WEBVTT 00:00:00.405 --> 00:00:02.108 I want to talk a little bit today 00:00:02.108 --> 00:00:06.006 about labor and work. 00:00:06.006 --> 00:00:09.170 When we think about how people work, 00:00:09.170 --> 00:00:11.639 the naive intuition we have 00:00:11.639 --> 00:00:13.805 is that people are like rats in a maze -- 00:00:13.805 --> 00:00:16.184 that all people care about is money, 00:00:16.184 --> 00:00:17.496 and the moment we give people money, 00:00:17.496 --> 00:00:19.318 we can direct them to work one way, 00:00:19.318 --> 00:00:21.422 we can direct them to work another way. 00:00:21.422 --> 00:00:24.723 This is why we give bonuses to bankers and pay in all kinds of ways. 00:00:24.723 --> 00:00:28.104 And we really have this incredibly simplistic view 00:00:28.104 --> 00:00:32.462 of why people work and what the labor market looks like. NOTE Paragraph 00:00:32.462 --> 00:00:35.190 At the same time, if you think about it, 00:00:35.190 --> 00:00:38.523 there's all kinds of strange behaviors in the world around us. 00:00:38.523 --> 00:00:41.655 Think about something like mountaineering and mountain climbing. 00:00:41.655 --> 00:00:46.191 If you read books of people who climb mountains, difficult mountains, 00:00:46.191 --> 00:00:51.188 do you think that those books are full of moments of joy and happiness? 00:00:51.188 --> 00:00:53.921 No, they are full of misery. 00:00:53.921 --> 00:00:57.722 In fact, it's all about frostbite and difficulty to walk 00:00:57.722 --> 00:00:59.406 and difficulty of breathing -- 00:00:59.406 --> 00:01:02.005 cold, challenging circumstances. 00:01:02.005 --> 00:01:04.703 And if people were just trying to be happy, 00:01:04.703 --> 00:01:06.703 the moment they would get to the top, 00:01:06.703 --> 00:01:08.472 they would say, "This was a terrible mistake. 00:01:08.472 --> 00:01:09.983 I'll never do it again." 00:01:09.983 --> 00:01:11.522 (Laughter) 00:01:11.522 --> 00:01:15.154 "Instead, let me sit on a beach somewhere drinking mojitos." 00:01:15.154 --> 00:01:18.414 But instead, people go down, 00:01:18.414 --> 00:01:21.438 and after they recover, they go up again. 00:01:21.438 --> 00:01:24.850 And if you think about mountain climbing as an example, 00:01:24.850 --> 00:01:26.943 it suggests all kinds of things. 00:01:26.943 --> 00:01:30.904 It suggests that we care about reaching the end, a peak. 00:01:30.904 --> 00:01:34.438 It suggests that we care about the fight, about the challenge. 00:01:34.438 --> 00:01:36.487 It suggests that there's all kinds of other things 00:01:36.487 --> 00:01:41.984 that motivate us to work or behave in all kinds of ways. NOTE Paragraph 00:01:41.984 --> 00:01:44.821 And for me personally, I started thinking about this 00:01:44.821 --> 00:01:47.639 after a student came to visit me. 00:01:47.639 --> 00:01:51.638 This was a student that was one of my students a few years earlier. 00:01:51.638 --> 00:01:53.822 And he came one day back to campus. 00:01:53.822 --> 00:01:56.071 And he told me the following story: 00:01:56.071 --> 00:02:01.472 He said that for more than two weeks, he was working on a PowerPoint presentation. 00:02:01.472 --> 00:02:03.241 He was working in a big bank. 00:02:03.241 --> 00:02:07.138 This was in preparation for a merger and acquisition. 00:02:07.138 --> 00:02:09.945 And he was working very hard on this presentation -- 00:02:09.945 --> 00:02:11.954 graphs, tables, information. 00:02:11.954 --> 00:02:15.021 He stayed late at night every day. 00:02:15.021 --> 00:02:17.474 And the day before it was due, 00:02:17.474 --> 00:02:20.688 he sent his PowerPoint presentation to his boss, 00:02:20.688 --> 00:02:23.343 and his boss wrote him back and said, 00:02:23.343 --> 00:02:28.253 "Nice presentation, but the merger is canceled." 00:02:28.253 --> 00:02:30.343 And the guy was deeply depressed. 