I want to talk a little bit today labor and work.
When we think about how people work, naive intuition we have is that people are like rats in a maze — that all care about is money, and the moment we give money, we can direct them to work one way, can direct them to work another way. This is why we give bonuses to bankers pay in all kinds of ways. And we really this incredibly simplistic view of why people work, and what labor market looks like.
At the same time, if you think about it, there’s all of strange behaviors in the world around us. Think about something like and 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, circumstances. And if people were just trying to be happy, the they would get to the top, they would say, “This was a mistake. I’ll never do it again.”
(Laughter)
“Instead, let sit on a beach somewhere drinking mojitos.” But instead, go down, and after they recover, they go up again. if you think about mountain climbing as an example, it suggests all kinds of things. It suggests we care about reaching the end, a peak. It suggests that we about 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, I thinking about this after a student came to visit me. This was one my students from a few years earlier, and he one day back to campus. And he told me the following story: said that for more than two weeks, he was working on a PowerPoint presentation. He was working in big bank, and this was in preparation for a merger and acquisition. he was working very hard on this presentation — graphs, tables, information. He stayed late at night every day. the day before it was due, he sent his PowerPoint presentation to his boss, his boss wrote him back and said, “Nice presentation, but 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 staying late, he was perfecting this PowerPoint presentation. But knowing nobody would ever watch it made him quite depressed.
So I started about how do we experiment with this idea of the fruits of our labor. And 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 build Bionicle for three dollars? We’ll pay you three dollars it.” And people said yes, and they built with these Legos. And when they finished, we it, we put it under the table, and we said, “Would you like to build another one, this for $2.70?” If they said yes, we gave them another one, and they finished, we asked them, “Do you want to build another one?” $2.40, $2.10, and so on, until at some point said, “No more. It’s not worth it for me.” This was what we called meaningful condition. People built one Bionicle after another. After they finished one of them, we put them under the table. And we told that at the end of the experiment, we will take all Bionicles, we will disassemble them, we will put them back the boxes, and we will use it for the participant.
There was another condition. This other condition was inspired by David, student. And this other condition we called the Sisyphic condition. And you remember the story about Sisyphus, Sisyphus was punished by gods to push the same rock up a hill, and when he almost got to end, the rock would roll over, and he would have to start again. And can think about this as the essence of doing futile work. You can imagine that if he the rock on different hills, at least he would have some sense progress. Also, if you look at prison movies, sometimes the way that the guards torture the prisoners to get them to dig a hole, and when the is finished, they ask him to fill the hole back up then dig again. There’s something about this cyclical version doing something over and over and over that seems be particularly demotivating.
So in the second condition of this experiment, that’s exactly we did. We asked people, “Would you like to build Bionicle for three dollars?” And if they said yes, built it. Then we asked them, “Do you want to another one for $2.70?” And if they 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 to build another one, this time 30 cents less?” And if they said yes, we gave them the one that they and we broke. So this was an endless cycle of them building, and us destroying in front of eyes.
Now what happens when you compare these two conditions? 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 building bridges. People were building Bionicles for a few cents. And only that, everybody knew that the Bionicles would be destroyed soon. So there was not a real opportunity for big meaning. But the small meaning made a difference.
Now we had version of this experiment. In this other version of the experiment, we didn’t put people this situation, we just described to them the situation, much as am describing to you now, and we asked them to predict the result would be. What happened? People predicted the right direction but not right magnitude. People who were just given the description the experiment said that in the meaningful condition, people would probably one more Bionicle. So people understand that meaning is important, they just don’t the magnitude of the importance, the extent to which it’s important.
There was other piece of data we looked at. If you think about it, are some 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 get more internal joy it. And the people who love Legos less would build less Legos because the that they derive from it is lower. And that’s actually what we in the meaningful condition. There was a very nice correlation between love of Legos and the amount of Legos people built.
What happened in Sisyphic condition? In that condition, the correlation was zero — there was no relationship the love of Legos, and how much people built, which suggests to me that this manipulation of breaking 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 software company in 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, and they asked to innovate, and create the next big product for company. And the week before I showed up, the CEO this big software company went to that group, 200 engineers, canceled the project. And I stood there in front of 200 the most depressed people I’ve ever talked to. And I described to them of these Lego experiments, and they said they felt like they just been through that experiment. And I asked them, I said, “How of you now 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 hand. I asked them, “How many of you now add not-so-kosher things to your reports?” And they didn’t raise their hands, but they took out to dinner and showed me what they could do with expense reports. And then asked them, I said, “What could the CEO have to make you not as depressed?” And they came up all kinds of ideas.
They said the CEO could have asked 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 the organization. He could have asked them to build next-generation prototypes, and see how they would work. But the thing is that any one of those require some effort and motivation. And I think the CEO basically did understand the importance of meaning. If the CEO, just our participants, thought the essence of meaning is unimportant, then [wouldn’t] care. And he would say, “At the moment I directed 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 would figure that 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 of that were identical next to each other. That was the task. did the first sheet, then we asked if they wanted to do another a little less money, the next sheet for a bit less, and so on and so forth. And we three conditions. In the first condition, people wrote their name on the sheet, all the pairs of letters, gave it to the experimenter, the experimenter would look at it, scan it from to bottom, say “Uh huh,” and put it on the pile next to them. In the condition, people did not write their name on it. The experimenter at it, took the sheet of paper, did not look it, did not scan it, and simply put it on the pile of pages. So you a piece, you just put it on the side. In the third condition, experimenter got the sheet of paper, and put it directly into 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 way down to 15 cents. At 15 cents per page, they basically these efforts. In the shredder condition, it was twice as — 30 cents per sheet.
