I to talk a little bit today about labor and work.
When think about how people work, the naive intuition we have is that people are rats in a maze — that all people care about is money, and the moment give them money, we can direct them to work one way, can direct them to work another way. This is we give bonuses to bankers and pay in all kinds ways. And we really have this incredibly simplistic view of why people work, and what the labor looks like.
At the same time, if you think it, there’s all kinds of strange behaviors in the world around us. Think about like mountaineering and mountain climbing. If you read books of people who climb mountains, difficult mountains, do think that those books are full of moments of joy and happiness? No, are full of misery. In fact, it’s all about and having difficulty walking, and difficulty breathing — cold, challenging circumstances. And if people were just trying be happy, the moment they would get to the top, they would say, “This was terrible mistake. I’ll never do it again.”
(Laughter)
“Instead, let me sit on a beach drinking mojitos.” But instead, people go down, and after they recover, they go up again. And if you 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 care about the fight, about the challenge. It suggests there’s all kinds of other things that motivate us work or behave in all kinds of ways.
And for me personally, I started thinking about this after student came to visit me. This was one of my students from a years earlier, and he came one day back to campus. And he told me the following story: He said for more than two weeks, he was working on a PowerPoint presentation. He was in a big bank, and this was in preparation a merger and acquisition. And he was working very 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 the merger canceled.” And the guy 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 PowerPoint presentation. But knowing that nobody would ever watch it made him quite depressed.
So I thinking about how do we experiment with this idea of the fruits of labor. And to start with, we created a little in which we gave people Legos, and we asked to build with Legos. And for some people, we them Legos and we said, “Hey, would you like to build this Bionicle for dollars? We’ll pay you three dollars for it.” And people said yes, and they built with Legos. And when they finished, we took it, we put it under the table, and said, “Would you like to 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 at some point said, “No more. It’s not worth it for me.” This was what we called the meaningful condition. built one Bionicle after another. After they finished every one of them, we put them under 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 the next participant.
There was another condition. This other condition was by David, my student. And this other condition we called the Sisyphic condition. And you remember the story about Sisyphus, Sisyphus was punished by the gods push the same rock up a hill, and when he almost got the end, the rock would roll over, and he would have start again. And you can think about this as the essence doing futile work. You can imagine that if he pushed the on different hills, at least he would have some of progress. Also, if you look at prison movies, the way that the guards torture the prisoners is get them to dig a hole, and when the prisoner is finished, they him to fill the hole back up and then again. There’s something about this cyclical version of doing over and over and over that seems to be 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. we asked them, “Do you want to build another for $2.70?” And if they said yes, we gave them a one, and as they were building it, we took apart the one that they finished. And when they finished that, we said, “Would you like to build another one, time for 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 their eyes.
Now what happens when 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 were not cancer or building bridges. People were building Bionicles for a few cents. And not only that, everybody knew the Bionicles would be destroyed quite soon. So there not a real opportunity for big meaning. But even small meaning made a difference.
Now we had another version of this experiment. this other version of the experiment, we didn’t put people in situation, we just described to them the situation, much as I describing to you now, and we asked them to predict what the result be. What happened? People predicted the right direction but the right magnitude. People who were just given the description of experiment 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 of we looked at. If you think about it, there are some who love Legos, and some people who don’t. And you speculate that the people who love Legos would build more Legos, even for money, because after all, they get more internal joy from it. And people who love Legos less would build less Legos the enjoyment 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 Legos people built.
What happened in the Sisyphic condition? In that condition, the was zero — there was no relationship between the love of Legos, and how much people built, which to me that with this manipulation of breaking things in of people’s eyes, we basically crushed any joy that they could get 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 were big company in Seattle. This was a group within the software company that was in a different building, and they asked them to innovate, and the next big product for this company. And the week I showed up, the CEO of this big software company to that group, 200 engineers, and canceled the project. And I stood there 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 they had just been through that experiment. And I them, I said, “How many of you now show up to work later you used to?” And everybody raised their hand. I said, “How many you now go home earlier than you used to?” Everybody their hand. I asked them, “How many of you now add not-so-kosher things to your expense reports?” they didn’t raise their 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 all of ideas.
They said the CEO could have asked to present to the whole company about their journey the last two years and what they decided to do. He could have asked them think about which aspect of their technology could fit with other parts of the organization. He have asked them to build some next-generation prototypes, and see how would work. But the thing is that any one of those would require 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 is unimportant, then he [wouldn’t] care. And he would say, “At the moment I directed you in this way, and that I’m directing you in this way, everything will okay.” But if you understood how important meaning is, then would figure out that it’s actually important to spend some time, and effort in getting people to care more about what they’re doing.
