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 people care is money, and the moment we give them money, we can direct them work one way, we can direct them to work another way. This is why we give bonuses bankers and pay in all kinds of ways. And we have this incredibly simplistic view 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 the world around us. about something like mountaineering and mountain climbing. If you read books of who climb mountains, difficult mountains, do you think that books are full of moments of joy and happiness? No, they are of misery. In fact, it’s all about frostbite and having difficulty walking, and difficulty breathing — cold, circumstances. And if people were just trying to be happy, the moment they would get to top, they would say, “This was a terrible mistake. I’ll never it again.”
(Laughter)
“Instead, let me sit on a beach drinking mojitos.” But instead, people go down, and after they recover, go up again. And if you think about mountain climbing as an example, it all kinds of things. It suggests that we care reaching the end, a peak. It suggests that we about the fight, about the challenge. It suggests that there’s all kinds of other things that motivate us work or behave 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, he came one day back to campus. And he told me the story: He said that for more than two weeks, was working on a PowerPoint presentation. He was working a big bank, and this was in preparation for a and acquisition. And he was working very hard on this presentation — graphs, tables, information. He stayed at night every day. And the day before it was due, 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 depressed. Now at the moment when he was working, was actually quite happy. Every night he was enjoying his work, he was staying late, was perfecting this PowerPoint presentation. But knowing that nobody would ever watch made him quite depressed.
So I started thinking about how do we experiment with this idea of fruits of our labor. And to start with, we created a little experiment in which gave people Legos, and we asked them to build with Legos. And for people, we gave them Legos and we said, “Hey, would you like build this Bionicle for three dollars? We’ll pay you dollars for it.” And people said yes, and they built these Legos. And when they finished, we took it, put it under the table, and we said, “Would you to build another one, this time for $2.70?” If said yes, we gave them another one, and when they finished, we asked them, “Do you to build another one?” for $2.40, $2.10, and so on, at some point people said, “No more. It’s not worth for me.” This was what we called the meaningful condition. built one Bionicle after another. After they finished every one of them, we them under the table. And we told them that 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 next participant.
There another condition. This other condition was inspired by David, my student. And other condition we called the Sisyphic condition. And if remember the story about Sisyphus, Sisyphus was punished by gods to push the same rock up a hill, and 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. can imagine that if he pushed the rock on hills, at 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 the hole back up and then dig again. There’s something about this cyclical version of doing something and over and over that seems to be particularly demotivating.
So in second condition of this experiment, that’s exactly what we did. asked people, “Would you like to build one Bionicle for dollars?” And if they said yes, they built it. Then we them, “Do you want to build another one for $2.70?” And if said yes, we gave them a new one, and they were building it, we took apart the one that just finished. And when they finished that, we said, “Would you like build another one, this time for 30 cents less?” And if they yes, we gave them the one that they built and we broke. this was an endless cycle of them building, and destroying in front of their eyes.
Now what happens you compare these two conditions? The first thing that happened that people built many more Bionicles — eleven in the meaningful condition, versus seven in the condition. And by the way, we should point out that this was not big meaning. People were curing cancer or building bridges. People were building Bionicles for a cents. And not only that, everybody knew that the Bionicles would destroyed quite soon. So there was not a real for 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 to them 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. People who just given the description of the experiment said that in meaningful condition, people would probably build one more Bionicle. 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 piece of data we looked at. If you think about it, are some people who love Legos, and some people don’t. And you would speculate that the people who love Legos would more Legos, even for less money, because after all, they get more internal joy from it. the people who love Legos less would build less Legos because enjoyment that they derive from it is lower. And that’s actually what found in the meaningful condition. There was a very nice correlation between the of Legos and the amount of Legos people built.
What happened the Sisyphic condition? In that condition, the correlation was zero — was no relationship between the love of Legos, and how much people built, suggests to me that with this manipulation of breaking things in of people’s eyes, we basically crushed any joy that could get out of this activity. We basically 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 in Seattle. This a group within the software company that was put a different building, and they asked them to innovate, and create the next big product this company. And the week before I showed up, the CEO this big software company went to that group, 200 engineers, and canceled project. And I stood there in front of 200 of the depressed people I’ve ever talked to. And I described to them some of these Lego experiments, they said they felt like they had just been through that experiment. 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 now go home earlier than you used to?” Everybody raised their hand. I 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 make you not as depressed?” And came up with all kinds of ideas.
They said the could have asked them to present to the whole about their journey over the last two years and what they decided to do. He have asked them to think about which aspect of their technology could fit with other parts the organization. He 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 the essence of is unimportant, then he [wouldn’t] care. And he would say, “At the I directed you in this way, and now that I’m directing you in this way, will be okay.” But if you understood how important meaning is, then you figure out that it’s actually important to spend some time, and effort in getting people to care more about they’re doing.
The next experiment was slightly different. We took sheet of paper with random letters, and we asked to find pairs of letters that were identical next to other. That was the task. People did the first sheet, then we asked if they wanted to another for a little less money, the next sheet for a little bit less, so on and so forth. And we had three conditions. In first condition, people wrote their name on the sheet, found all the of letters, gave it to the experimenter, the experimenter would 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 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, put it directly into a shredder.
(Laughter)
What happened those three conditions?
In this plot I’m showing you what pay rate people stopped. So low numbers mean people worked harder. They worked for much longer. In the acknowledged condition, worked all the way down to 15 cents. At 15 cents per page, basically stopped these efforts. In the shredder condition, it was twice as much — 30 cents sheet.
