What makes us feel good about our work?
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0:00 - 0:02I want to talk a little bit today
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0:02 - 0:06about labor and work.
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0:06 - 0:09When we think about how people work,
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0:09 - 0:12the naive intuition we have
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0:12 - 0:14is that people are like rats in a maze --
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0:14 - 0:16that all people care about is money,
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0:16 - 0:17and the moment we give people money,
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0:17 - 0:19we can direct them to work one way,
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0:19 - 0:21we can direct them to work another way.
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0:21 - 0:25This is why we give bonuses to bankers and pay in all kinds of ways.
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0:25 - 0:28And we really have this incredibly simplistic view
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0:28 - 0:32of why people work and what the labor market looks like.
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0:32 - 0:35At the same time, if you think about it,
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0:35 - 0:39there's all kinds of strange behaviors in the world around us.
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0:39 - 0:42Think about something like mountaineering and mountain climbing.
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0:42 - 0:46If you read books of people who climb mountains, difficult mountains,
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0:46 - 0:51do you think that those books are full of moments of joy and happiness?
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0:51 - 0:54No, they are full of misery.
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0:54 - 0:58In fact, it's all about frostbite and difficulty to walk
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0:58 - 0:59and difficulty of breathing --
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0:59 - 1:02cold, challenging circumstances.
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1:02 - 1:05And if people were just trying to be happy,
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1:05 - 1:07the moment they would get to the top,
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1:07 - 1:08they would say, "This was a terrible mistake.
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1:08 - 1:10I'll never do it again."
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1:10 - 1:12(Laughter)
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1:12 - 1:15"Instead, let me sit on a beach somewhere drinking mojitos."
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1:15 - 1:18But instead, people go down,
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1:18 - 1:21and after they recover, they go up again.
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1:21 - 1:25And if you think about mountain climbing as an example,
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1:25 - 1:27it suggests all kinds of things.
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1:27 - 1:31It suggests that we care about reaching the end, a peak.
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1:31 - 1:34It suggests that we care about the fight, about the challenge.
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1:34 - 1:36It suggests that there's all kinds of other things
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1:36 - 1:42that motivate us to work or behave in all kinds of ways.
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1:42 - 1:45And for me personally, I started thinking about this
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1:45 - 1:48after a student came to visit me.
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1:48 - 1:52This was a student that was one of my students a few years earlier.
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1:52 - 1:54And he came one day back to campus.
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1:54 - 1:56And he told me the following story:
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1:56 - 2:01He said that for more than two weeks, he was working on a PowerPoint presentation.
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2:01 - 2:03He was working in a big bank.
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2:03 - 2:07This was in preparation for a merger and acquisition.
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2:07 - 2:10And he was working very hard on this presentation --
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2:10 - 2:12graphs, tables, information.
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2:12 - 2:15He stayed late at night every day.
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2:15 - 2:17And the day before it was due,
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2:17 - 2:21he sent his PowerPoint presentation to his boss,
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2:21 - 2:23and his boss wrote him back and said,
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2:23 - 2:28"Nice presentation, but the merger is canceled."
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2:28 - 2:30And the guy was deeply depressed.
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2:30 - 2:33Now at the moment when he was working,
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2:33 - 2:35he was actually quite happy.
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2:35 - 2:37Every night he was enjoying his work,
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2:37 - 2:41he was staying late, he was perfecting this PowerPoint presentation.
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2:41 - 2:47But knowing that nobody would ever watch that made him quite depressed.
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2:47 - 2:49So I started thinking about how do we experiment
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2:49 - 2:53with this idea of the fruits of our labor.
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2:53 - 2:57And to start with, we created a little experiment
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2:57 - 3:03in which we gave people Legos, and we asked them to build with Legos.
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3:03 - 3:08And for some people, we gave them Legos and we said,
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3:08 - 3:12"Hey, would you like to build this Bionicle for three dollars?
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3:12 - 3:14We'll pay you three dollars for it."
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3:14 - 3:18And people said yes, and they built with these Legos.
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3:18 - 3:21And when they finished, we took it, we put it under the table,
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3:21 - 3:26and we said, "Would you like to build another one, this time for $2.70?"
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3:26 - 3:28If they said yes, we gave them another one.
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3:28 - 3:29And when they finished, we asked them,
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3:29 - 3:34"Do you want to build another one?" for $2.40, $2.10, and so on,
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3:34 - 3:40until at some point people said, "No more. It's not worth it for me."
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3:40 - 3:43This was what we called the meaningful condition.
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3:43 - 3:46People built one Bionicle after another.
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3:46 - 3:49After they finished every one of them, we put them under the table.
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3:49 - 3:51And we told them that at the end of the experiment,
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3:51 - 3:55we will take all these Bionicles, we will disassemble them,
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3:55 - 3:59we will put them back in the boxes, and we will use it for the next participant.
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3:59 - 4:01There was another condition.
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4:01 - 4:06This other condition was inspired by David, my student.
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4:06 - 4:09And this other condition we called the Sisyphic condition.
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4:09 - 4:11And if you remember the story about Sisyphus,
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4:11 - 4:17Sisyphus was punished by the gods to push the same rock up a hill,
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4:17 - 4:19and when he almost got to the end,
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4:19 - 4:22the rock would roll over, and he would have to start again.
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4:22 - 4:27And you can think about this as the essence of doing futile work.