The experiment was slightly different. We took a sheet of with random letters, and we asked people to find pairs of that were identical next to each other. That was the task. People did the first sheet, then we if they wanted to do another for a little less money, next sheet for a little bit less, and so and so forth. And we had three conditions. In the first condition, people wrote their name on sheet, found all the pairs of letters, gave it to the experimenter, the experimenter look at it, scan it from top to bottom, “Uh huh,” and put it on the pile next to them. the second condition, people did not write their name it. The experimenter looked at it, took the sheet of paper, did not at it, did not scan it, and simply put it on the of pages. So you take a piece, you just it on the side. In the third condition, the experimenter got sheet of paper, and 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 that people worked harder. They worked much longer. In the acknowledged condition, people worked all the way to 15 cents. At 15 cents per page, they basically stopped these efforts. the shredder condition, it was twice as much — 30 cents per sheet.
And this is basically the we had before. You shred people’s efforts, output — you get not to be as happy with what they’re doing. I should point out, by the way, that in the shredder condition, people could cheated. They could have done not so good work, 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 in fact, in the shredder condition, people could submitted more work and gotten more money, and put effort into it. But what about the ignored condition? Would the condition be more like the acknowledged or more like the shredder, or somewhere the middle? It turns out it was almost like the shredder.
Now there’s news and bad news here. The bad news is ignoring the performance of people is almost as bad as shredding their effort front of their eyes. Ignoring gets 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 dramatically improve people’s motivations. 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 it carefully, might overdo it. So this is all in terms of negative motivation, or eliminating negative motivation.
The part I want to show you is something about positive motivation. So there is store in the U.S. called IKEA. And IKEA is store with kind of okay furniture that takes a time to assemble.
(Laughter)
I don’t know about you, but time I assemble one of those, it takes me 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 old story about cake mixes. So when they started cake mixes in the ’40s, they would this powder and they would put it in a box, they would ask housewives to basically pour it in, stir some water it, mix it, put it in the oven, and — voila — you had cake. But it turns out were very unpopular. People did not want them, and thought about all kinds of reasons for that. Maybe taste was not good? No, the taste was great. What they out was that there was not enough effort involved. was so easy that nobody could serve cake to guests and say, “Here is my cake.” No, it somebody else’s cake, as if you bought it in the store. It didn’t really like your own. So what did they do? They the eggs and the milk out of the powder.
(Laughter)
Now you to break the eggs and add them, you had to measure milk and add it, mixing it. Now it was cake. Now everything was fine.
(Laughter)
(Applause)
Now, I think little bit like the IKEA effect, by getting people work 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 them a sheet 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 origami really belongs us. You worked for us, but I’ll tell you what, we’ll sell to you. How much do you want to pay for it?” And measured how much they were willing to pay for it. And we had two types of people: We the people who built it, and the people who did build it, and just looked at it as external observers. And what found was that the builders thought that these were beautiful pieces of origami —
(Laughter)
and they were to pay five times more for them than the people just evaluated them externally. Now you could say — if you were a builder, you think [you’d say], “Oh, I love this origami, but I that nobody else would love it?” Or “I love this origami, and everybody will love it as well?” Which one of those two is correct? Turns the builders not only loved the origami more, they thought that would see the world in their view. They thought everybody else would love it more well.
In the next version, we tried to do the IKEA effect. We tried make it more difficult. So for some people, we gave the same task. some people, we made it harder by hiding the instructions. At top of the sheet, we had little diagrams of how fold origami. For some people, we just eliminated that. So this was tougher. What happened? Well in an objective way, origami now was uglier, it was more difficult. Now we looked at the easy origami, we saw the same thing — builders 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 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 tells you something about we evaluate 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 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 day you went to the park and you met kids. They were just like your kids, and you with them for a few hours, and when you 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 not that much. And this is because our kids so valuable, not just because of who they are, but because of us, because they are so to us, and because of the time and connection. By the way, if you think IKEA instructions are good, what about the instructions that come with kids, those are really tough.
(Laughter)
By the way, are my kids, which, of course, are wonderful and so on. Which comes tell you one more thing, which 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 think about Adam Smith versus Karl Marx, Adam Smith had a very notion of efficiency. He gave an example of a pin factory. He pins have 12 different steps, and if one person does all 12 steps, production is very low. if you get one person to do step one, and person to do step two and step three and on, production can increase tremendously. And indeed, this is a example, and the reason for the Industrial Revolution and efficiency. Marx, on the other hand, said that the alienation labor is incredibly important in how people think about connection to what they are doing. And if you do all 12 steps, you care the pin. But if you do one step every time, maybe you don’t care much.
I think that in the Industrial Revolution, Adam was more correct than Karl Marx. But the reality that we’ve switched, and now we’re in the knowledge economy. You can ask yourself, happens in a knowledge economy? Is 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 their own about how much effort, attention, caring, how connected they feel to it, are they thinking labor on the way to work, and in the 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 as the same thing, but the reality is that we should probably all kinds of things to it — meaning, creation, challenges, ownership, identity, pride, etc.
The good news is that if 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, for the employees — I think we could get people be both more productive and happier.
Thank you very much.