I to talk a little bit today about labor and work.
When think about how people work, the naive intuition we is that people are like rats in a maze — that people care about is money, and the moment we give them money, we can direct them 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 simplistic view of people work, and what the labor market looks like.
At same 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 books of people who climb mountains, difficult mountains, do think that those books are full of moments of joy happiness? No, they are full of misery. In fact, it’s all about frostbite and having walking, and difficulty breathing — cold, challenging circumstances. And people were just trying to be happy, the moment they would get to the top, would say, “This was a terrible mistake. I’ll never do it again.”
(Laughter)
“Instead, me sit on a beach somewhere drinking mojitos.” But instead, people go down, and after they recover, go up again. And if you think about mountain climbing an example, it suggests all kinds of things. It suggests that we care reaching the end, a peak. It suggests that we care the fight, about the challenge. It suggests that there’s all of other things that motivate us to work or in all kinds of ways.
And for me personally, started thinking about this after a student came to visit me. This was of my students from a few years earlier, and came one day back to campus. And he told the following story: He said that for more than two weeks, he was on a PowerPoint presentation. He was working in a big bank, and this was in for a merger and acquisition. And he was working very hard on presentation — graphs, tables, information. He stayed late at night every day. the day before it was due, he sent his PowerPoint to his boss, and his boss wrote him back and said, “Nice presentation, the merger is canceled.” And the guy was deeply depressed. Now at the moment when he was working, he actually quite happy. Every night he was enjoying his work, he was late, he was perfecting this PowerPoint presentation. But knowing that nobody would ever watch made him quite depressed.
So I started thinking about how do experiment with this idea of the fruits of our labor. And to start with, created a little experiment in which we gave people Legos, and we asked to build with Legos. And for some people, we gave Legos 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 Legos. And when they finished, we took it, we put under the table, and we said, “Would you like to build one, this time for $2.70?” If they said yes, we gave another one, and when they finished, we asked them, “Do you want to build another one?” $2.40, $2.10, and so on, until at some point people said, “No more. It’s not worth for me.” This was what we called the meaningful condition. People built one Bionicle after another. they finished every one of them, we put them the table. And we told them that at the end the experiment, we will take all these Bionicles, we will disassemble them, we will put them back the boxes, and we will use it for the next participant.
There another condition. This other condition was inspired by David, my student. And this other we called the Sisyphic condition. And if you remember the about Sisyphus, Sisyphus was punished by the gods to push the rock up a hill, and when he almost got to the end, the rock would roll over, he would have to start again. And you can think about as the essence of doing futile work. You can that if he pushed the rock on different hills, at least would have some sense of progress. Also, if you 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 fill the hole back up and then again. There’s something about this cyclical version of doing something over and over and over that to 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 it. Then we asked them, “Do you want to build one for $2.70?” And if they said yes, we gave them new one, and as they were building it, we took the one that they just finished. And when they finished that, we said, “Would like to build another one, this time for 30 cents less?” And if they said yes, we them the one that they built and we broke. So this was an endless of them building, and us destroying in front of eyes.
Now what happens when you compare these two conditions? The first thing that happened was that built many more Bionicles — eleven in the meaningful condition, versus seven the Sisyphus condition. And by the way, we should out that this was not big meaning. People were not curing or building bridges. People were building Bionicles for a few cents. And not that, everybody knew that the Bionicles would be destroyed soon. So there was not a real opportunity for big meaning. But even the small meaning a difference.
Now we had another version of this experiment. In this other version of the experiment, didn’t put people in this situation, we just described to the situation, much as I am describing to you now, and we asked to predict what the result would be. What happened? People predicted the right direction but the right magnitude. People who were just given the description of the experiment said that in the condition, people would probably build one more Bionicle. So people understand that meaning important, they just don’t understand the magnitude of the importance, extent to which it’s important.
There was one other piece of data we looked at. If you think it, there are some people who love Legos, and people who don’t. And you would speculate that the who love Legos would build more Legos, even for less money, because after all, they get internal joy from it. And the people who love Legos less would build less because the enjoyment that they derive from it is lower. And that’s actually what we found the meaningful condition. There was a very nice correlation between the love of Legos the amount 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, and how much built, which suggests to me that with this manipulation of things in front of people’s eyes, we basically crushed joy that they could get out of this activity. We basically eliminated it.
Soon after finished running this experiment, I went to talk to a big software company Seattle. I can’t tell you who they were, but they a big company in Seattle. This was a group within software company that was put in a different building, they asked them to innovate, and create the next product for this company. And the week before I showed up, CEO of this big software company went to that group, 200 engineers, and canceled the project. And I stood there in of 200 of the most depressed people I’ve ever to. And I 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 now go home earlier than you used to?” raised their hand. I asked them, “How many of now add not-so-kosher things to your expense reports?” And didn’t raise their hands, but they took me out to dinner showed me what they could do with expense reports. And then I them, I said, “What could the CEO have done to make not as depressed?” And they came up with all kinds of ideas.
They said CEO could have asked them to present to the whole about their journey over the last two years and what decided to do. He could have asked them to about which aspect of their technology could fit with parts of 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 those would require some effort and motivation. And I think the CEO basically did not understand the of meaning. If the CEO, just like our participants, thought essence of meaning is unimportant, then he [wouldn’t] care. And would 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 figure that it’s actually important to spend some time, energy and effort in getting to care more about what they’re doing.