00:02:30.343 --> 00:02:32.773 Now at the moment when he was working, 00:02:32.773 --> 00:02:34.543 he was actually quite happy. 00:02:34.543 --> 00:02:36.822 Every night he was enjoying his work, 00:02:36.822 --> 00:02:41.472 he was staying late, he was perfecting this PowerPoint presentation. 00:02:41.472 --> 00:02:46.622 But knowing that nobody would ever watch that made him quite depressed. NOTE Paragraph 00:02:46.622 --> 00:02:49.327 So I started thinking about how do we experiment 00:02:49.327 --> 00:02:53.144 with this idea of the fruits of our labor. 00:02:53.144 --> 00:02:57.376 And to start with, we created a little experiment 00:02:57.376 --> 00:03:03.404 in which we gave people Legos, and we asked them to build with Legos. 00:03:03.404 --> 00:03:07.606 And for some people, we gave them Legos and we said, 00:03:07.606 --> 00:03:12.321 "Hey, would you like to build this Bionicle for three dollars? 00:03:12.321 --> 00:03:14.344 We'll pay you three dollars for it." 00:03:14.344 --> 00:03:17.592 And people said yes, and they built with these Legos. 00:03:17.592 --> 00:03:21.462 And when they finished, we took it, we put it under the table, 00:03:21.462 --> 00:03:26.487 and we said, "Would you like to build another one, this time for $2.70?" 00:03:26.487 --> 00:03:28.196 If they said yes, we gave them another one. 00:03:28.196 --> 00:03:29.498 And when they finished, we asked them, 00:03:29.498 --> 00:03:34.237 "Do you want to build another one?" for $2.40, $2.10, and so on, 00:03:34.237 --> 00:03:39.685 until at some point people said, "No more. It's not worth it for me." 00:03:39.685 --> 00:03:42.522 This was what we called the meaningful condition. 00:03:42.522 --> 00:03:45.663 People built one Bionicle after another. 00:03:45.663 --> 00:03:48.892 After they finished every one of them, we put them under the table. 00:03:48.892 --> 00:03:51.264 And we told them that at the end of the experiment, 00:03:51.264 --> 00:03:54.556 we will take all these Bionicles, we will disassemble them, 00:03:54.556 --> 00:03:59.213 we will put them back in the boxes, and we will use it for the next participant. NOTE Paragraph 00:03:59.213 --> 00:04:01.007 There was another condition. 00:04:01.007 --> 00:04:05.656 This other condition was inspired by David, my student. 00:04:05.656 --> 00:04:09.034 And this other condition we called the Sisyphic condition. 00:04:09.034 --> 00:04:11.475 And if you remember the story about Sisyphus, 00:04:11.475 --> 00:04:16.524 Sisyphus was punished by the gods to push the same rock up a hill, 00:04:16.524 --> 00:04:18.539 and when he almost got to the end, 00:04:18.539 --> 00:04:21.597 the rock would roll over, and he would have to start again. 00:04:21.597 --> 00:04:26.691 And you can think about this as the essence of doing futile work. 00:04:26.691 --> 00:04:29.508 You can imagine that if he pushed the rock on different hills, 00:04:29.508 --> 00:04:32.316 at least he would have some sense of progress. 00:04:32.316 --> 00:04:34.854 Also, if you look at prison movies, 00:04:34.854 --> 00:04:38.207 sometimes the way that the guards torture the prisoners 00:04:38.207 --> 00:04:40.341 is to get them to dig a hole 00:04:40.341 --> 00:04:44.807 and when the prisoner is finished, they ask him to fill the hole back up and then dig again. 00:04:44.807 --> 00:04:47.095 There's something about this cyclical version 00:04:47.095 --> 00:04:49.463 of doing something over and over and over 00:04:49.463 --> 00:04:52.406 that seems to be particularly demotivating. 00:04:52.406 --> 00:04:55.903 So in the second condition of this experiment, that's exactly what we did. 00:04:55.903 --> 00:05:00.990 We asked people, "Would you like to build one Bionicle for three dollars?" 00:05:00.990 --> 00:05:02.904 And if they said yes, they built it. 00:05:02.904 --> 00:05:06.391 Then we asked them, "Do you want to build another one for $2.70?" 