I want to talk a little bit today about labor 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 is money, the moment we give them money, we can direct them to work one way, can direct them to work another way. This is why give bonuses to bankers and pay in all kinds of ways. And we have this incredibly simplistic view of why people work, and what the labor market looks like.
At the time, if you think about it, there’s all kinds of behaviors in the world around us. Think 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 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 terrible mistake. I’ll never do it again.”
(Laughter)
“Instead, let me on a beach somewhere drinking mojitos.” But instead, people down, and after they recover, they go up again. if you think about mountain climbing as an example, it suggests all kinds things. It suggests that we care about reaching the end, peak. It suggests that we care about the fight, about the challenge. It that there’s all kinds of other things that motivate to work or behave in all kinds of ways.
And for me personally, I started thinking about after a student came to visit me. This was one my students from a few years earlier, and he came one day to campus. And he told me the following story: said that for more than two weeks, he was on a PowerPoint presentation. He was working in a bank, and this was in preparation for a merger and acquisition. And he was very hard on this presentation — graphs, tables, information. He stayed late at night every day. And the before it was due, he sent his PowerPoint presentation to boss, and his boss wrote him back and said, “Nice presentation, the merger is canceled.” And the guy was deeply depressed. at the moment when he was working, he was actually quite happy. Every night he was 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 started thinking about do we experiment with this idea of the fruits 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 some people, we them Legos and we said, “Hey, would you like to build this Bionicle for three dollars? We’ll pay three dollars for 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 build another one, this time for $2.70?” If they said yes, we them another one, and when they finished, we asked them, “Do you 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 the meaningful condition. People built one Bionicle after another. After they finished one of them, we put them under the table. And we told them that the end of the experiment, we will take all these Bionicles, we will them, we will put them back in the boxes, we will use it for the next participant.
There another condition. This other condition was inspired by David, my student. And this other condition we called Sisyphic condition. And if you remember the story about Sisyphus, Sisyphus was punished by the gods 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 pushed the rock on different hills, at least he have some sense of progress. Also, if you look at prison movies, sometimes way that the guards torture the prisoners is to get them to dig hole, and when the prisoner is finished, they ask him to fill the back up and then dig again. There’s something about this cyclical version of something over and over and over that seems to be particularly demotivating.
So the second condition of this experiment, that’s exactly what we did. We asked people, “Would you like to one Bionicle for three dollars?” And if they said yes, they it. Then we asked them, “Do you want to build another one for $2.70?” And if they yes, we gave them a new one, and as they were building it, we apart the one that they just finished. And when 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 that they built and we broke. So this was an cycle of them building, and us destroying in front of their eyes.
Now what happens when you these two conditions? The first thing that happened was that people built many more — eleven in the meaningful condition, versus seven in Sisyphus condition. And by the way, we should point out that this not big meaning. People were not curing cancer or building bridges. People were Bionicles for a few cents. And not only that, everybody knew the Bionicles would be destroyed quite soon. So there was not a real opportunity for meaning. But even the small meaning made a difference.
Now we had version of this experiment. In this other version of the experiment, didn’t put people in this situation, we just described them the situation, much as I am describing to you now, and we them to predict what the result would be. What happened? People predicted the direction but not the right magnitude. People who were just given the of the experiment said that in the meaningful condition, people probably build one more Bionicle. So people understand that meaning is important, they don’t understand the magnitude of the importance, the extent which it’s important.
There was one other piece of data we at. If you think about it, there are some people who love Legos, and some who don’t. And you would speculate that the people who love would build more Legos, even for less money, because after all, they get more 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 we found in the meaningful condition. There a very nice correlation between the love of Legos the amount of Legos people built.
What happened in Sisyphic condition? In that condition, the correlation was zero — there was no relationship between the love Legos, and how much people built, which suggests to me that this manipulation of breaking things in front of people’s eyes, basically crushed any joy that they could get out of this activity. We eliminated it.
Soon after I finished running this experiment, I went to talk to a big 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 was put in a different building, and they asked them to innovate, and the next big product for this company. And the before I showed up, the CEO of this big software company to that group, 200 engineers, and canceled the project. I stood there in front of 200 of the depressed people I’ve ever talked to. And I described to some of these Lego experiments, and they said they felt they had just been through that experiment. And I asked them, I said, “How many of now show up to work later than you used to?” everybody raised their hand. I said, “How many of you now go home earlier than you to?” Everybody raised their 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 me to dinner and showed me what they could do with reports. And then I asked them, I said, “What could the have done to make you not as depressed?” And they came up with all of ideas.
They said the CEO could have asked them to present to the company about their journey over the last two years and what they decided to do. could have asked them to think about which aspect of their could fit with other parts of the organization. He could asked them to build some next-generation prototypes, and see how they work. But the thing is that any one of those require some effort and motivation. And I think the CEO did not understand 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 directed you in this way, and now that I’m directing you in this way, will be okay.” But if you understood how important meaning is, you would figure out that it’s actually important to some time, energy and effort in getting people to more about what they’re doing.
