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