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