I want to a little bit today about labor and work.
When we about how people work, the naive intuition we have that people are like rats in a maze — all people care about is money, and the moment we give them money, we can direct to work one way, we can direct them to work another way. This why we give bonuses to bankers and pay in all kinds of ways. we really have this incredibly simplistic view of why people work, what the labor market looks like.
At the same time, if you think about it, there’s 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 happiness? No, they are full of misery. In fact, it’s all about and having difficulty walking, and difficulty breathing — cold, challenging circumstances. if people were just trying to be happy, the moment would get to the top, they would say, “This a terrible mistake. I’ll never do it again.”
(Laughter)
“Instead, let me on a beach somewhere drinking mojitos.” But instead, people go down, and after they recover, they up again. And if you think about mountain climbing as example, it suggests all kinds of things. It suggests that care about reaching the end, a peak. It suggests we care about the fight, about the challenge. It suggests that there’s all kinds of things that motivate us to work or behave in all of ways.
And for me personally, I started thinking about this a student came to visit me. This was one of students from a few years earlier, and he came one day back to campus. And he told me following story: He said that for more than two weeks, he working on a PowerPoint presentation. He was working in big bank, and this was in preparation for a and acquisition. And he was working very hard on presentation — graphs, tables, information. He stayed late at night day. And the day before it was due, he his PowerPoint presentation to his boss, and his boss him back and said, “Nice presentation, but the merger canceled.” And the guy was deeply depressed. Now at moment when he was working, he was actually quite happy. night he was enjoying his work, he was staying late, was perfecting this PowerPoint presentation. But knowing that nobody would ever it made him quite depressed.
So I started thinking about how do we experiment with idea of the fruits of our labor. And to start with, we created a little experiment in we gave people Legos, and we asked them to build with Legos. And some people, we gave them Legos and we said, “Hey, would you to build this Bionicle for three dollars? We’ll pay three dollars for it.” And people said yes, and built with these Legos. And when they finished, we took it, put it 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 want to build one?” for $2.40, $2.10, and so on, until at some point said, “No more. It’s not worth it for me.” This what we called the meaningful condition. People built one Bionicle after another. After they finished every one them, we put them under the table. And we told that at the end of the experiment, we will take all these Bionicles, we will disassemble them, will put them back in the boxes, and we use it for the next participant.
There was another condition. This other was inspired by David, my student. And this other we called the Sisyphic condition. And if you remember story about Sisyphus, Sisyphus was punished by the gods to push same rock up a hill, and when he almost got the end, the rock would roll over, and he have to start again. And you can think about this as essence of doing futile work. You can imagine that if pushed the rock on different hills, at least he would have some sense progress. Also, if you look at prison movies, sometimes the way that guards torture the prisoners is to get them to a 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 doing something 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 to build one Bionicle for three dollars?” And if they yes, they built it. Then we asked them, “Do you want to build one for $2.70?” And if they said yes, we gave them a one, and as they were building it, we took apart the one they just finished. And when they finished that, we said, “Would you to build another one, this time for 30 cents less?” And they said yes, we gave them the one that they built and we broke. So this was an cycle of them building, and us destroying in front their eyes.
Now what happens when you compare these two conditions? The first thing happened was that people built many more Bionicles — eleven in meaningful condition, versus seven in the Sisyphus condition. And the way, we should point out that this was big meaning. People were not curing cancer or building bridges. People building Bionicles for a few cents. And not only that, everybody knew the Bionicles would be destroyed quite soon. So there was not a real for big meaning. But even the small meaning made a difference.
Now we had another of this experiment. In this other version of the experiment, we didn’t put in this situation, we just described to them the situation, much as I am to you now, and we asked them to predict what the result would be. happened? People predicted the right 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 just don’t understand magnitude of the importance, the extent to which it’s important.
There one other piece of data we looked at. If you about it, there are some people who love Legos, some people who don’t. And you would speculate that the people who love Legos build more Legos, even for less 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 meaningful condition. There a very nice correlation between the love of Legos the amount of Legos people built.
What happened in the Sisyphic condition? In condition, the correlation was zero — there was no relationship between the love of Legos, and how much built, which suggests to me that with this manipulation breaking things in front of people’s eyes, we basically crushed any joy that could get out of this activity. We basically eliminated it.
Soon after I finished running this experiment, went to talk to a big software company in Seattle. I can’t tell who they were, but they were a big company in Seattle. This was a group the software company that was put in a different building, they asked them to innovate, and create the next big product for this company. And the before I showed up, the CEO of this big software company went to that group, 200 engineers, canceled the project. And I stood there in front 200 of the most depressed people I’ve ever talked to. And I to them some of these Lego experiments, and they they felt like they had just been through that experiment. And I them, I said, “How many of you now show up work later than you used to?” And everybody raised their hand. I said, “How of you now go home earlier than you used to?” Everybody raised their hand. I asked them, “How many 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 do with expense reports. then I asked them, I said, “What could the have done to make you not as depressed?” And came up with all kinds of ideas.
They said the could have asked them to present to the whole company about their journey over the last two and what they decided to do. He could have asked to 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 they would work. But the thing is that any one of those require some effort and motivation. And I think the CEO basically 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 I directed you this way, and now that I’m directing you in this way, everything will be okay.” But you understood how important meaning is, then you would out that it’s actually important to spend some time, and effort in getting people to care more about they’re doing.