The next experiment was slightly different. took a sheet of paper with random letters, and we asked people find pairs of letters that were identical next to each other. That was the task. People did the sheet, then we asked if they wanted to do another for a less money, the next sheet for a little bit less, and so on and so forth. And we had conditions. In the first 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 next to them. In the second condition, people did write their name on it. The experimenter looked at it, took sheet of paper, did not look at it, did not scan it, and put it on the pile of pages. So you a piece, you just put it on the side. the third condition, the experimenter got the sheet of paper, and it directly into a shredder.
(Laughter)
What happened in those three conditions?
In this plot I’m you at what pay rate people stopped. So low numbers mean people worked harder. They worked for much longer. In the acknowledged condition, people worked all the way to 15 cents. At 15 cents per page, they basically these efforts. In the 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 with what they’re doing. But I should point out, by the way, that the shredder condition, people could have cheated. They could have done so good work, because they realized people were just it. So maybe the first sheet you’d do good work, but then you see nobody is testing it, so you would do more and more and more. So fact, in the shredder condition, people could have submitted more work and gotten more money, and less effort into it. But what about the ignored condition? Would ignored condition be more like the acknowledged or more the shredder, or somewhere in the middle? It turns it was almost like the shredder.
Now there’s good news bad news here. The bad news is that ignoring performance of people is almost as bad as shredding effort in front of their eyes. Ignoring gets you whole way out there. The good news is that simply looking at something that somebody has done, scanning it 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 so difficult. The bad news is that motivations seems to be incredibly easy, and if we don’t think about carefully, we might overdo it. So this is all in terms of negative motivation, or negative motivation.
The next part I want to show is something about positive motivation. So there is a store the U.S. called IKEA. And IKEA is a store with kind okay furniture that takes a long time to assemble.
(Laughter)
I don’t know about you, but every time assemble one of those, it takes me much longer, it’s much more effortful, it’s much more confusing, I put in the wrong way — I can’t say I enjoy those pieces. can’t say I enjoy the process. But when I finish it, I seem to like those IKEA of furniture more than I like other ones.
(Laughter)
And there’s an old story about cake mixes. when they started cake mixes in the ’40s, they would take this powder and they would put it a box, and they would ask housewives to basically pour it in, some water in it, mix it, put it in the oven, — voila — you had cake. But it turns out they were unpopular. People did not want them, and they thought about all of reasons for that. Maybe the taste was not good? No, taste was great. What they figured out was that was not enough effort involved. It was so easy that nobody could serve cake to their 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 own. So what did they do? They took the and the milk out of the powder.
(Laughter)
Now you to break the eggs and add them, you had to the milk and add it, mixing it. Now it was your cake. everything was fine.
(Laughter)
(Applause)
Now, I think a bit like the IKEA effect, by getting people to harder, they actually got them to love what they’re to a higher degree.
So how do we look this question experimentally? We asked people to build some origami. We gave instructions on how to create origami, and we gave a sheet of paper. And these were all novices, and they built something that was really quite — nothing like a frog or a crane. But then we told them, “Look, this origami belongs to us. You worked for us, but I’ll tell you what, we’ll it to you. How much do you want to for it?” And we measured how much they were willing to for it. And we had two types of people: We the people who built it, and the people who did not build it, and looked at it as external observers. And what we found was that the thought that these were beautiful pieces of origami —
(Laughter)
and they were willing to pay five more for them than the people who just evaluated them externally. Now you could say — if you 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, and else will love it as well?” Which one of two is correct? Turns out the builders not only the origami more, they thought that everybody would see the in their view. They thought everybody else would love more as well.
In the next version, we tried do the IKEA effect. We tried to make it 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 just that. So now this was tougher. What happened? Well an objective way, the origami now was uglier, it was more difficult. when we looked at the easy origami, we saw the same thing — loved it more, evaluators loved it less. When you at the hard instructions, the effect was larger. Why? now the builders loved it even more.
(Laughter)
They put this extra effort into it. And evaluators? They loved it even less. Because reality, it was even uglier than the first version.
(Laughter)
Of course, this you something about how we evaluate things.
Now think about kids. Imagine I asked you, “How would you sell your kids for?” Your memories and and so on. Most people would say for a lot, a lot money.
(Laughter)
On good days.
(Laughter)
But imagine this was slightly different. Imagine if you did have your kids. And one day you went to the and you met some kids. They were just like kids, and you played with them for a few hours, and when were about to leave, the parents said, “Hey, by the way, before you leave, if you’re interested, they’re for sale.”
(Laughter)
How would you pay for them now? Most people say that much. And this is because our kids are so valuable, not because of who they are, but because of us, they are so connected to us, and because of time 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 so on. Which comes to tell one more thing, which 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 a pin factory. He said pins have 12 different steps, and if one person does all 12 steps, production very low. But if you get one person to do step one, one person to do step two and step three and so on, production can increase tremendously. indeed, this is a great example, and the reason for the Revolution and efficiency. Karl Marx, on the other hand, said that the of labor is incredibly important in how people think about the connection to what they doing. And if you do all 12 steps, you care about the pin. But if you do one every time, maybe you don’t care as much.
I that in the Industrial Revolution, Adam Smith was more than Karl Marx. But the reality is that we’ve switched, and we’re in the knowledge economy. You can ask yourself, what in a knowledge economy? Is efficiency still more important meaning? I think the answer is no. I think that as we to situations in which people have to decide on their own about how much effort, attention, caring, connected they feel to it, are they thinking about labor the way to work, and in the shower and on, all of a sudden Marx has more things to say to us. when we think about labor, we usually think about motivation and as the same thing, but the reality is that we should probably add all kinds things to it — meaning, creation, challenges, ownership, identity, pride, etc.
The good news is if we added all of those components and thought about them — how do we our own meaning, pride, motivation, and how 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.