00:05:06.391 --> 00:05:09.750 And if they said yes, we gave them a new one, 00:05:09.750 --> 00:05:11.715 and as they were building it, 00:05:11.715 --> 00:05:14.583 we took apart the one that they just finished. 00:05:14.583 --> 00:05:17.211 And when they finished that, 00:05:17.211 --> 00:05:20.878 we said, "Would you like to build another one, this time for 30 cents less?" 00:05:20.878 --> 00:05:24.911 And if they said yes, we gave them the one that they built and we broke. 00:05:24.911 --> 00:05:27.211 So this was an endless cycle 00:05:27.211 --> 00:05:32.190 of them building and us destroying in front of their eyes. NOTE Paragraph 00:05:32.190 --> 00:05:36.343 Now what happens when you compare these two conditions? 00:05:36.343 --> 00:05:37.429 The first thing that happened 00:05:37.429 --> 00:05:41.144 was that people built many more Bionicles -- they built 11 versus seven -- 00:05:41.144 --> 00:05:44.796 in the meaningful condition versus the Sisyphus condition. 00:05:44.796 --> 00:05:47.864 And by the way, we should point out that this was not a big meaning. 00:05:47.864 --> 00:05:50.278 People were not curing cancer or building bridges. 00:05:50.278 --> 00:05:54.383 People were building Bionicles for a few cents. 00:05:54.383 --> 00:05:59.434 And not only that, everybody knew that the Bionicles would be destroyed quite soon. 00:05:59.434 --> 00:06:02.328 So there was not a real opportunity for big meaning. 00:06:02.328 --> 00:06:06.213 But even the small meaning made a difference. NOTE Paragraph 00:06:06.213 --> 00:06:08.584 Now we had another version of this experiment. 00:06:08.584 --> 00:06:10.123 In this other version of the experiment, 00:06:10.123 --> 00:06:12.460 we didn't put people in this situation, 00:06:12.460 --> 00:06:16.879 we just described to them the situation, much as I am describing to you now, 00:06:16.879 --> 00:06:19.995 and we asked them to predict what the result would be. 00:06:19.995 --> 00:06:21.091 What happened? 00:06:21.091 --> 00:06:25.142 People predicted the right direction but not the right magnitude. 00:06:25.142 --> 00:06:29.198 People who were just given the description of the experiment 00:06:29.198 --> 00:06:33.511 said that in the meaningful condition people would probably build one more Bionicle. 00:06:33.511 --> 00:06:35.961 So people understand that meaning is important, 00:06:35.961 --> 00:06:38.724 they just don't understand the magnitude of the importance, 00:06:38.724 --> 00:06:40.878 the extent to which it's important. NOTE Paragraph 00:06:40.878 --> 00:06:43.962 There was one other piece of data we looked at. 00:06:43.962 --> 00:06:48.880 If you think about it, there are some people who love Legos and some people who don't. 00:06:48.880 --> 00:06:50.962 And you would speculate that the people who love Legos 00:06:50.962 --> 00:06:53.544 will build more Legos, even for less money, 00:06:53.544 --> 00:06:56.478 because after all, they get more internal joy from it. 00:06:56.478 --> 00:06:59.783 And the people who love Legos less will build less Legos 00:06:59.783 --> 00:07:02.727 because the enjoyment that they derive from it is lower. 00:07:02.727 --> 00:07:05.561 And that's actually what we found in the meaningful condition. 00:07:05.561 --> 00:07:08.598 There was a very nice correlation between love of Lego 00:07:08.598 --> 00:07:10.727 and the amount of Legos people built. 00:07:10.727 --> 00:07:13.278 What happened in the Sisyphic condition? 00:07:13.278 --> 00:07:16.183 In that condition the correlation was zero. 00:07:16.183 --> 00:07:20.624 There was no relationship between the love of Lego and how much people built, 00:07:20.624 --> 00:07:23.545 which suggests to me that with this manipulation 00:07:23.545 --> 00:07:25.911 of breaking things in front of people's eyes, 00:07:25.911 --> 00:07:30.580 we basically crushed any joy that they could get out of this activity. 