I to talk a little bit today about labor and work.
When we think about how work, the naive intuition we have is that people like rats in a maze — that all people care about money, and the moment we give them money, we can direct them to work way, we can direct them to work another way. This is why we give bonuses to and 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 kinds of strange behaviors in the world around us. Think about like mountaineering and mountain climbing. If you read books people who climb mountains, difficult mountains, do you think that those books are full of moments joy and happiness? No, they are full of misery. In fact, it’s all frostbite and having difficulty walking, and difficulty breathing — cold, challenging circumstances. And if people were just 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, they up again. And if you think about mountain climbing as an example, it suggests kinds of things. It suggests that we care about the end, a peak. It suggests that we care about the fight, the challenge. It suggests that there’s all kinds of other things that motivate us to work or in all kinds of ways.
And for me personally, I started thinking about after a student came to visit me. This was one of my students from a few earlier, and he came one day back to campus. And he told the following story: He said that for more than two weeks, he was working a PowerPoint presentation. He was working in a big bank, and was in preparation for a merger and acquisition. And he was working hard on this presentation — graphs, tables, information. He late at night every day. And the day before it due, he sent his PowerPoint presentation to his boss, and his boss wrote him back said, “Nice presentation, but the merger is canceled.” And the guy was deeply depressed. Now at moment when he was working, he was actually quite happy. Every night he was his work, he was staying late, he was perfecting this presentation. But knowing that nobody would ever watch it made quite depressed.
So I started thinking about how do we experiment with this idea of fruits of our labor. And to start with, we created a little experiment which we gave people Legos, and we asked them build with Legos. And for some people, we gave them Legos and we said, “Hey, you like to build this Bionicle for three dollars? We’ll pay you three 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 to build another one, time for $2.70?” If they said yes, we gave them another one, and when finished, we asked them, “Do you want to build one?” for $2.40, $2.10, and so on, until at point people said, “No more. It’s not worth it for me.” This was what called 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 at the of the experiment, we will take all these Bionicles, we will them, we will put them back in the boxes, and we will use it the next participant.
There was another condition. This other condition was inspired by David, my student. this other condition we called the Sisyphic condition. And if you remember the about Sisyphus, Sisyphus was punished by the gods to push the same rock up a hill, and he almost got to the end, the rock would roll over, and he would have 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 sense 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 is finished, they ask him to fill the hole back up and dig again. There’s something about this cyclical version of something over and over and over that seems to be particularly demotivating.
So in the second of this experiment, that’s exactly what we did. We asked people, “Would you like to build one for three dollars?” And if they said yes, they built it. Then we asked them, “Do you to build another one for $2.70?” And if they said yes, we gave them a new one, as they were building it, we took apart the one that they finished. And when they finished that, we said, “Would like to build another one, this time for 30 less?” And if they said yes, we gave them the one that they built and broke. So this was an endless cycle of them building, and us destroying front of their eyes.
Now what happens when you compare these two conditions? The first thing that was that people built many more Bionicles — eleven in meaningful condition, versus seven in the Sisyphus condition. And by the way, should point out that this was not big meaning. People were not curing cancer or building bridges. were building Bionicles for a few cents. And not only that, knew that 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 experiment. In this other version of the experiment, we didn’t put people in situation, we just described to them the situation, much I am describing to you now, and we asked them to predict what the result be. What happened? People predicted the right direction but not the right magnitude. People 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 is important, they don’t understand the magnitude of the importance, the extent which it’s important.
There was one other piece of data looked 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 Legos would more Legos, even for less money, because after all, they more internal joy from it. And the people who love less would build less Legos because the enjoyment that derive from it is lower. And that’s actually what found in the meaningful condition. There was a very nice between the love of Legos and the amount of Legos people built.
What happened in the Sisyphic condition? that condition, the correlation was zero — there was 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 any 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 company in Seattle. I can’t tell you who they were, but they a big company in Seattle. This was a group within the company that was put in a different building, and asked them to innovate, and create the next big for this company. And the week before I showed up, the CEO of 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 some these Lego experiments, and they said they felt like they had just been that experiment. And I asked 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 of you now home earlier than you used to?” Everybody raised their hand. I them, “How many of you now add not-so-kosher things to your expense reports?” And they didn’t their hands, but they took me out to dinner and showed me what they could do expense reports. And then I asked them, I said, “What could the CEO have done to make you as depressed?” And they came up with all kinds of ideas.
They said the CEO could asked them to present to the whole company about their journey over the last two years what they decided to do. He could have asked to think about which aspect of their technology could fit with parts of the organization. He could have asked them build some next-generation prototypes, and see how they would work. the thing is that any one of those would require some and motivation. And I think the CEO basically did not understand the importance of meaning. If CEO, just like our participants, thought the essence of meaning is unimportant, then [wouldn’t] care. And he would say, “At the moment I directed you in this way, now that I’m directing you in this way, everything 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, and we asked people to find pairs of letters were identical next to each other. That was the task. People the first sheet, then we asked if they wanted to another for a little less money, the next sheet for a little bit less, and so on and forth. And we had three conditions. In the first condition, people wrote name on the sheet, found all the pairs of letters, gave it the experimenter, the experimenter would look at it, scan from top to bottom, say “Uh huh,” and put it the pile next to them. In the second condition, people not write their name on it. The experimenter looked at it, the sheet of paper, did not look at it, did scan it, and simply put it on the pile of pages. So you take piece, you just put it on the side. In the third condition, experimenter got the sheet of paper, and put it directly into a shredder.
