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 in a maze — that all people care about is money, and the we give them money, we can direct them to work way, we can direct them to work another way. This is why we give to bankers and pay in all kinds of ways. And really 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 strange behaviors in the around us. Think about something like mountaineering and mountain climbing. If read books of people who climb mountains, difficult mountains, you think that those books are full of moments of joy and happiness? No, they are of misery. In fact, it’s all about frostbite and having difficulty walking, and breathing — cold, challenging circumstances. And if people were trying to be happy, the moment they would get the top, they would say, “This was a 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, suggests all kinds of things. It suggests that we about reaching the end, a peak. It suggests that we care about fight, about the challenge. It suggests that there’s all kinds of other things that motivate us work or behave in all kinds of ways.
And for me personally, started thinking about this after a student came to me. This was one of my students from a few earlier, and he came one day back to campus. And he told me following story: He said that for more than two weeks, he was working a PowerPoint presentation. He was working in a big bank, this was in preparation for a merger and acquisition. he was working very hard on this presentation — graphs, tables, information. stayed late at night every day. And the day before it was due, he sent his PowerPoint to his boss, and his boss wrote him back and said, “Nice presentation, but the merger canceled.” And the guy was deeply depressed. Now at the moment when was working, he was actually quite happy. Every night he was his work, he was staying late, he was perfecting this PowerPoint presentation. But knowing that nobody ever watch it made him quite depressed.
So I thinking about how do we experiment with this idea of the fruits our labor. And to start with, we created a little experiment in we gave people Legos, and we asked them to build Legos. And for some people, we gave them Legos we said, “Hey, would you like to build this Bionicle for three dollars? We’ll you three dollars for it.” And people said yes, and built with these Legos. And when they finished, we took it, we put it the table, and we said, “Would you like to build another one, this for $2.70?” If they said yes, we gave them one, and when they finished, we asked them, “Do you want to build another one?” for $2.40, $2.10, so on, until at some point people said, “No more. It’s not worth it for me.” was what we called the meaningful condition. People built one after another. After they finished every one of them, put them under the table. And we told them at the end of the experiment, we will take all these Bionicles, will disassemble them, we will put them back in the boxes, and will use it for the next participant.
There was another condition. This condition was inspired by David, my student. And this 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, when he almost got to the end, the rock would roll over, and he would to start again. And you can think about this the essence of doing futile work. You can imagine that if he the rock on different hills, at least he would some sense of 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 doing 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 build one Bionicle for three dollars?” And if they said yes, they built it. we asked them, “Do you want to build another one $2.70?” And if they said yes, we gave them new one, and as they were building it, we took apart the one they just finished. And when they finished that, we said, “Would you like to build one, this time for 30 cents less?” And if they said yes, we gave them one that they built and we broke. So this an endless cycle of them building, and us destroying in of their eyes.
Now what happens when you compare these two conditions? first thing that happened was that people built many more Bionicles — eleven the meaningful condition, versus seven in the Sisyphus condition. by the way, we should point out that this was not big meaning. People were not curing or building bridges. People were building Bionicles for a cents. And not only that, everybody knew that the would be destroyed quite soon. So there was not a real for big meaning. But even the small meaning made difference.
Now we had another version of this experiment. In this 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 would be. happened? People predicted the right direction but not the magnitude. People who were just given the description of the experiment said that in meaningful condition, people would probably build one more Bionicle. So people understand that meaning important, they just don’t understand the magnitude of the importance, the to which it’s important.
There was one other piece of data we at. If you think about it, there are some people love Legos, and some people who don’t. And you would speculate that people who love Legos would build more Legos, even less money, because after all, they get more internal joy from it. And people who love Legos less would build less Legos because the enjoyment that they derive it is lower. And that’s actually what we found the meaningful condition. There was a very nice correlation between the love of Legos and the of Legos people built.
What happened in the Sisyphic condition? In that condition, the was zero — there was no relationship between the love Legos, and how much people 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 it.
Soon after I finished running this experiment, I to talk to a big software company in Seattle. I can’t tell you who they were, they were a big company in Seattle. This was a group within the software company that was put a different building, and they asked them to innovate, and create the next big product for company. And the week before I showed up, the CEO of this big software company went to group, 200 engineers, and canceled the project. And I stood there in front of 200 of the depressed people I’ve ever talked to. And I described to them some of these experiments, and they said they felt like they had been through that experiment. And I asked them, I said, “How many of you show up to work later than you used to?” And everybody their hand. I said, “How many of you now go home earlier than used to?” Everybody raised their hand. I asked them, “How many of now add not-so-kosher things to your expense reports?” And they didn’t raise their hands, but they took me to dinner and showed me what they could do expense reports. And then I asked them, I said, “What could the CEO have done make you not as depressed?” And they came up with all kinds of ideas.
They said the could have asked them to present to the whole about their journey over the last two years and what decided to do. He could have asked them to think about which aspect their technology could fit with other parts of the organization. He could have asked to build some next-generation prototypes, and see how they would work. But the thing is that any one those would require some effort and motivation. And I think the CEO did not understand the importance of meaning. If the CEO, just like our participants, the essence of meaning is unimportant, then he [wouldn’t] care. And would say, “At the moment I directed you in way, and now that I’m directing you in this way, will be okay.” But if you understood how important meaning is, then would figure out that it’s actually important to spend time, energy and effort in getting people to care about what they’re doing.