The next experiment was different. We took a sheet of paper with random letters, we asked people to find pairs of letters that were identical to each other. That was the task. People did the first sheet, we asked if they wanted to do another for little less money, the next sheet for a little bit less, and so and so forth. And we had three conditions. In first condition, people wrote their name on the sheet, found the pairs of letters, gave it to the experimenter, the experimenter would at it, scan it from top to bottom, say “Uh huh,” and it on the pile next to them. In the second condition, did not write their name on it. The experimenter looked at it, the sheet of paper, did not look at it, did not scan it, simply put it on the pile of pages. So you take a piece, you just it on the side. In the third condition, the experimenter got the sheet paper, and put it directly into a shredder.
(Laughter)
What happened in those conditions?
In this plot I’m showing you at what pay rate people stopped. So low numbers that people worked harder. They worked for much longer. In the condition, people worked all the way down to 15 cents. At 15 per page, they basically stopped these efforts. In the shredder condition, it was twice much — 30 cents 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 in the shredder condition, people have cheated. They could have done not so good work, because they realized people were just shredding it. So the first sheet you’d do good work, but then you see nobody is testing it, so you would do more and more 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, somewhere in the middle? It turns out it was like the shredder.
Now there’s good news and bad news here. The bad news is that ignoring performance of people is almost as bad as shredding their effort in front of their eyes. Ignoring gets a whole way out there. The good news is that by looking at something that somebody has done, scanning it saying “Uh huh,” that seems to be quite sufficient to dramatically people’s motivations. So the good news is that adding doesn’t seem to be so difficult. The bad news is that eliminating motivations seems to be incredibly easy, if we don’t think about it carefully, we might overdo it. So this is all in of negative motivation, or eliminating negative motivation.
The next part want 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 okay furniture that takes a long time to assemble.
(Laughter)
I don’t know 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 enjoy those pieces. I can’t say I enjoy the process. But when I finish it, I seem to like IKEA pieces of furniture more than I like other ones.
(Laughter)
And there’s an old story about cake mixes. So they started cake mixes in the ’40s, they would take this and they would put it in a box, and would ask housewives to basically pour it in, stir some water in it, mix it, put it in oven, and — voila — you had cake. But it turns out they were very unpopular. People did want them, and they thought about all kinds of reasons that. Maybe the taste was not good? No, the taste was great. they figured out was that there was not enough involved. It was 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? took the eggs and the milk out of the powder.
(Laughter)
Now had 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 a little like the IKEA effect, by getting people to work harder, they actually got them to love what they’re to a higher degree.
So how do we look at this experimentally? We asked people to build some origami. We gave them on how to create origami, and we gave them a sheet of paper. And these were all novices, they built something that was really quite ugly — nothing a frog or a crane. But then we told them, “Look, origami really belongs to us. You worked for us, I’ll tell you what, we’ll sell it to you. How do you want to pay for it?” And we measured how much they were to pay for it. And we had two types of people: We had the who built it, and the people who did not build it, 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 more for them than the people who just evaluated externally. Now you could say — if you were a builder, do you [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 of those is correct? Turns out the builders not only loved the more, they thought that everybody would see the world in view. They thought everybody else would love it 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. For people, we made it harder by hiding the instructions. At the of the sheet, we had little diagrams of how you fold origami. some people, we just eliminated that. So now this tougher. What happened? Well in an objective way, the now was uglier, it was more difficult. Now when we looked at easy origami, we saw the same thing — builders loved more, evaluators loved it less. When you looked at the hard instructions, effect was larger. Why? Because now the builders loved it even more.
(Laughter)
They put this extra effort into it. And evaluators? They loved it even less. Because in reality, 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 you 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 this was slightly different. Imagine if you did not 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 you about to leave, the parents said, “Hey, by the way, just before you leave, if you’re interested, they’re sale.”
(Laughter)
How much would you pay for them now? Most people say that much. And this is because our kids are so valuable, just because of who they are, but because of us, because they are so to us, and because of the time and connection. the way, if you think IKEA instructions are not good, what about 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 look at the creature of their creation, we don’t see other people don’t see things our way.
Let me say one comment. If you think about Adam Smith versus Karl Marx, Smith had a very important notion of efficiency. He gave an of a pin factory. He said pins have 12 different steps, if one person does all 12 steps, production is very low. But if you get one person do step one, and one person to do step two and three and so on, production can increase tremendously. And indeed, this is great example, and the reason for the Industrial Revolution and efficiency. Karl Marx, on other hand, said that the alienation of labor is incredibly important in how think about the connection to what they are doing. And 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 correct Karl Marx. But the reality is that we’ve switched, now we’re in the knowledge economy. You can ask yourself, what happens in a economy? Is efficiency still more important than meaning? I think the answer is no. I that as we move to situations in which people have to on their own about how much effort, attention, caring, how 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 say to us. So when we think about labor, we usually think motivation and payment as the same thing, but the reality is that we should probably add all of things to it — meaning, creation, challenges, ownership, identity, pride, etc.
The good is that if we added all of those components and thought about — how do we create our own meaning, pride, motivation, and how do we do it in our workplace, for the employees — I think we could get people to be both more productive and happier.
Thank very much.