do we look at this question experimentally? We asked people to build origami. We gave them instructions on how to create origami, we gave them a sheet of paper. And these were all novices, and they something that was really quite ugly — nothing like a frog or a crane. But 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 pay for it?” And we measured how much they were willing to pay it. And we had two types of people: We had the who built it, and the people who did not it, and just looked at it as external observers. And what we found was the builders thought that these were beautiful pieces of —
(Laughter)
and they were willing to pay five more for them than the people who just evaluated externally. Now you could say — if you were a builder, do think [you’d say], “Oh, I love this origami, but I know that else would love it?” Or “I love this origami, and everybody will love it as well?” Which one of those two is correct? Turns the builders not only loved the origami more, they thought that everybody would see the world their view. They thought everybody else would love it as well.
In the next version, we tried to the IKEA effect. We tried to make it more difficult. for some people, we gave the same task. For some people, we it harder by hiding the instructions. At the top of sheet, we had little diagrams of how you fold origami. For some people, we just eliminated that. So now was tougher. What happened? Well in an objective way, the origami now was uglier, was more difficult. Now when we looked at the origami, we saw the same thing — builders loved more, evaluators loved it 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 it even less. Because in reality, it was even than the first version.
(Laughter)
Of course, this tells something about how we evaluate things.
Now think about kids. Imagine asked you, “How much would you sell your kids for?” Your memories and associations and on. Most people would say for a lot, a of money.
(Laughter)
On good days.
(Laughter)
But imagine this was different. Imagine if you did not have your kids. one day you went to the park and you some kids. They were just like your kids, and you played with them a few hours, and when you were 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 for them now? Most people say not that much. this is because our kids are so valuable, not just because who they are, but because of us, because they are so connected to us, and because of time and connection. By the way, if you think IKEA are not good, what about the instructions that come 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 our builders, when they look at the creature 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 Adam versus Karl Marx, Adam Smith had a very important notion of efficiency. He gave an example of pin factory. He said pins have 12 different steps, if 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 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. Marx, on the other hand, said that the alienation labor is incredibly important in how people think about the connection to they are doing. And if you do all 12 steps, you care about the pin. if you do one step every time, maybe you don’t as much.
I think that in the Industrial Revolution, Smith was more correct than Karl Marx. But the is that we’ve switched, and now we’re in the knowledge economy. You ask yourself, what happens in a knowledge economy? Is efficiency still more than meaning? I think the answer is no. I that as we move to situations in which people to decide on their own about how much effort, attention, caring, how connected feel to it, are they thinking about labor on the way work, and in the shower and so on, all of a sudden Marx has more to say to us. So when we think about labor, we think 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 we added all of those components and thought about — how do we create our own meaning, pride, motivation, and how do we do it in workplace, and for the employees — I think we get people to be both more productive and happier.
Thank you much.