I want to talk a little bit about labor and work.
When we think about how people work, the naive intuition we is that people are like rats in a maze — that all people care about money, and the moment we give them money, we can direct to work one way, we can direct them to work another way. is why we give bonuses to bankers and pay all kinds of ways. And we really have this incredibly view of why people work, and what the labor market looks like.
At same time, if you think about it, there’s all kinds strange behaviors in the world around us. Think about something like and mountain climbing. If you read books of people climb mountains, difficult mountains, do you think that those books are full moments of joy and happiness? No, they are full misery. In fact, it’s all about frostbite and having difficulty walking, difficulty breathing — cold, challenging circumstances. And if people were just trying to be happy, the moment they get to the top, they would say, “This was a terrible mistake. I’ll never do 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 as an example, it suggests all kinds of things. It suggests that we about reaching the end, a peak. It suggests that we care about the fight, the challenge. It suggests that there’s all kinds of other that motivate us to work or behave in all kinds ways.
And for me personally, I started 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 story: He said that for more than two weeks, was working on a PowerPoint presentation. He was working in a big bank, and this was preparation for a merger and acquisition. And he was working very on this presentation — graphs, tables, information. He stayed late at night day. And the day before it was due, he sent his PowerPoint presentation to his boss, and his wrote him back and said, “Nice presentation, but the merger is canceled.” And the was deeply depressed. Now at the moment when he was working, he was actually quite happy. night he was enjoying his work, he was staying late, he was perfecting this PowerPoint presentation. But that nobody would ever watch it made him quite depressed.
So I thinking about how do we experiment with this idea the fruits of our labor. And to start with, we created a little experiment in which we gave Legos, and we asked them to build with Legos. And for people, we gave them Legos and we said, “Hey, would you like to this 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 for $2.70?” If they said yes, we gave them another one, when they finished, we asked them, “Do you want to another one?” for $2.40, $2.10, and so on, until some point people said, “No more. It’s not worth for me.” This was what we called the meaningful condition. People built one Bionicle another. After they finished every one of them, we put them under the table. And we them that at the end of the experiment, we take all these Bionicles, we will disassemble them, we will them back in the boxes, and we will use it the next participant.
There was another condition. This other condition was inspired by David, my student. And this condition we called the Sisyphic condition. And if you remember the story about Sisyphus, was punished by the gods to push the same up a hill, and when he almost got to the end, rock would roll over, and he would have to again. And you can think about this as the essence of doing futile work. You can that if he pushed the rock on different hills, least he would have some sense of progress. Also, if you at prison movies, sometimes the way that the guards torture the is to get them to 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 cyclical version of doing something over and over and over that seems be particularly demotivating.
So in the second condition of this experiment, that’s exactly what did. We asked people, “Would you like to build one for three dollars?” And if they said yes, they built it. Then we them, “Do you want to build another one for $2.70?” And if they yes, we gave them a new one, and as they 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 said yes, we gave them the one that they and we broke. So this was an endless cycle of building, and us destroying in front of their eyes.
Now what happens you compare these two conditions? The first thing that was that people built 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 not curing cancer or building bridges. People were building Bionicles for a few cents. not only that, everybody knew that the Bionicles would destroyed quite soon. So there was not a real opportunity for big meaning. But even small meaning made a difference.
Now we had another version this experiment. In this other version of the experiment, we didn’t people in this situation, we just described to them the situation, much as am describing to you now, and we asked them to predict what result would be. What happened? People predicted the right direction but not the right magnitude. People were just given the description of the experiment said in the meaningful condition, people would probably build one more Bionicle. So people understand that is important, they just don’t understand the magnitude of the importance, the extent to which it’s important.
There one other piece of data we looked at. If think about it, there are some people who love Legos, some people who don’t. And you would speculate that the who love Legos would build more Legos, even for money, because after all, they get more internal joy from it. And the who love Legos less would build less Legos because the that they derive from it is lower. And that’s actually what we found in the condition. There was a very nice correlation between the love of Legos and the amount of people built.
What happened in the Sisyphic condition? In that condition, the correlation was zero — there was relationship between the love of Legos, and how much people built, which suggests to me with this manipulation of breaking things in front of people’s eyes, we basically crushed any joy 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 a big company in Seattle. This was a group within the software company that put in a different building, and they asked them to innovate, and the next big product for this company. And the week before showed up, the CEO of this big software company to that group, 200 engineers, and canceled the project. And I there in front of 200 of the most depressed people I’ve ever talked to. And described to them some of these Lego experiments, and they said they felt like they just been through that experiment. And I asked them, I said, “How many of you show up to work later than you used to?” And raised their hand. I said, “How many of you go home earlier than you used to?” Everybody raised their hand. I them, “How many of you now add 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 could with expense reports. And then I asked them, I said, “What could the CEO have done to you not as depressed?” And they came up with kinds of ideas.
They said the CEO could have them to present to the whole company about their journey over the last two and what they decided to do. He could have asked them to think about aspect of their technology could fit with other parts of 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 some effort and motivation. And I think the CEO basically did not the importance of meaning. If the CEO, just like our participants, thought the essence of meaning is unimportant, he [wouldn’t] care. And he would say, “At the moment I you in this way, and now that I’m directing you this way, everything will be okay.” But if you how important meaning is, then you would figure out it’s actually important to spend some time, energy and effort in people to care more about what they’re doing.
