I want talk a 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 — that all people care about is money, and the moment we give them money, we can them to work one way, we can direct them work another way. This is why we give bonuses to and pay in all kinds of ways. And we have this incredibly simplistic view of why people work, what the labor market looks like.
At the same time, if you think it, there’s all kinds of strange behaviors in the world around us. Think about something mountaineering and mountain climbing. If you read books of who climb mountains, difficult mountains, do you think that those books are full of moments of joy happiness? No, they are full of misery. In fact, it’s all about frostbite and difficulty walking, and difficulty breathing — cold, challenging circumstances. if people were just trying to be happy, the they would get to the top, they would say, “This a terrible mistake. I’ll never do it again.”
(Laughter)
“Instead, let sit on a beach somewhere drinking mojitos.” But instead, people go down, and after recover, they go up again. And if you think about mountain climbing an 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. It suggests that there’s all of other things that motivate us to work or in all kinds of ways.
And for me personally, I thinking about this after a student came to visit me. was one of my students from a few years earlier, and he one day back to campus. And he told me the following story: He said that more than two weeks, he was working on a PowerPoint presentation. He working in a big bank, and this was in for a merger and acquisition. And he was working very hard on presentation — graphs, tables, information. He stayed late at night every day. And the before 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 guy was deeply depressed. Now at moment when he was working, he was actually quite happy. night he was enjoying his work, he was staying late, was perfecting this PowerPoint presentation. But knowing that nobody would ever it made him quite depressed.
So I started thinking how do we experiment with this idea of the fruits of our labor. And to with, we created a little experiment in which we gave Legos, and we asked them to build with Legos. And for some people, we gave Legos and we said, “Hey, would you like to build this Bionicle for dollars? We’ll pay you three dollars for it.” And people yes, and they built with these Legos. And when finished, we took it, we put it under the table, we said, “Would you like to build another one, this time $2.70?” If they said yes, we gave them another one, when they finished, we asked them, “Do you want to build one?” for $2.40, $2.10, and so on, until at some point people said, “No more. It’s worth it for me.” This was what we called the meaningful condition. built one Bionicle after another. After they finished every one of them, we put under the table. And we told them that at the end of the experiment, 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. 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 punished by 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 can think about this as the essence of doing futile work. You can imagine if he pushed the rock on different hills, at least would have some sense of progress. Also, if you look at prison movies, sometimes 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 over that seems to particularly demotivating.
So in the second condition of this experiment, that’s exactly what did. We asked people, “Would you like to build Bionicle for three dollars?” And if they said yes, they built it. Then we asked them, “Do want to build another one for $2.70?” And if they yes, we gave them a new one, and as they were building it, we apart the one that they just finished. And when finished that, we said, “Would you like to build another one, this time for 30 less?” And if they said yes, we gave them the one that they built and we broke. So was an endless cycle of them building, and us destroying in front of their eyes.
Now happens when you compare these two conditions? The first thing that happened that people built many more Bionicles — eleven in the meaningful condition, versus in the Sisyphus condition. And by the way, we should point that this was not big meaning. People were not curing cancer or building bridges. People were building for a few cents. And not only that, everybody knew that Bionicles would be destroyed quite soon. So there was not a real opportunity for meaning. But even the small meaning made a difference.
Now had another version of this experiment. In this other version of the experiment, we didn’t people 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? People predicted the direction but not the right magnitude. People who were given the description of the experiment said that in the meaningful condition, people would probably build one Bionicle. So people understand that meaning is important, they just don’t understand magnitude of the importance, the extent to which it’s important.
There was one other of data we looked at. If you think about it, there are people who love Legos, and some people who don’t. 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 enjoyment that they derive from is lower. And that’s actually what we found in the meaningful condition. There was a very correlation between the love of Legos and the amount of Legos people built.
What happened in the condition? In that condition, the correlation was zero — there was no relationship the love of Legos, and how much people built, which suggests me that with this manipulation of breaking things in front of people’s eyes, we basically crushed any that they could get out of this activity. We basically it.
Soon after I finished running this experiment, I went talk to a 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 company that was put in a different building, and they asked them to innovate, create the next big product for 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 I stood there in of 200 of the most depressed people I’ve ever to. And I described to them some of these experiments, and they said they felt like they had been through that experiment. And I asked them, I said, “How of you now show up to work later than you to?” And everybody raised their hand. I said, “How of you now go home earlier than you used to?” raised their hand. I asked 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 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 of ideas.
They said the CEO could have asked them to present to the whole company about their over 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 of the organization. He could have asked them to build some next-generation prototypes, and see they would work. But the thing is that any of those would require some effort and motivation. And I the CEO basically did not 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, now that I’m directing you in this way, everything be okay.” But if you understood how important meaning is, then you would figure out that it’s important to spend some time, energy and effort in people to care more about what they’re doing.
The next experiment slightly different. We took a sheet of paper with letters, and we asked people to find pairs of letters that were next to each other. That was the task. People did the first sheet, then we asked if wanted to do another for a little less money, the sheet for a little bit less, and so on and so forth. we had three conditions. In the first condition, people their name on the sheet, found all the pairs letters, gave it to the experimenter, the experimenter would look it, scan it from top to bottom, say “Uh huh,” and put it on the pile next them. In the second condition, people did not write their name on it. The experimenter looked it, took the sheet of paper, did not 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 the side. the third condition, the experimenter got the sheet of paper, and put directly into a shredder.
