I want talk a little bit today about labor and work.
When we about how people work, the naive intuition we have that people are like rats in a maze — that all people care about is money, the moment we give them money, we can direct them to work one way, we direct them to work another way. This is why we give bonuses to bankers pay in all kinds of ways. And we really have this incredibly view of why people work, and what the labor looks like.
At the same time, if you think about it, there’s all kinds of behaviors in the world around us. Think about something like mountaineering mountain climbing. If you read books of people who mountains, difficult mountains, do you think that those books full of moments of joy and happiness? No, they are full of misery. In fact, it’s all frostbite and having difficulty walking, and difficulty breathing — cold, challenging circumstances. And people were just trying to be happy, the moment they get to the top, they would say, “This was terrible mistake. I’ll never 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 example, it suggests all kinds of things. It suggests that we care reaching the end, a 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 or behave in all kinds of ways.
And for me personally, I started thinking about this after student came to visit me. This was one of my from a few years earlier, and he came one day back to campus. And he me the following story: He said that for more than two weeks, was working on a PowerPoint presentation. He was working in big bank, and this was in preparation for a merger and acquisition. And he was working hard on this presentation — graphs, tables, information. He late at night every day. And the day before was due, he sent his PowerPoint presentation to his boss, and his wrote him back and said, “Nice presentation, but the merger canceled.” And the guy was deeply depressed. Now at the moment when he was working, he was quite happy. Every night he was enjoying his work, he 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 labor. And to start with, we created a little experiment which we gave people Legos, and we asked them build with Legos. And for some people, we gave them and we said, “Hey, would you like to build Bionicle for three dollars? We’ll pay you three dollars it.” And people said yes, and they built with these Legos. when 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?” they said 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 point people said, “No more. It’s not worth it me.” This was what we called the meaningful condition. People built one Bionicle after another. After they finished one 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 put them back in the boxes, and we will use for the next participant.
There was another condition. This other was inspired by David, my student. And this other condition we called Sisyphic condition. And if you remember the story about Sisyphus, Sisyphus was punished by the gods push the same rock up a hill, and when almost got to the end, the rock would roll over, and he would to 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 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, when the prisoner is finished, they ask him to fill the back up and then dig again. There’s something about this version of doing something over and over and over that seems be particularly demotivating.
So in the second condition of experiment, that’s exactly what we did. We asked people, “Would like to build one Bionicle for three dollars?” And they said yes, they built it. Then we asked them, “Do 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 build 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 cycle of them building, and us in front of their eyes.
Now what happens when you compare two conditions? The first thing that happened was that people many more Bionicles — eleven in the meaningful condition, seven in the Sisyphus condition. And by the way, should point out that this was not big meaning. People were curing cancer or building bridges. People were building Bionicles for a few cents. And not only that, everybody that the Bionicles would be destroyed quite soon. So there was a real opportunity for big meaning. But even the meaning made a difference.
Now we had another version of this experiment. this other version of the experiment, we didn’t put people this situation, we just described to them the situation, much as I describing to you now, and we asked them to predict what the would be. What happened? People predicted the right direction but the right magnitude. People who were just given the description of the said that in the meaningful condition, people would probably build one more Bionicle. So people understand that meaning important, they just 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 think about it, there are some people who love Legos, and some people who don’t. you would 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 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 nice correlation between the love of Legos and the of Legos people built.
What happened in the Sisyphic condition? In that condition, the correlation was — there was no relationship between the love of Legos, how much people built, which suggests to me that with this manipulation of breaking in front of people’s eyes, we basically crushed any that they could get out of this activity. We eliminated it.
Soon after I finished running this experiment, I to talk to a big software company in Seattle. I can’t tell who they were, but they were a big company Seattle. This was a group within the software company that was put a different building, and they asked them to innovate, and create the next big product for company. And the week before I showed up, the of this big software company went to that group, 200 engineers, canceled the project. And I stood there in front of 200 of the most depressed people I’ve talked to. And I described to them some of Lego experiments, and they said they felt like they had been through that experiment. And I asked them, I said, “How many of you show up to work later than you used to?” everybody raised their hand. I said, “How many of you now home earlier than you used to?” Everybody raised their hand. I asked them, “How many of now add not-so-kosher things to your expense reports?” And they didn’t their hands, but they took me out to dinner showed me what they could do with expense reports. And I asked them, I said, “What could the CEO have done to make you as depressed?” And they came up with all kinds of ideas.
They said the could have asked them to present to the whole company about their journey over last two years and what they decided to do. He could have asked them to think which aspect of their technology could fit with other parts of 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 basically did not understand the importance of meaning. If the CEO, like our participants, thought the essence of meaning is unimportant, then he [wouldn’t] care. he would say, “At the moment I directed you in this way, and now I’m directing you in this way, everything will be okay.” But if you understood how important is, then you would figure out that it’s actually to spend some time, energy and effort in getting people to care about 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 each other. That was the task. People did the first sheet, we asked if they wanted to do another for a little less money, the next sheet for 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 of letters, gave it to experimenter, the experimenter would look at it, scan it from top to bottom, say “Uh huh,” and put on the pile next to them. In the second condition, people did not write their on it. The experimenter looked at it, took the of paper, did not look at it, did not scan it, and simply put it on the pile pages. So you take a piece, you just put on the side. In the third condition, the experimenter got sheet of paper, and put it directly into a shredder.