The next experiment was slightly different. We took a sheet paper with random letters, and we asked people to find pairs letters that were identical next to each other. That was the task. People did the first sheet, we asked if they wanted to do another for a less money, the next sheet for a little bit less, and on and so forth. And we had three conditions. In the condition, people wrote their name on the sheet, found the pairs of letters, gave it to the experimenter, experimenter would look at it, scan it from top bottom, say “Uh huh,” and put it on the pile next to them. In second condition, people did not write their name on it. The experimenter looked at it, took the of paper, did not look at it, did not it, and simply put it on the pile of pages. So take a piece, you just put it on the side. In the condition, the experimenter got the sheet of paper, and it directly into a shredder.
(Laughter)
What happened in three conditions?
In this plot I’m showing you at what pay rate people stopped. So low numbers mean people worked harder. They worked for much longer. In the condition, people worked all the way down to 15 cents. 15 cents per page, they basically stopped these efforts. In shredder condition, it was twice as much — 30 per sheet.
And this is basically the result we had before. shred people’s efforts, output — you get them not to be as happy what they’re doing. But I should point out, by the way, that in the shredder condition, could have cheated. They could have done not so work, because they realized people were just shredding it. So maybe first sheet you’d do good work, but then you see nobody is really testing it, you would do more and more and more. So fact, in the shredder condition, people could have submitted more and gotten more money, and put less effort into it. what about the ignored condition? Would the ignored condition be more like acknowledged or more like the shredder, or somewhere in the middle? It out it was almost like the shredder.
Now there’s good news and news here. The bad news is that ignoring the performance of is almost as bad as shredding their effort in front of eyes. Ignoring gets you a whole way out there. The news is that by simply looking at something that somebody done, scanning it and saying “Uh huh,” that seems to be quite sufficient dramatically improve people’s motivations. So the good news is that motivation doesn’t seem to be so difficult. The bad is that eliminating motivations seems to be incredibly easy, and we don’t think about it carefully, we might overdo it. So this is all in terms of motivation, or eliminating negative motivation.
The next part I want show 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 long time assemble.
(Laughter)
I don’t know about you, but every time I assemble one of those, it takes much longer, it’s much more effortful, it’s much more confusing, put things in the wrong way — I can’t say I enjoy pieces. I can’t say I enjoy the process. But I finish it, I seem to like those IKEA pieces of furniture than I like other ones.
(Laughter)
And there’s an story about cake mixes. So when they started cake mixes the ’40s, they would take this powder and 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 — you cake. But it turns out they were very unpopular. People not want them, and they thought about all kinds of reasons that. Maybe the taste was not good? No, the taste great. What they figured out was that there was not effort involved. It was so easy that nobody could serve cake their guests and say, “Here is my cake.” No, it was somebody else’s cake, as if you bought in the store. It didn’t really feel like your own. So what did they do? They the eggs and the milk out of the powder.
(Laughter)
Now you had to break the and 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 like the IKEA effect, by getting people to work harder, actually got them to love what they’re doing to higher degree.
So how do we look at this question experimentally? We asked people build some origami. We gave them instructions on how to create origami, and we gave them sheet of paper. And these were all novices, and built something that was 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 tell what, we’ll sell it to you. How much do want to pay for it?” And we measured how much they were willing to for it. And we had two types of people: had the people who built it, and the people who did not it, and just looked at it as external observers. And what we found was that the builders that these were beautiful pieces of origami —
(Laughter)
and were willing to pay five times more for them than people who just 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 love it?” Or “I love this origami, and everybody else will it as well?” Which one of those two is correct? Turns out builders not only loved the origami more, they thought 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 some people, we the same task. For some people, we made it 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 more difficult. Now we looked at the easy origami, we saw the same thing — loved it more, evaluators loved it less. When you looked at the hard instructions, the was larger. Why? Because now the builders loved it even more.
(Laughter)
They put this extra effort into it. And evaluators? They loved even less. Because in reality, it was even uglier than the version.
(Laughter)
Of course, this tells you something about we evaluate things.
Now think about kids. Imagine I asked you, “How much would 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.
(Laughter)
But imagine this slightly different. Imagine if you did not have your kids. And one you went to the park and you met some kids. were just like your kids, and you played with them for a hours, and 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 you pay for 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 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, about the instructions that come with kids, those are really tough.
(Laughter)
By way, these are my kids, which, of course, are and so on. Which 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 people don’t things our way.
Let me say one last comment. If you think about Adam Smith versus Marx, Adam Smith had a very important notion of efficiency. He gave an example of a pin factory. said pins have 12 different steps, and if one does all 12 steps, production is very low. But if you get person to do step one, and one person to do two and step three and so on, production can increase tremendously. And indeed, is 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 important in how people think about connection to what they are doing. And if you do all 12 steps, you about the pin. But if you do one step time, maybe you don’t care as much.
I think that in the Industrial Revolution, Adam Smith more correct than Karl Marx. But the reality is that we’ve switched, now we’re in the knowledge economy. You can ask yourself, what happens a knowledge economy? Is efficiency still more important than meaning? I think the answer no. I think that as we move to situations in which people to 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, and in the and so on, all of a sudden Marx has more things to say 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 that if we added all of those components and thought them — how do we create our own 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.