The next experiment was slightly different. We took a sheet of with random letters, and we asked people to find pairs letters that were identical next to each other. That was the task. People did first sheet, then we asked if they wanted to do another for a little less money, the sheet for a little bit less, and so on so forth. And we had three conditions. In the first condition, wrote their name on the sheet, found all the of letters, gave it to the experimenter, the experimenter look at it, scan it from top to bottom, say “Uh huh,” and put it on the next to them. In the second condition, people did write their name on it. The 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 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 in those conditions?
In this plot I’m showing you at what rate people stopped. So low numbers mean that people worked harder. worked for much longer. In the acknowledged condition, people worked all the way to 15 cents. At 15 cents per page, they basically stopped these efforts. In the shredder condition, was twice as much — 30 cents per sheet.
And this is basically result we had before. You shred people’s efforts, output — you get them not be as happy with what they’re doing. But I should point out, by the way, that the shredder condition, people could have cheated. They could have done so good work, because they realized people were just shredding it. So maybe the first sheet you’d do work, but then you see nobody is really testing it, so you would more and more and more. So in fact, in the condition, people could have submitted more work and gotten more money, and put less into it. But what about the ignored condition? Would the ignored condition more like the acknowledged or more like the shredder, or somewhere in middle? It turns out it was almost like the shredder.
Now there’s good news bad news here. The bad news is that ignoring performance of people is almost as bad as shredding effort in front of their eyes. Ignoring gets you 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 dramatically improve people’s motivations. So the good news is that adding motivation doesn’t seem to be so difficult. bad news is that eliminating motivations seems to be easy, and if we don’t think about it carefully, we might it. So this is all in terms of negative motivation, or eliminating motivation.
The next part I want to show you something about positive motivation. So there is a store in the U.S. called IKEA. And IKEA is store with kind of okay furniture that takes a long to assemble.
(Laughter)
I don’t know about 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 I enjoy pieces. I can’t say I enjoy the process. But I finish it, I seem to like those IKEA pieces of more than I like other ones.
(Laughter)
And there’s an story about cake mixes. So when they started cake mixes in ’40s, they would take this powder and they would put in a box, and they would ask housewives to basically it in, stir some water in it, mix it, put it in the oven, and — — 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. 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 is 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 the out of the powder.
(Laughter)
Now you had to break the eggs and add them, you had measure the milk and add it, mixing it. Now 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 this question experimentally? We asked people to build some origami. We gave them instructions how to create origami, and we gave them a of 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 to us. worked for us, but I’ll tell you what, we’ll sell it you. How much do you want to pay for it?” And we how much they were willing to pay for it. And had two types of people: We had the people who it, and the people who did not build it, and just looked at as external observers. And what we found was that the thought that these were beautiful pieces of origami —
(Laughter)
and were willing to pay five times more for them than the people just evaluated them externally. Now you could say — if you a builder, do you think [you’d say], “Oh, I this origami, but I know that nobody else would 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 loved the origami more, they thought that everybody would see the in their view. They thought everybody else would love it more as well.
In the next version, tried to do the IKEA effect. We tried to make it more difficult. for some people, we gave the same task. For some people, we made harder by hiding the instructions. At the top of the sheet, had little diagrams of how you fold origami. For some people, we just eliminated that. now this was tougher. What happened? Well in an objective way, the origami now was uglier, was more difficult. Now when we looked at the easy origami, saw the same thing — builders loved it more, evaluators loved it less. you looked at the hard instructions, the effect was larger. Why? Because now builders loved it even more.
(Laughter)
They put all extra effort into it. And evaluators? They loved it even less. in reality, it was even uglier than the first version.
(Laughter)
Of course, this you something about how we evaluate things.
Now think about kids. Imagine I you, “How much would you sell your kids for?” Your memories associations and so on. Most people would say for a lot, lot of money.
(Laughter)
On good days.
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But imagine was slightly different. Imagine if you did not have your kids. And one day you went to park and you met some kids. They were just like your kids, and you played with for a few hours, and when you were about to leave, the parents said, “Hey, the way, just before you leave, if you’re interested, they’re sale.”
(Laughter)
How much would you pay for them now? Most say not that much. And this is because our kids are so valuable, not just of who they are, but because of us, because are so connected to us, and because of the and connection. By the way, if you think IKEA are not good, what about the instructions that come kids, those are really tough.
(Laughter)
By the way, these my kids, which, of course, are wonderful and so on. comes to tell you one more thing, which is, much our builders, when they look at the creature of creation, we don’t see that other people don’t see our way.
Let me say one last comment. If you about Adam Smith versus Karl Marx, Adam Smith had a very notion of efficiency. He gave an example of a pin factory. said pins have 12 different steps, and if one person does all 12 steps, 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 increase tremendously. And indeed, this is a great example, and the for the Industrial Revolution and efficiency. Karl Marx, on the other hand, said that the of labor is incredibly important in how people 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 step time, maybe you 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 knowledge economy. You can ask yourself, what happens a knowledge economy? Is efficiency still more important than meaning? I think answer 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 to it, are they thinking about labor on the way work, and in the shower and so on, all of a sudden Marx more things to say to us. So when we about labor, we usually think about motivation and payment as same thing, but the reality is that we should probably add all of things to it — meaning, creation, challenges, ownership, identity, pride, etc.
The news is that if we added all of those and thought about them — how do we create our own meaning, pride, motivation, and how we do it in our workplace, and for the employees — think we could get people to be both more productive and happier.
Thank you much.