I to talk a little bit today about labor and work.
When we about how people work, the naive intuition we have is that people are like rats a maze — that all people care about is money, and moment we give them money, we can direct them work one way, we can direct them to work another way. This is we give bonuses to bankers and pay in all of ways. And we really have this incredibly simplistic view of why people work, what the labor market looks like.
At the same time, you think about it, there’s all kinds of strange in the world around us. Think about something like mountaineering mountain climbing. If you read books of people who climb mountains, mountains, do you think that those books are full of moments of joy and happiness? No, are full of misery. In fact, it’s all about frostbite and difficulty walking, and difficulty breathing — cold, challenging circumstances. And if were just trying to be happy, the moment they would get to the top, they would say, “This a terrible mistake. I’ll never do it again.”
(Laughter)
“Instead, me sit on a beach somewhere drinking mojitos.” But instead, people down, and after they recover, they go up again. And if you think about climbing as an example, it suggests all kinds of things. It that we care about reaching the end, a peak. It suggests we care about the fight, about the challenge. It that there’s all kinds of other things that motivate us to work or behave in all kinds ways.
And for me personally, I started thinking about this a student came to visit me. This was one of my students a few years earlier, and 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 in big bank, and this was in preparation for a merger and acquisition. And he was working very hard this presentation — graphs, tables, information. He stayed late night every day. And the day before it was due, he his PowerPoint presentation to his boss, and his boss wrote him and said, “Nice presentation, but the merger is canceled.” And the was deeply depressed. Now at the moment when he working, he was actually quite happy. Every night he enjoying his work, he was staying late, he was perfecting this PowerPoint presentation. But knowing that nobody would watch it made him quite depressed.
So I started thinking about how do we experiment with this of the fruits of our labor. And to start with, we created little experiment in which we gave people Legos, and asked them to build with Legos. And for some people, we gave them and we said, “Hey, would you like to build this for three dollars? We’ll pay you three dollars for it.” And people said yes, and built with these Legos. And when they finished, we took it, put it under the table, and we said, “Would you like build another one, this time for $2.70?” If they said yes, we gave another one, and when they finished, we asked them, “Do want to build another one?” for $2.40, $2.10, and so on, until some point 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 told them that at the end of the experiment, we take all these Bionicles, we will disassemble them, we will put back in the boxes, and we will use it for next participant.
There was another condition. This other condition was inspired by David, student. And this other condition we called the Sisyphic condition. And if you the story about Sisyphus, Sisyphus was punished by the gods to push the same up a hill, and when he almost got to the end, the rock would over, and he would have to start again. And you can think about this as the essence doing futile work. You can imagine that if he pushed the rock on different hills, at he would have some sense of progress. Also, if you look at prison movies, sometimes the that the guards torture the prisoners is to get them dig a hole, and when the prisoner is finished, they ask him fill the hole back up and then dig again. There’s something about cyclical version 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 you like build one Bionicle for three dollars?” And if they said yes, they it. Then we asked them, “Do you want to build another for $2.70?” And if they said yes, we gave them a new one, and as were building it, we took apart the one that they just finished. And when finished that, we said, “Would you like to build one, this time for 30 cents less?” And if they said yes, we gave the one that they built and we broke. So this was an endless cycle them building, and us destroying in front of their eyes.
Now what when you compare these two 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 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 that the Bionicles would be destroyed quite soon. So there was not a opportunity for big meaning. But even the small meaning 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 am describing to now, and we asked them to predict what the would be. What happened? People predicted the right direction not the right magnitude. People who were just given the description of the said that in the meaningful condition, people would probably build one Bionicle. So people understand that meaning is important, they just don’t understand the magnitude of the importance, the to which it’s important.
There was one other piece 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 build more Legos, even for less money, because after all, they more internal joy from it. And 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 love of Legos and the amount of Legos people built.
What happened in the Sisyphic condition? In condition, the correlation was zero — there was no relationship the love of Legos, and how much people built, suggests to me that with this manipulation of breaking in front of people’s eyes, we basically crushed any joy that they get out of this activity. We basically eliminated it.
Soon after I finished running experiment, I went to talk to a big software in Seattle. I can’t tell you who they were, but they were a company in Seattle. This was a group within the software company that put in a different building, and they asked them to innovate, and create the next big for this company. And the week before I showed up, the CEO of big software company went to that group, 200 engineers, and canceled project. And I stood there in front of 200 of the most depressed I’ve ever 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 of you now show up to work later than you to?” And everybody raised their hand. I said, “How many of you now go earlier than you used to?” Everybody raised their hand. I them, “How many of you now add not-so-kosher things to expense reports?” And they didn’t raise their hands, but they took me to dinner and showed me what they could do with expense reports. And I asked 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 CEO could have asked them present to the whole company about their journey over the two years and what they decided to do. He could 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 they would work. But 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 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 you in this way, everything will be okay.” But you understood how important meaning is, then you would out that it’s actually important to spend some time, energy and effort in getting people care more about what 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 each other. That was task. People did the first sheet, then we asked if they wanted do another for a little less money, the next sheet for a little bit less, and so and so forth. And we had three conditions. In the first condition, people wrote name on the sheet, found all the pairs of letters, gave to the experimenter, the experimenter would look at it, scan it from to bottom, say “Uh huh,” and put it on the next to them. In the second condition, people did not write their name it. The experimenter looked at it, took the sheet of paper, not look at it, did not scan it, and simply put it on pile of pages. So you take a piece, you just put it on the side. In the condition, the experimenter got the sheet of paper, and put it directly a shredder.