(Laughter)
What happened in those three conditions?
In plot I’m showing you at what pay rate people stopped. 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, they stopped these efforts. In the shredder condition, it was twice as — 30 cents per sheet.
And this is basically result we had before. You shred people’s efforts, output — you them not to be as happy with what they’re doing. But should point out, by the way, that in the shredder condition, people have cheated. They could have done not so good work, because they people were just shredding it. So maybe the first you’d do good work, but then you see nobody is testing it, so you would do more and more and more. 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 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 ignoring the performance of people is almost as bad as their effort in front of their eyes. Ignoring gets you a whole way out there. good news is that by simply looking at something that somebody has done, scanning and saying “Uh huh,” that seems to be quite sufficient to dramatically improve people’s motivations. So the 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 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 positive motivation. So there is a store in the U.S. called IKEA. IKEA is a store with kind of okay furniture that a long time to assemble.
(Laughter)
I don’t know you, but every time I assemble one of those, takes me much 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. I can’t say I the process. But when I finish it, I seem to like those IKEA pieces of more than I like other ones.
(Laughter)
And there’s an old about cake mixes. So when they started cake mixes in the ’40s, they would this powder and they would put it in a box, they would ask housewives to basically pour it in, stir some water in it, mix it, it in the oven, and — voila — you had cake. But it out they were very unpopular. People did not want them, and they thought all kinds of reasons for that. Maybe the taste not good? No, the taste was great. What they figured out that there was not enough effort involved. It was so easy that nobody could cake to their guests and say, “Here is my cake.” No, it was somebody else’s cake, as you bought it in the store. It didn’t really feel like your own. what did they do? They took the eggs and the out of the powder.
(Laughter)
Now you had to break the eggs and them, you 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 IKEA effect, by getting people to work harder, they actually got them to what they’re doing to a higher degree.
So how do we look this question experimentally? We asked people to build some origami. We gave them instructions on how to origami, and we gave them a sheet of paper. And these were all novices, and they something that was really quite ugly — nothing like 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. much do you want to pay for it?” And measured how much they were willing to pay for it. And had two types of people: We had the people who built it, and the people who did build it, and just looked at it as external observers. And what we found was that the builders thought these were beautiful pieces of origami —
(Laughter)
and they were willing pay five times more for them than the people who just 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 as well?” Which one of those two is correct? out the builders not only loved the origami more, thought that everybody would see the world in their view. thought everybody else would love it more as well.
In next version, we tried to do the IKEA effect. We tried make it more difficult. So for some people, we gave the task. For some people, we made it harder by hiding instructions. At the top of the sheet, we had little diagrams how you fold origami. For some people, we just that. So now this was tougher. What happened? Well in an objective way, origami now was uglier, it was more difficult. Now when we looked the easy origami, we saw the same thing — builders loved it more, evaluators loved it less. When looked at the hard instructions, the effect was larger. Why? Because now the builders it even more.
(Laughter)
They put all this extra effort it. And evaluators? They loved it even less. Because in reality, was even uglier than the first version.
(Laughter)
Of course, this tells you about how we evaluate things.
Now think about kids. Imagine I you, “How much would you sell your kids for?” Your memories and associations and so on. Most people say for a lot, a lot of money.
(Laughter)
On good days.
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But imagine this was slightly different. if you did not have your kids. And one day you went to the park you met some kids. They were just like your kids, and played with them for a few hours, and when you were about leave, the parents said, “Hey, by the 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, not just because of who are, but because of us, because they are so connected us, and because of the time and connection. By the way, if you think IKEA instructions not good, what about the instructions that come with kids, are really tough.
(Laughter)
By the way, these are kids, which, of course, are wonderful and so on. Which comes tell you one more thing, which is, much like our builders, when they look at the of their creation, we 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. He gave an example of pin factory. He 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 to do step two and step three and so on, can increase tremendously. And indeed, this is a great example, and the for the Industrial Revolution and efficiency. Karl Marx, on other hand, said that the alienation of labor is important in how people think about the connection to what they doing. And if you do all 12 steps, you care about pin. But if you do one step every time, maybe you don’t as much.
I think that in the Industrial Revolution, Adam Smith was more correct than Karl Marx. the reality is that we’ve switched, and now we’re in knowledge economy. You can ask yourself, what happens in a 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 own about how effort, attention, caring, how connected they feel to it, they thinking about labor on the way to work, in the shower and so on, all of a sudden Marx more things to say to us. So when we about labor, we usually think about motivation and payment the same thing, but the reality is that we should probably add all kinds of to it — meaning, creation, challenges, ownership, identity, pride, etc.
The good is that if we added all of those components thought about them — how do we create our 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 very much.