And this is basically the result we had before. shred people’s efforts, output — you get them not to be as happy with they’re doing. But I should point out, by the way, in the shredder condition, people could have cheated. They could done not so good work, because they realized people were just shredding it. So maybe the sheet you’d do good work, but then you see nobody is testing it, so you would do more and more and more. So in fact, the shredder condition, people could have submitted more work and gotten more money, and put less into it. But what about the ignored condition? Would the ignored condition be like the acknowledged or more like the shredder, or somewhere in the middle? It turns out was almost like the shredder.
Now there’s good news and news here. The bad news is that ignoring the performance people is almost as bad as shredding their effort in front of eyes. Ignoring gets you a whole way out there. good news is that by simply looking at something that has done, scanning it and saying “Uh huh,” that seems to be quite sufficient dramatically improve people’s motivations. So the good news is adding motivation doesn’t seem to be so difficult. The news is that eliminating motivations seems to be incredibly easy, and we don’t think about it carefully, we might overdo it. So this all in terms of negative motivation, or eliminating negative motivation.
The next part I want show you is something about positive motivation. So there a store in the U.S. called IKEA. And IKEA a store with kind of okay furniture that takes a time to assemble.
(Laughter)
I don’t know about you, but every I assemble one of those, it takes me much longer, it’s much more effortful, it’s much confusing, I put things in the wrong way — I can’t say enjoy those pieces. I can’t say I enjoy the process. But when I finish it, seem to like those IKEA pieces of furniture more I like other ones.
(Laughter)
And there’s an old story cake mixes. So when they started cake mixes in the ’40s, they would take this powder they would put it in a box, and they ask housewives to basically pour it in, stir some in it, mix it, put it in the oven, and — voila — had cake. But it turns out they were very unpopular. People did not want them, they thought about all kinds of reasons for that. Maybe the taste not good? No, the taste was great. What they figured out was that there was not enough involved. It was so easy that nobody could serve cake to their guests say, “Here is my cake.” No, it was somebody else’s cake, as you bought it in the store. It didn’t really feel your own. So what did they do? They took eggs and the milk out of the powder.
(Laughter)
Now you had to break the eggs add them, you had to measure the milk and it, mixing it. Now it was your cake. Now was fine.
(Laughter)
(Applause)
Now, I think a little bit like the effect, by getting people to work harder, they actually got them to love what they’re doing a higher degree.
So how do we look at this experimentally? We asked people to build some origami. We gave them instructions on to create origami, and we gave them a sheet paper. And these were all novices, and they built something that was really quite ugly — nothing a frog or a crane. But then we told them, “Look, this origami belongs to us. You worked for us, but I’ll tell what, we’ll sell it to you. How much do you want to pay for it?” we measured how much they were willing to pay for it. And we had two types people: We had the people who built it, and the people who not build it, and just looked at it as external observers. And what we found that the builders thought that these were beautiful pieces origami —
(Laughter)
and they were willing to pay five times more for them than the people who evaluated them externally. Now you could say — if were a builder, do you think [you’d say], “Oh, love this origami, but I know that nobody else would love it?” Or “I love this origami, and else will love it 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. They everybody else would love it more as well.
In the next version, we to do the IKEA effect. We tried to make it more difficult. So for people, we gave the same task. For some people, we made harder by hiding the instructions. At the top of sheet, we had little diagrams of how you fold origami. some people, we just eliminated that. So now this was tougher. happened? Well in an objective way, the origami now was uglier, it was difficult. Now when we looked at the easy origami, we saw same thing — builders loved it more, evaluators loved it less. When you looked at hard instructions, the effect was larger. Why? Because now 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 how we evaluate things.
Now about kids. Imagine I asked you, “How much would you sell your kids for?” Your memories associations and so on. Most people would say for lot, a lot of money.
(Laughter)
On good days.
(Laughter)
But imagine this was slightly different. Imagine if did not have your kids. And one day you went to park and you met some kids. They were just your kids, and you played with them for a few hours, when you were about to leave, the parents said, “Hey, by the way, just before leave, if you’re interested, they’re for sale.”
(Laughter)
How much would you for them now? Most people say not that much. And this is because our kids are so valuable, just because of who they are, but because of us, because they are so connected us, and because of the time and connection. By way, if you think IKEA instructions are not good, what about the instructions that come kids, those are really tough.
(Laughter)
By the way, these are my kids, which, course, are wonderful and so on. Which comes to tell you one more thing, is, much like our builders, when they look at creature of their creation, we don’t see that other people don’t see our way.
Let me say one last comment. If you think about 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 does 12 steps, production is very low. But if you one person to do step one, and one person to do two 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. Karl Marx, on other hand, said that the alienation of labor is important in how people think about the connection to what they are doing. And you do all 12 steps, you care about the pin. But if do one step every time, maybe you don’t care as much.
I think that in Industrial Revolution, Adam Smith was more correct than Karl Marx. But the reality that we’ve switched, and now we’re in the knowledge economy. You ask yourself, what happens in a knowledge economy? Is efficiency still important than meaning? I think the answer is no. think that as we move to situations in which people have decide on their own about how much effort, attention, caring, how connected they feel to it, they thinking about labor on the way to work, and in shower and so on, all of a sudden Marx has more things say to us. So when we think about labor, we usually think about motivation and payment as 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 news is that if we added all of components and thought about them — how do we create our own meaning, pride, motivation, and 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.