00:07:30.580 --> 00:07:33.361 We basically eliminated it. NOTE Paragraph 00:07:33.361 --> 00:07:37.078 Soon after I finished running this experiment, 00:07:37.078 --> 00:07:41.142 I went to talk to a big software company in Seattle. 00:07:41.142 --> 00:07:44.736 I can't tell you who they were, but they were a big company in Seattle. 00:07:44.736 --> 00:07:49.094 And this was a group within this software company that was put in a different building. 00:07:49.094 --> 00:07:54.277 And they asked them to innovate and create the next big product for this company. 00:07:54.277 --> 00:07:56.143 And the week before I showed up, 00:07:56.143 --> 00:08:00.210 the CEO of this big software company went to that group, 200 engineers, 00:08:00.210 --> 00:08:03.311 and canceled the project. 00:08:03.311 --> 00:08:08.466 And I stood there in front of 200 of the most depressed people I've ever talked to. 00:08:08.466 --> 00:08:11.661 And I described to them some of these Lego experiments, 00:08:11.661 --> 00:08:16.507 and they said they felt like they had just been through that experiment. 00:08:16.507 --> 00:08:18.129 And I asked them, I said, 00:08:18.129 --> 00:08:21.659 "How many of you now show up to work later than you used to?" 00:08:21.659 --> 00:08:23.863 And everybody raised their hand. 00:08:23.863 --> 00:08:26.844 I said, "How many of you now go home earlier than you used to?" 00:08:26.844 --> 00:08:28.643 And everybody raised their hand. 00:08:28.643 --> 00:08:34.509 I asked them, "How many of you now add not-so-kosher things to your expense reports?" 00:08:34.509 --> 00:08:36.261 And they didn't really raise their hands, 00:08:36.261 --> 00:08:41.885 but they took me out to dinner and showed me what they could do with expense reports. 00:08:41.885 --> 00:08:43.584 And then I asked them, I said, 00:08:43.584 --> 00:08:48.184 "What could the CEO have done to make you not as depressed?" 00:08:48.184 --> 00:08:50.548 And they came up with all kinds of ideas. 00:08:50.548 --> 00:08:53.786 They said the CEO could have asked them to present to the whole company 00:08:53.786 --> 00:08:57.093 about their journey over the last two years and what they decided to do. 00:08:57.093 --> 00:09:00.958 He could have asked them to think about which aspect of their technology 00:09:00.958 --> 00:09:04.504 could fit with other parts of the organization. 00:09:04.504 --> 00:09:07.878 He could have asked them to build some prototypes, some next-generation prototypes, 00:09:07.878 --> 00:09:09.749 and seen how they would work. 00:09:09.749 --> 00:09:11.744 But the thing is that any one of those 00:09:11.744 --> 00:09:14.711 would require some effort and motivation. 00:09:14.711 --> 00:09:18.864 And I think the CEO basically did not understand the importance of meaning. 00:09:18.864 --> 00:09:21.128 If the CEO, just like our participants, 00:09:21.128 --> 00:09:24.229 thought the essence of meaning is unimportant, 00:09:24.229 --> 00:09:25.586 then he [wouldn't] care. 00:09:25.586 --> 00:09:28.551 And he would tell them, "At the moment I directed you in this way, 00:09:28.551 --> 00:09:30.153 and now that I am directing you in this way, 00:09:30.153 --> 00:09:32.113 everything will be okay." 00:09:32.113 --> 00:09:34.661 But if you understood how important meaning is, 00:09:34.661 --> 00:09:37.078 then you would figure out that it's actually important 00:09:37.078 --> 00:09:38.961 to spend some time, energy and effort 00:09:38.961 --> 00:09:42.396 in getting people to care more about what they're doing. NOTE Paragraph 00:09:42.396 --> 00:09:45.104 The next experiment was slightly different. 00:09:45.104 --> 00:09:47.761 We took a sheet of paper with random letters, 00:09:47.761 --> 00:09:52.232 and we asked people to find pairs of letters that were identical next to each other. 00:09:52.232 --> 00:09:53.380 That was the task. 00:09:53.380 --> 00:09:54.763 And people did the first sheet. 