The next experiment was slightly different. We took sheet of paper with random letters, and we asked people to find pairs of letters were identical next to each other. That was the task. did the first sheet, then we asked if they wanted to do another for a little money, the next sheet for a little bit less, and on and so forth. And we had three conditions. In the first condition, people wrote their on the 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. In the condition, people did not write their name on it. experimenter looked at it, took the sheet of paper, did not at it, did not scan it, and simply put it the pile of pages. So you take a piece, you just put it on the side. In the condition, the experimenter got the sheet of paper, and put it directly a shredder.
(Laughter)
What happened in those three conditions?
In plot I’m showing you at what pay rate people stopped. low numbers mean that people worked harder. They worked for much longer. the acknowledged condition, people worked all the way down 15 cents. At 15 cents per page, they basically these efforts. In the shredder condition, it was twice much — 30 cents per sheet.
And this is basically the result we had before. You people’s efforts, output — you get them not to as happy with what they’re doing. But I should point out, by way, that in the shredder condition, people could have 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 really testing it, so you would do more and and more. So in fact, in the shredder condition, could have submitted more work and gotten more money, and put less effort into it. what about the ignored condition? Would the ignored condition be more like the acknowledged or more the shredder, or somewhere in the middle? It turns out it was almost the shredder.
Now there’s good news and bad news here. The bad news that ignoring the performance of people is almost as 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 has done, scanning it and saying “Uh huh,” that to be quite sufficient to dramatically improve people’s motivations. the good news is that adding motivation doesn’t seem be so difficult. The bad news is that eliminating motivations seems to incredibly easy, and 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 I want to show you is something about positive motivation. there is a store in the U.S. called IKEA. IKEA is a store with kind of okay furniture that takes long time to assemble.
(Laughter)
I don’t know about you, every 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. I can’t say I enjoy 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 mixes. So when they started cake mixes in the ’40s, would take this powder and they would put it in a box, and they ask housewives to basically pour it in, stir some water 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 not good? No, the taste was great. What they figured out was that was not enough effort involved. It was so easy nobody could serve cake to their guests and say, “Here my cake.” No, it was somebody else’s cake, as if you bought it the store. It didn’t really feel like your own. what did they do? They took the eggs and the milk of the powder.
(Laughter)
Now you had to break eggs and add them, you had to measure the and add it, mixing it. Now it was your cake. Now everything was fine.
(Laughter)
(Applause)
Now, think a little bit like the IKEA effect, by people to work harder, they actually got them to love they’re doing to a higher degree.
So how do we look at this 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 something that was really quite ugly — nothing like a frog or a crane. then we told them, “Look, this origami really belongs to us. You for us, but I’ll tell you what, we’ll sell it to you. much do you want to pay for it?” And we measured how much they were willing pay for it. And we had two types of people: We had the who built it, and the people who did not build it, and just looked at it external observers. And what we found was that the builders thought these were beautiful pieces of origami —
(Laughter)
and they were willing pay five times more for them than the people who just evaluated externally. Now you could say — if you were a builder, you think [you’d say], “Oh, I love this origami, but I know that nobody would love it?” Or “I love this origami, and everybody will love it as well?” Which one of those two is correct? Turns out the builders not loved the origami more, they thought that everybody would the world in their view. They thought everybody else would love it as well.
In the next version, we tried to do the IKEA effect. We tried to 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 you fold origami. For people, we just eliminated that. So now this was tougher. happened? Well in an objective way, the origami now uglier, it was more difficult. Now when we looked at the origami, we saw the same thing — builders loved more, evaluators loved it less. When you looked at the instructions, the effect was larger. Why? Because now the builders it even more.
(Laughter)
They put all this extra effort into it. And evaluators? loved it even less. Because in reality, it was even uglier the first version.
(Laughter)
Of course, this tells you something about how we 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, lot of money.
(Laughter)
On good days.
(Laughter)
But imagine this was slightly different. if you did not have your kids. And one day you to the park and you met some kids. They just like your kids, and you played with them for a few hours, and when you were about 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. this is because our kids are so valuable, not just of who they are, but because of us, because they are so to us, and because of the time and connection. By way, if you think IKEA instructions are not good, what about the that come with kids, those are really tough.
(Laughter)
By way, these are my kids, which, of course, are wonderful so on. Which comes to tell you one more thing, which is, much like builders, when they look at the 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 a very important notion of efficiency. He gave an example of pin factory. He said pins have 12 different steps, and if one person does 12 steps, production is very low. But if you get one person to do step one, and one to do step two and step three and so 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 the connection to what they are doing. And if do all 12 steps, you care about the pin. But if you do step every time, maybe you don’t care as much.
I think that in the Industrial Revolution, Adam Smith was correct than Karl Marx. But the reality is that we’ve switched, and now we’re in the economy. You can ask yourself, what happens in a knowledge economy? Is efficiency still important than meaning? I think the answer is no. I think as we move to situations in which people have decide 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 shower so on, all of a sudden Marx has more things to say to us. when we think about labor, we usually think about and payment 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 we added all those components and thought about them — how do we our own meaning, pride, motivation, and how do we do it in workplace, and for the employees — I think we could get people to be both more productive happier.
Thank you very much.