(Laughter)
What happened those three conditions?
In this plot I’m showing you at what pay people stopped. So low numbers mean that people worked harder. They worked much longer. In the acknowledged condition, people worked all way down to 15 cents. At 15 cents per page, basically stopped these efforts. In the shredder condition, it was twice as — 30 cents per sheet.
And this is basically the result we had before. You people’s efforts, output — you get them not to be as happy what they’re doing. But I should point out, by the way, that in shredder condition, people could have cheated. They could have not so good work, because they realized people were shredding 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 in fact, in shredder condition, people could have submitted more work and more money, and put less effort into it. But what about the ignored condition? Would the ignored condition more like the acknowledged or more like the shredder, or somewhere in the middle? It turns it was almost like the shredder.
Now there’s good news and news here. The bad news is that ignoring the performance of people is almost as bad shredding their effort in front of their eyes. Ignoring gets a whole way out there. The good news is by simply looking at something that somebody has done, scanning it and saying “Uh huh,” that seems be quite sufficient to dramatically improve people’s motivations. So good news is that adding motivation doesn’t seem to so difficult. The bad news is that eliminating motivations to be incredibly easy, and if we don’t think about 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 takes a long time to assemble.
(Laughter)
I don’t about you, but every time I assemble one of those, takes me much longer, it’s much more effortful, it’s much more confusing, I things 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 pieces furniture more than I like other ones.
(Laughter)
And there’s an story about cake mixes. So when they started cake in the ’40s, they would take this powder and they would put it in a box, and 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 turns out they were very unpopular. People did not them, and they thought about all kinds of reasons that. Maybe the taste was not good? No, the taste great. What they figured out was that there was not enough 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, 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 the milk and add it, mixing it. Now it was your cake. Now was fine.
(Laughter)
(Applause)
Now, I think a little bit like IKEA effect, by getting people to work harder, they actually got them to love they’re doing to a higher degree.
So how do we look at this question experimentally? asked people to build some origami. We gave them instructions on how create origami, and we gave them a sheet of paper. these were all novices, and they built something that was really quite ugly — like a frog or a crane. But then we them, “Look, this origami really belongs to us. You for us, but I’ll tell you what, we’ll sell it to you. How much do want to pay for it?” And we measured how much were willing to pay for it. And we had types of people: We had the people who built it, and people who did not build it, and just looked at as external observers. And what we found was that the builders thought that these were beautiful pieces origami —
(Laughter)
and they were willing to pay five times more for than the people who just evaluated them externally. Now you could say — if were a builder, do you think [you’d say], “Oh, I love this origami, but I know that else would love it?” Or “I love this origami, and everybody else love it as well?” Which one of those two is correct? Turns out the builders not only loved origami more, they thought that everybody would see the world their view. They thought everybody else would love it more well.
In the next version, we tried to do the IKEA effect. We tried to make it difficult. So for some people, we gave the same task. For some people, we it harder by hiding the instructions. At the top of the sheet, we had little diagrams how you fold origami. For some people, we just that. So now this was tougher. What happened? Well in objective way, the origami now was uglier, it was more difficult. Now when 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 now the builders loved it more.
(Laughter)
They put all this extra effort into it. evaluators? They loved it even less. Because in reality, it was uglier than the first version.
(Laughter)
Of course, this you something about how we evaluate things.
Now think about kids. I asked you, “How much would you sell your kids for?” Your memories and associations so on. Most people would say for a lot, a lot of money.
(Laughter)
On days.
(Laughter)
But imagine this was slightly different. Imagine if you not have your kids. And one day you went to park and you met some kids. They were just like your kids, you played with them for a few hours, and when you were about to leave, the said, “Hey, by the way, just before you leave, you’re interested, they’re for sale.”
(Laughter)
How much would pay for them now? Most people say not that much. And is because our kids are so valuable, not just because who they are, but because of us, because they so connected to us, and because of the time and connection. By the way, if think IKEA instructions are not good, what about the instructions that with kids, those are really tough.
(Laughter)
By the way, 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 the creature of their creation, we don’t see that people don’t see things our way.
Let me say one last comment. If you about Adam Smith versus Karl Marx, Adam Smith had 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, and one person do step two and step three and so on, production increase tremendously. And indeed, this is a great example, the reason for the Industrial Revolution and efficiency. Karl Marx, on other hand, said that the alienation of labor is incredibly important in how people think 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 Revolution, Adam Smith was more correct than Karl Marx. But the reality that we’ve switched, and now we’re in the knowledge economy. You 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 to decide on own about how much effort, attention, caring, how connected they feel to it, they thinking about labor on the way to work, and in the shower and so on, all 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 probably add all kinds of things to it — meaning, creation, challenges, ownership, identity, pride, etc.
The news is that if we added all of those components and thought them — how do we create 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 and happier.
Thank you very much.