00:09:54.763 --> 00:09:57.823 And then we asked them if they wanted to do the next sheet for a little bit less money 00:09:57.823 --> 00:10:00.781 and the next sheet for a little bit less money, and so on and so forth. 00:10:00.781 --> 00:10:02.664 And we had three conditions. 00:10:02.664 --> 00:10:06.352 In the first condition, people wrote their name on the sheet, 00:10:06.352 --> 00:10:10.030 found all the pairs of letters, gave it to the experimenter. 00:10:10.030 --> 00:10:13.996 The experimenter would look at it, scan it from top to bottom, 00:10:13.996 --> 00:10:18.146 say "uh huh" and put it on the pile next to them. 00:10:18.146 --> 00:10:21.845 In the second condition, people did not write their name on it. 00:10:21.845 --> 00:10:24.063 The experimenter looked at it, 00:10:24.063 --> 00:10:27.196 took the sheet of paper, did not look at it, did not scan it, 00:10:27.196 --> 00:10:30.795 and simply put it on the pile of pages. 00:10:30.795 --> 00:10:33.447 So you take a piece, you just put it on the side. 00:10:33.447 --> 00:10:34.593 And in the third condition, 00:10:34.593 --> 00:10:42.971 the experimenter got the sheet of paper and directly put it into a shredder. 00:10:42.971 --> 00:10:45.788 What happened in those three conditions? NOTE Paragraph 00:10:45.788 --> 00:10:50.220 In this plot I'm showing you at what pay rate people stopped. 00:10:50.220 --> 00:10:54.738 So low numbers mean that people worked harder. They worked for much longer. 00:10:54.738 --> 00:10:59.654 In the acknowledged condition, people worked all the way down to 15 cents. 00:10:59.654 --> 00:11:03.398 At 15 cents per page, they basically stopped these efforts. 00:11:03.398 --> 00:11:08.153 In the shredder condition, it was twice as much -- 30 cents per sheet. 00:11:08.153 --> 00:11:10.326 And this is basically the result we had before. 00:11:10.326 --> 00:11:13.804 You shred people's efforts, output, 00:11:13.804 --> 00:11:16.303 you get them not to be as happy with what they're doing. 00:11:16.303 --> 00:11:17.838 But I should point out, by the way, 00:11:17.838 --> 00:11:20.803 that in the shredder condition, people could have cheated. 00:11:20.803 --> 00:11:22.984 They could have done not so good work, 00:11:22.984 --> 00:11:25.487 because they realized that people were just shredding it. 00:11:25.487 --> 00:11:27.354 So maybe the first sheet you would do good work, 00:11:27.354 --> 00:11:29.273 but then you see nobody is really testing it, 00:11:29.273 --> 00:11:31.468 so you would do more and more and more. 00:11:31.468 --> 00:11:33.030 So in fact, in the shredder condition, 00:11:33.030 --> 00:11:35.904 people could have submitted more work and gotten more money 00:11:35.904 --> 00:11:38.323 and put less effort into it. 00:11:38.323 --> 00:11:40.470 But what about the ignored condition? 00:11:40.470 --> 00:11:43.983 Would the ignored condition be more like the acknowledged or more like the shredder, 00:11:43.983 --> 00:11:46.002 or somewhere in the middle? 00:11:46.002 --> 00:11:49.358 It turns out it was almost like the shredder. NOTE Paragraph 00:11:49.358 --> 00:11:52.165 Now there's good news and bad news here. 00:11:52.165 --> 00:11:56.800 The bad news is that ignoring the performance of people 00:11:56.800 --> 00:12:01.300 is almost as bad as shredding their effort in front of their eyes. 00:12:01.300 --> 00:12:05.050 Ignoring gets you a whole way out there. 00:12:05.050 --> 00:12:09.450 The good news is that by simply looking at something that somebody has done, 00:12:09.450 --> 00:12:11.665 scanning it and saying "uh huh," 00:12:11.665 --> 00:12:13.069 that seems to be quite sufficient 00:12:13.069 --> 00:12:16.312 to dramatically improve people's motivations. 00:12:16.312 --> 00:12:21.793 So the good news is that adding motivation doesn't seem to be so difficult. 