(Laughter)
What happened in those three conditions?
In this plot I’m showing you what pay rate people stopped. So low numbers mean that worked harder. They worked for much longer. In the condition, people worked all the way down to 15 cents. At 15 cents per page, they stopped these efforts. In the shredder condition, it was twice much — 30 cents per sheet.
And this is basically the we had before. You shred people’s efforts, output — you get them not to be happy with what they’re doing. But I should point out, the way, that in the shredder condition, people could have cheated. They could have done 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, in shredder condition, people could have submitted more work and more money, and put less effort into it. But what about the ignored condition? Would ignored condition be more like the acknowledged or more like the shredder, somewhere in the middle? It turns out it was almost like the shredder.
Now there’s news and bad news here. The bad news is that ignoring the performance of people is almost as as shredding their effort in front of their eyes. Ignoring you a whole way out there. The good news that by simply looking at something that somebody has done, scanning it saying “Uh huh,” that seems to be quite sufficient to improve people’s motivations. So the good news is that adding motivation doesn’t seem to so difficult. The bad news is that eliminating motivations seems be incredibly easy, and if we don’t think about carefully, we might overdo it. So this is all in terms negative motivation, or eliminating negative motivation.
The next part I to show you is something about positive motivation. So there a store in the U.S. called IKEA. And IKEA is a store with kind of okay furniture that a long time to assemble.
(Laughter)
I don’t know about you, but time I assemble one of those, it takes me much longer, it’s more effortful, it’s much more confusing, I put things the wrong way — I can’t say I enjoy those pieces. I can’t say I enjoy the process. when I finish it, I seem to like those IKEA pieces of furniture than I like other ones.
(Laughter)
And there’s an old story about cake mixes. So when started cake mixes in the ’40s, they would take this and 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 cake. But it turns out they were very unpopular. People did want them, and they thought about all kinds of reasons for that. Maybe taste was not good? No, the taste was great. they figured out was that there was not enough effort involved. It so easy that nobody could serve cake to their guests say, “Here is my cake.” No, it was somebody else’s cake, if you bought it in the store. It didn’t feel like your own. So what did they do? They took the eggs and the milk of the powder.
(Laughter)
Now you had to break eggs and add them, you had to measure the and add it, mixing it. Now it was your cake. Now everything was fine.
(Laughter)
(Applause)
Now, I a little bit 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 look at this question experimentally? asked people to build some 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 was really quite ugly — nothing like a frog a crane. But then we told them, “Look, this really belongs to us. You worked for us, but I’ll tell what, we’ll sell it to you. How much do you to pay for it?” And we measured how much they willing to pay for it. And we had two types of people: We had people who built it, and the people who did not build it, and just looked at it as observers. And what we found was that the builders thought that these were pieces of origami —
(Laughter)
and they were willing pay five times more for them than the people just evaluated them externally. Now you could say — you were a builder, do you think [you’d say], “Oh, I love this origami, but I that nobody else would love it?” Or “I love this origami, everybody else will love it as well?” Which one those two is correct? Turns 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 the next version, we 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 fold origami. For people, we just eliminated that. So now this was tougher. What happened? Well in an objective way, the origami was uglier, it was more difficult. Now when we looked at the easy origami, we the same thing — builders loved 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 extra into it. And evaluators? They loved it even less. in reality, it was even uglier than the first version.
(Laughter)
Of course, this tells you something about how we things.
Now think about kids. Imagine I asked you, “How much would you sell your for?” Your memories and associations and so on. Most people would say for lot, a lot of money.
(Laughter)
On good days.
(Laughter)
But imagine was slightly different. Imagine if you did not have your kids. one day you went to the park and you met some kids. They were just 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 you leave, if you’re interested, they’re for sale.”
(Laughter)
How would you pay for them now? Most people say not that much. And is because our kids are so valuable, not just because who they are, but because of us, because they are so connected to us, and because of the and connection. By the way, if you think IKEA instructions not good, what about the instructions that come with kids, those are really tough.
(Laughter)
By way, these are my kids, which, of course, are wonderful and on. Which comes to tell you one more thing, is, much like our builders, when they look at the creature their creation, we don’t see that other people don’t see our way.
Let me say one last comment. If you think about Adam Smith versus Karl Marx, Smith had a very important notion of efficiency. He gave an example of a 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, production can tremendously. And indeed, this is a great example, and the reason for the Industrial and efficiency. Karl Marx, on the other hand, said that the alienation of labor is incredibly in how people think about the connection to what they are doing. And if do all 12 steps, you care about the pin. But if you do step every time, maybe you don’t care as much.
I think that in Industrial Revolution, Adam Smith was more correct than Karl Marx. the reality is that we’ve switched, and now we’re the knowledge economy. You can ask yourself, what happens a knowledge economy? Is efficiency still more important than meaning? I the answer is no. I think that as we move situations in which people have to decide on their own about how effort, attention, caring, how connected they feel to it, are thinking about labor on the way to work, and in shower and so on, all of a sudden Marx has more things to say to us. So we think about labor, we usually think about motivation and payment as the same thing, but the reality that we should probably add all kinds of things it — meaning, creation, challenges, ownership, identity, pride, etc.
The good news is if we added all of those components and thought them — how do we create our own meaning, pride, motivation, and how we do it in our workplace, and for the — I think we could get people to be both more and happier.
Thank you very much.