(Laughter)
What happened in those conditions?
In this plot I’m showing you at what pay rate people stopped. So low numbers that people worked harder. They worked for much longer. In the acknowledged condition, people all the way down to 15 cents. At 15 per page, they basically stopped these efforts. In the shredder condition, it was as much — 30 cents per sheet.
And this is basically the result we before. You shred people’s efforts, output — you get them 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 good work, because they realized people were just it. So maybe the first sheet you’d do good work, but then you nobody is really testing it, so you would do more and and more. So in fact, in the shredder condition, could have submitted more work and gotten more money, and put less effort it. But what about the ignored condition? Would the condition be more like the acknowledged or more like the shredder, 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 the performance of people is almost as bad as their effort in front of their eyes. Ignoring gets a whole way out there. The good news is that simply looking at something that somebody has done, scanning and saying “Uh huh,” that seems to be quite sufficient dramatically improve people’s motivations. So the good news is that adding motivation doesn’t seem to be difficult. The bad news is that eliminating motivations seems to be incredibly easy, and if we don’t about it carefully, we might overdo it. So this is all in terms of negative motivation, eliminating 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 is a store with kind of okay furniture that takes a long to assemble.
(Laughter)
I don’t know about you, but every I assemble one of those, it takes me much longer, it’s 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 like those IKEA pieces of furniture more than I like ones.
(Laughter)
And there’s an old story about cake mixes. So when started cake mixes in the ’40s, they would take this powder they would put it in a box, and they would ask to basically pour it in, stir some water in it, mix it, it in the oven, and — voila — you had cake. it turns out they were very unpopular. People did want them, and they thought about all kinds of for that. Maybe the taste was not good? No, the taste was great. What they figured out was there was not enough effort involved. It was so easy nobody could serve cake to their guests and say, “Here is cake.” No, it was somebody else’s cake, as if you bought it the 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 was your cake. Now everything was fine.
(Laughter)
(Applause)
Now, I think a little bit the IKEA effect, by getting people to work harder, they actually got them to what they’re doing to a higher degree.
So how do 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 built something that really quite ugly — nothing like a frog or crane. But then we told them, “Look, this origami belongs to us. You worked for us, but I’ll you what, we’ll sell it to you. How much do want to pay for it?” And we measured how much were willing to pay for it. And we had two of people: We had the people who built it, and people who did not build it, and just looked 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 times more for them than the people just evaluated them externally. Now you could say — if you were a builder, do think [you’d say], “Oh, I love this origami, but I know that nobody else would love it?” “I love this origami, and everybody else will love it well?” Which one of those two is correct? Turns out the not only loved the origami more, they thought that everybody would see the world in view. They thought everybody else would love it more as well.
In the next version, tried to do the IKEA effect. We tried to make more difficult. So for some people, we gave the same task. For some people, made it harder by hiding the instructions. At the 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 now uglier, it was more difficult. Now when we looked at the origami, we saw the same thing — builders loved it more, loved it less. When you looked at the hard instructions, the effect was larger. Why? Because now builders loved it even more.
(Laughter)
They put all this extra effort into it. And evaluators? loved it even less. Because in reality, it was uglier than the first version.
(Laughter)
Of course, this tells you about how we evaluate things.
Now think about kids. I asked you, “How much would you sell your for?” Your memories and associations and so on. Most people would for a lot, a lot of money.
(Laughter)
On good days.
(Laughter)
But imagine this was slightly different. if you did not have your kids. And one you went to the park and you met some kids. They were just like kids, and you played with them for a few hours, 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 pay for them now? Most people say not that much. this is because our kids are so valuable, not because of who they are, but because of us, they are so connected to us, and because of time and connection. By the way, if you think IKEA instructions not good, what about the instructions that come with kids, those really tough.
(Laughter)
By the way, these are my kids, which, of course, wonderful and so on. Which comes to tell you more thing, which is, much like our builders, when look at the creature of their creation, we don’t 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 a very important notion of efficiency. He gave an example of a pin factory. He pins have 12 different steps, and if one person all 12 steps, production is very low. But if you get one person to step one, and one person to do step two and step three so on, production can increase tremendously. And indeed, this a great example, and the reason for the Industrial Revolution and efficiency. Karl Marx, the other hand, said that the alienation of labor is incredibly in how people think about the connection to what are doing. And if you do all 12 steps, you care about pin. But if you do one step every time, you don’t care as much.
I think that in the Industrial Revolution, Adam Smith was more than Karl Marx. But the reality is that we’ve switched, and now we’re in knowledge economy. You can ask yourself, what happens in a knowledge economy? efficiency still more important than meaning? I think the answer is no. I that as we move to situations in which people have decide on their own about how much effort, attention, caring, connected they feel to it, are they thinking about labor on the way to work, in the shower and so on, all of a sudden Marx has more things to to us. So when we think about labor, we usually think about and payment as the same thing, but the reality is we should probably add all kinds of things to — meaning, creation, challenges, ownership, identity, pride, etc.
The good news is that if we all of those components and thought about them — do we create our own meaning, pride, motivation, and how do do it in our workplace, and for the employees — I think we get people to be both more productive and happier.
Thank very much.