00:12:21.793 --> 00:12:24.090 The bad news is that eliminating motivations 00:12:24.090 --> 00:12:25.865 seems to be incredibly easy, 00:12:25.865 --> 00:12:29.556 and if we don't think about it carefully, we might overdo it. 00:12:29.556 --> 00:12:33.041 So this is all in terms of negative motivation 00:12:33.041 --> 00:12:35.924 or eliminating negative motivation. NOTE Paragraph 00:12:35.924 --> 00:12:40.414 The next part I want to show you is something about the positive motivation. 00:12:40.414 --> 00:12:44.542 So there is a store in the U.S. called IKEA. 00:12:44.542 --> 00:12:51.390 And IKEA is a store with kind of okay furniture that takes a long time to assemble. 00:12:51.390 --> 00:12:53.340 (Laughter) 00:12:53.340 --> 00:12:56.180 And I don't know about you, but every time I assemble one of those, 00:12:56.180 --> 00:13:00.266 it takes me much longer, it's much more effortful, it's much more confusing. 00:13:00.266 --> 00:13:03.186 I put things in the wrong way. 00:13:03.186 --> 00:13:05.790 I can't say enjoy those pieces. 00:13:05.790 --> 00:13:09.040 I can't say I enjoy the process. 00:13:09.040 --> 00:13:12.903 But when I finish it, I seem to like those IKEA pieces of furniture 00:13:12.903 --> 00:13:15.274 more than I like other ones. NOTE Paragraph 00:13:15.274 --> 00:13:19.646 And there's an old story about cake mixes. 00:13:19.646 --> 00:13:22.674 So when they started cake mixes in the '40s, 00:13:22.674 --> 00:13:26.489 they would take this powder and they would put it in a box, 00:13:26.489 --> 00:13:30.928 and they would ask housewives to basically pour it in, stir some water in it, 00:13:30.928 --> 00:13:35.440 mix it, put it in the oven, and -- voila! -- you had cake. 00:13:35.440 --> 00:13:37.639 But it turns out they were very unpopular. 00:13:37.639 --> 00:13:39.424 People did not want them. 00:13:39.424 --> 00:13:41.723 And they thought about all kinds of reasons for that. 00:13:41.723 --> 00:13:43.156 Maybe the taste was not good. 00:13:43.156 --> 00:13:44.656 No, the taste was great. 00:13:44.656 --> 00:13:49.680 What they figured out was that there was not enough effort involved. 00:13:49.680 --> 00:13:53.081 It was so easy that nobody could serve cake to their guests 00:13:53.081 --> 00:13:55.389 and say, "Here is my cake." 00:13:55.389 --> 00:13:56.958 No, no, no, it was somebody else's cake. 00:13:56.958 --> 00:13:58.973 It was as if you bought it in the store. 00:13:58.973 --> 00:14:01.384 It didn't really feel like your own. 00:14:01.384 --> 00:14:03.043 So what did they do? 00:14:03.043 --> 00:14:06.710 They took the eggs and the milk out of the powder. 00:14:06.710 --> 00:14:08.063 (Laughter) 00:14:08.063 --> 00:14:11.904 Now you had to break the eggs and add them. 00:14:11.904 --> 00:14:14.874 You had to measure the milk and add it, mixing it. 00:14:14.874 --> 00:14:17.689 Now it was your cake. Now everything was fine. NOTE Paragraph 00:14:17.689 --> 00:14:27.275 (Applause) NOTE Paragraph 00:14:27.275 --> 00:14:30.043 Now I think a little bit like the IKEA effect, 00:14:30.043 --> 00:14:32.009 by getting people to work harder, 00:14:32.009 --> 00:14:35.762 they actually got them to love what they're doing to a higher degree. NOTE Paragraph 00:14:35.762 --> 00:14:38.784 So how do we look at this question experimentally? 00:14:38.784 --> 00:14:41.223 We asked people to build some origami. 00:14:41.223 --> 00:14:44.076 We gave them instructions on how to create origami, 00:14:44.076 --> 00:14:45.762 and we gave them a sheet of paper. 00:14:45.762 --> 00:14:50.076 And these were all novices, and they built something that was really quite ugly -- 00:14:50.076 --> 00:14:52.743 nothing like a frog or a crane. 00:14:52.743 --> 00:14:56.275 But then we told them, we said, "Look, this origami really belongs to us. 00:14:56.275 --> 00:14:59.092 You worked for us, but I'll tell you what, we'll sell it to you. 00:14:59.092 --> 00:15:01.227 How much do you want to pay for it?" 00:15:01.227 --> 00:15:04.210 And we measured how much they were willing to pay for it. 00:15:04.210 --> 00:15:06.183 And we had two types of people. 