And this is basically the we had before. You shred people’s efforts, output — get them not to be as happy with what they’re doing. But I point out, by the way, that in the shredder condition, people could cheated. They could have done not so good work, because they people were just shredding it. So maybe the first sheet you’d good work, but then you see nobody is really it, so you would do more and more and more. in fact, in the shredder condition, people could have submitted more work and gotten more money, and put effort into it. But what about the ignored condition? Would the ignored condition be more like acknowledged or more like the shredder, or somewhere in the middle? turns out it was almost like the shredder.
Now there’s news and bad news here. The bad news is that ignoring the of people is almost as bad as shredding their effort in front of their eyes. gets you a whole way out there. The good is that by simply looking at something that somebody done, scanning it and saying “Uh huh,” that seems to quite sufficient to dramatically improve people’s motivations. So the good news is that adding doesn’t seem to be so difficult. The bad news is that eliminating seems to be incredibly easy, and if we don’t think it carefully, we might overdo it. So this is in terms of negative motivation, or eliminating negative motivation.
The part I want to show you is something about positive motivation. So there is a store in U.S. called IKEA. And IKEA is a store with kind of furniture that takes a long time to assemble.
(Laughter)
I don’t know about you, every time I assemble one of those, it takes much longer, it’s much more effortful, it’s much more confusing, I put in the wrong way — I can’t say I those pieces. I can’t say I enjoy the process. when I finish it, I seem to like those IKEA pieces of furniture more than I other ones.
(Laughter)
And there’s an old story about cake mixes. So when they 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, and thought about all kinds of reasons for that. Maybe the taste was good? No, the taste was great. What they figured was that there was not enough effort involved. It so easy that nobody could serve cake to their and say, “Here is my cake.” No, it was somebody else’s cake, as if bought it in the store. It didn’t really feel your own. So what did they do? They took the eggs and milk out of the powder.
(Laughter)
Now you had to the eggs and add them, you had to measure milk and add it, mixing it. Now it was your cake. everything was fine.
(Laughter)
(Applause)
Now, I think a little like the IKEA effect, by getting people to work harder, they actually got to love what they’re doing to a higher degree.
So how do we look this question experimentally? We asked people to build some origami. gave them instructions on how to create origami, and we gave them a sheet of paper. And these all novices, and they built something that was really quite — nothing like a frog or a crane. But we told them, “Look, this origami really belongs to us. worked for us, but I’ll tell you what, we’ll sell to you. How much do you want to pay for it?” we measured how much they were willing to pay it. And we had two types of people: We the people who built it, and the people who not build it, and just looked at it as external observers. And what we found was the builders thought that these were beautiful pieces of —
(Laughter)
and they were willing to pay five times more for than the people who just evaluated them externally. Now you could say — you 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, everybody 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 thought everybody would love it more as well.
In the next version, we tried to do the effect. We tried to make it more difficult. So 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? in an objective way, the origami now was uglier, it was difficult. Now when we looked at the easy origami, saw the same thing — builders loved it more, evaluators loved it less. When you looked at hard instructions, the effect was larger. Why? Because now the builders loved even more.
(Laughter)
They put all this extra effort it. And evaluators? They loved it even less. Because reality, it was even uglier than the first version.
(Laughter)
Of course, this tells you something about how evaluate things.
Now think about kids. Imagine I asked you, “How much would you your kids for?” Your memories and associations and so on. Most people would for a lot, a lot of money.
(Laughter)
On good days.
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But imagine this was 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 few hours, and when 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 much you pay for them now? Most people say not that much. And this is because kids are so valuable, not just because of who they are, but of us, because they are so connected to us, and because the time and connection. By the way, if you think IKEA instructions are good, what about the instructions that come with kids, those really tough.
(Laughter)
By the way, these are my kids, which, of course, are wonderful and so on. Which to tell you one more thing, which is, much like our builders, when look at the creature of their creation, we don’t see that other don’t see things our way.
Let me say one comment. If you think about Adam Smith versus Karl Marx, Adam Smith a very important notion of efficiency. He gave an of a pin factory. He said pins have 12 steps, and if one person does all 12 steps, production is low. But if you get one person to do step one, and one person do step two and step three and so on, can increase tremendously. And indeed, this is a great example, and the reason the Industrial Revolution and efficiency. Karl Marx, on the hand, said that the alienation of labor is incredibly important 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 don’t care as much.
I think that in the Revolution, Adam Smith was more correct than Karl Marx. But the is that we’ve switched, and now we’re in the economy. You can ask yourself, what happens in a knowledge economy? efficiency still more important than meaning? I think the is no. I think that as we move to situations in which people have to decide on their about how much effort, attention, caring, how connected they feel to it, they thinking about labor on the way to work, and the shower and so on, all of a sudden has more things to say to us. So when we think about labor, we think about motivation and payment as the same thing, but the reality is we should probably add all kinds of things to — meaning, creation, challenges, ownership, identity, pride, etc.
The good news that if we added all of those components and about them — how do we create our own meaning, pride, motivation, and how do we do it our workplace, and for the employees — I think we could get people to be both productive and happier.
Thank you very much.