00:15:06.183 --> 00:15:08.110 We had the people who built it, 00:15:08.110 --> 00:15:13.024 and we had the people who did not build it and just looked at it as external observers. 00:15:13.024 --> 00:15:15.428 And what we found was that the builders thought 00:15:15.428 --> 00:15:18.942 that these were beautiful pieces of origami, 00:15:18.942 --> 00:15:21.481 and they were willing to pay for them five times more 00:15:21.481 --> 00:15:24.639 than the people who just evaluated them externally. 00:15:24.639 --> 00:15:27.664 Now you could say, if you were a builder, 00:15:27.664 --> 00:15:34.103 do you think that, "Oh, I love this origami, but I know that nobody else would love it?" 00:15:34.103 --> 00:15:39.797 Or do you think, "I love this origami, and everybody else will love it as well?" 00:15:39.797 --> 00:15:42.266 Which one of those two is correct? 00:15:42.266 --> 00:15:45.423 Turns out the builders not only loved the origami more, 00:15:45.423 --> 00:15:48.921 they thought that everybody would see the world in their view. 00:15:48.921 --> 00:15:51.942 They thought everybody else would love it more as well. NOTE Paragraph 00:15:51.942 --> 00:15:54.994 In the next version we tried to do the IKEA effect. 00:15:54.994 --> 00:15:56.793 We tried to make it more difficult. 00:15:56.793 --> 00:15:59.703 So for some people we gave the same task. 00:15:59.703 --> 00:16:03.725 For some people we made it harder by hiding the instructions. 00:16:03.725 --> 00:16:07.997 At the top of the sheet, we had little diagrams of how do you fold origami. 00:16:07.997 --> 00:16:10.743 For some people we just eliminated that. 00:16:10.743 --> 00:16:13.702 So now this was tougher. What happened? 00:16:13.702 --> 00:16:19.609 Well in an objective way, the origami now was uglier, it was more difficult. 00:16:19.609 --> 00:16:21.711 Now when we looked at the easy origami, 00:16:21.711 --> 00:16:26.103 we saw the same thing: Builders loved it more, evaluators loved it less. 00:16:26.103 --> 00:16:28.264 When you looked at the hard instructions, 00:16:28.264 --> 00:16:31.194 the effect was larger. 00:16:31.194 --> 00:16:36.272 Why? Because now the builders loved it even more. 00:16:36.272 --> 00:16:38.926 They put all this extra effort into it. 00:16:38.926 --> 00:16:43.024 And evaluators? They loved it even less. 00:16:43.024 --> 00:16:47.429 Because in reality it was even uglier than the first version. 00:16:47.429 --> 00:16:52.526 Of course, this tells you something about how we evaluate things. NOTE Paragraph 00:16:52.526 --> 00:16:54.731 Now think about kids. 00:16:54.731 --> 00:16:59.145 Imagine I asked you, "How much would you sell your kids for?" 00:16:59.145 --> 00:17:01.780 Your memories and associations and so on. 00:17:01.780 --> 00:17:05.203 Most people would say for a lot, a lot of money -- 00:17:05.203 --> 00:17:07.039 on good days. 00:17:07.039 --> 00:17:08.303 (Laughter) 00:17:08.303 --> 00:17:10.071 But imagine this was slightly different. 00:17:10.071 --> 00:17:11.650 Imagine if you did not have your kids, 00:17:11.650 --> 00:17:14.984 and one day you went to the park and you met some kids, 00:17:14.984 --> 00:17:16.221 and they were just like your kids. 00:17:16.221 --> 00:17:17.942 And you played with them for a few hours. 00:17:17.942 --> 00:17:20.162 And when you were about to leave, the parents said, 00:17:20.162 --> 00:17:24.292 "Hey, by the way, just before you leave, if you're interested, they're for sale." 00:17:24.292 --> 00:17:26.565 (Laughter) 00:17:26.565 --> 00:17:29.424 How much would you pay for them now? 00:17:29.424 --> 00:17:31.924 Most people say not that much. 00:17:31.924 --> 00:17:36.743 And this is because our kids are so valuable, 00:17:36.743 --> 00:17:38.808 not just because of who they are, 00:17:38.808 --> 00:17:42.716 but because of us, because they are so connected to us 00:17:42.716 --> 00:17:44.984 and because of the time and connection. 00:17:44.984 --> 00:17:48.242 And by the way, if you think that IKEA instructions are not good, 00:17:48.242 --> 00:17:50.161 think about the instructions that come with kids. 00:17:50.161 --> 00:17:51.398 Those are really tough. 00:17:51.398 --> 00:17:52.472 (Laughter) 00:17:52.472 --> 00:17:56.952 By the way, these are my kids, which, of course, are wonderful and so on. 00:17:56.952 --> 00:17:58.900 Which comes to tell you one more thing, 00:17:58.900 --> 00:18:01.216 which is, much like our builders, 00:18:01.216 --> 00:18:04.961 when they look at the creature of their creation, 00:18:04.961 --> 00:18:09.702 we don't see that other people don't see things our way. NOTE Paragraph 00:18:09.702 --> 00:18:12.833 Let me say one last comment. 00:18:12.833 --> 00:18:16.230 If you think about Adam Smith versus Karl Marx, 00:18:16.230 --> 00:18:20.346 Adam Smith had the very important notion of efficiency. 00:18:20.346 --> 00:18:23.180 He gave an example of a pin factory. 00:18:23.180 --> 00:18:26.445 He said pins have 12 different steps, 00:18:26.445 --> 00:18:30.562 and if one person does all 12 steps, production is very low. 00:18:30.562 --> 00:18:33.062 But if you get one person to do step one 00:18:33.062 --> 00:18:35.465 and one person to do step two and step three and so on, 00:18:35.465 --> 00:18:38.263 production can increase tremendously. 00:18:38.263 --> 00:18:43.797 And indeed, this is a great example and the reason for the Industrial Revolution and efficiency. 00:18:43.797 --> 00:18:45.880 Karl Marx, on the other hand, 00:18:45.880 --> 00:18:49.181 said that the alienation of labor is incredibly important 00:18:49.181 --> 00:18:52.785 in how people think about the connection to what they are doing. 00:18:52.785 --> 00:18:56.079 And if you make all 12 steps, you care about the pin. 00:18:56.079 --> 00:18:59.903 But if you make one step every time, maybe you don't care as much. NOTE Paragraph 00:18:59.903 --> 00:19:02.786 And I think that in the Industrial Revolution, 00:19:02.786 --> 00:19:06.130 Adam Smith was more correct than Karl Marx, 00:19:06.130 --> 00:19:08.947 but the reality is that we've switched 00:19:08.947 --> 00:19:11.313 and now we're in the knowledge economy. 00:19:11.313 --> 00:19:14.046 And you can ask yourself, what happens in a knowledge economy? 00:19:14.046 --> 00:19:17.464 Is efficiency still more important than meaning? 00:19:17.464 --> 00:19:19.046 I think the answer is no. 00:19:19.046 --> 00:19:21.213 I think that as we move to situations 00:19:21.213 --> 00:19:24.196 in which people have to decide on their own 00:19:24.196 --> 00:19:27.984 about how much effort, attention, caring, how connected they feel to it, 00:19:27.984 --> 00:19:32.034 are they thinking about labor on the way to work and in the shower and so on, 00:19:32.034 --> 00:19:36.493 all of a sudden Marx has more things to say to us. 00:19:36.493 --> 00:19:41.430 So when we think about labor, we usually think about motivation and payment as the same thing, 00:19:41.430 --> 00:19:45.188 but the reality is that we should probably add all kinds of things to it -- 00:19:45.188 --> 00:19:49.543 meaning, creation, challenges, ownership, identity, pride, etc. 00:19:49.543 --> 00:19:53.850 And the good news is that if we added all of those components and thought about them, 00:19:53.850 --> 00:19:57.248 how do we create our own meaning, pride, motivation, 00:19:57.248 --> 00:20:00.681 and how do we do it in our workplace and for the employees, 00:20:00.681 --> 00:20:04.504 I think we could get people to both be more productive and happier. NOTE Paragraph 00:20:04.504 --> 00:20:06.184 Thank you very much. NOTE Paragraph 00:20:06.184 --> 00:20:07.984 (Applause)