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4:27 - 4:30You can imagine that if he pushed the rock on different hills,
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4:30 - 4:32at least he would have some sense of progress.
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4:32 - 4:35Also, if you look at prison movies,
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4:35 - 4:38sometimes the way that the guards torture the prisoners
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4:38 - 4:40is to get them to dig a hole
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4:40 - 4:45and when the prisoner is finished, they ask him to fill the hole back up and then dig again.
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4:45 - 4:47There's something about this cyclical version
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4:47 - 4:49of doing something over and over and over
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4:49 - 4:52that seems to be particularly demotivating.
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4:52 - 4:56So in the second condition of this experiment, that's exactly what we did.
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4:56 - 5:01We asked people, "Would you like to build one Bionicle for three dollars?"
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5:01 - 5:03And if they said yes, they built it.
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5:03 - 5:06Then we asked them, "Do you want to build another one for $2.70?"
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5:06 - 5:10And if they said yes, we gave them a new one,
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5:10 - 5:12and as they were building it,
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5:12 - 5:15we took apart the one that they just finished.
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5:15 - 5:17And when they finished that,
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5:17 - 5:21we said, "Would you like to build another one, this time for 30 cents less?"
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5:21 - 5:25And if they said yes, we gave them the one that they built and we broke.
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5:25 - 5:27So this was an endless cycle
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5:27 - 5:32of them building and us destroying in front of their eyes.
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5:32 - 5:36Now what happens when you compare these two conditions?
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5:36 - 5:37The first thing that happened
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5:37 - 5:41was that people built many more Bionicles -- they built 11 versus seven --
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5:41 - 5:45in the meaningful condition versus the Sisyphus condition.
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5:45 - 5:48And by the way, we should point out that this was not a big meaning.
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5:48 - 5:50People were not curing cancer or building bridges.
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5:50 - 5:54People were building Bionicles for a few cents.
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5:54 - 5:59And not only that, everybody knew that the Bionicles would be destroyed quite soon.
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5:59 - 6:02So there was not a real opportunity for big meaning.
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6:02 - 6:06But even the small meaning made a difference.
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6:06 - 6:09Now we had another version of this experiment.
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6:09 - 6:10In this other version of the experiment,
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6:10 - 6:12we didn't put people in this situation,
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6:12 - 6:17we just described to them the situation, much as I am describing to you now,
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6:17 - 6:20and we asked them to predict what the result would be.
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6:20 - 6:21What happened?
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6:21 - 6:25People predicted the right direction but not the right magnitude.
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6:25 - 6:29People who were just given the description of the experiment
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6:29 - 6:34said that in the meaningful condition people would probably build one more Bionicle.
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6:34 - 6:36So people understand that meaning is important,
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6:36 - 6:39they just don't understand the magnitude of the importance,
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6:39 - 6:41the extent to which it's important.
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6:41 - 6:44There was one other piece of data we looked at.
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6:44 - 6:49If you think about it, there are some people who love Legos and some people who don't.
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6:49 - 6:51And you would speculate that the people who love Legos
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6:51 - 6:54will build more Legos, even for less money,
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6:54 - 6:56because after all, they get more internal joy from it.
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6:56 - 7:00And the people who love Legos less will build less Legos
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7:00 - 7:03because the enjoyment that they derive from it is lower.
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7:03 - 7:06And that's actually what we found in the meaningful condition.
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7:06 - 7:09There was a very nice correlation between love of Lego
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7:09 - 7:11and the amount of Legos people built.
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7:11 - 7:13What happened in the Sisyphic condition?
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7:13 - 7:16In that condition the correlation was zero.
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7:16 - 7:21There was no relationship between the love of Lego and how much people built,
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7:21 - 7:24which suggests to me that with this manipulation
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7:24 - 7:26of breaking things in front of people's eyes,
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7:26 - 7:31we basically crushed any joy that they could get out of this activity.
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7:31 - 7:33We basically eliminated it.
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7:33 - 7:37Soon after I finished running this experiment,
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7:37 - 7:41I went to talk to a big software company in Seattle.
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7:41 - 7:45I can't tell you who they were, but they were a big company in Seattle.
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7:45 - 7:49And this was a group within this software company that was put in a different building.
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7:49 - 7:54And they asked them to innovate and create the next big product for this company.
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7:54 - 7:56And the week before I showed up,
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7:56 - 8:00the CEO of this big software company went to that group, 200 engineers,
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8:00 - 8:03and canceled the project.
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8:03 - 8:08And I stood there in front of 200 of the most depressed people I've ever talked to.
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8:08 - 8:12And I described to them some of these Lego experiments,
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8:12 - 8:17and they said they felt like they had just been through that experiment.
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8:17 - 8:18And I asked them, I said,
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8:18 - 8:22"How many of you now show up to work later than you used to?"
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8:22 - 8:24And everybody raised their hand.
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8:24 - 8:27I said, "How many of you now go home earlier than you used to?"
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8:27 - 8:29And everybody raised their hand.
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8:29 - 8:35I asked them, "How many of you now add not-so-kosher things to your expense reports?"
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8:35 - 8:36And they didn't really raise their hands,
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8:36 - 8:42but they took me out to dinner and showed me what they could do with expense reports.
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8:42 - 8:44And then I asked them, I said,
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8:44 - 8:48"What could the CEO have done to make you not as depressed?"
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8:48 - 8:51And they came up with all kinds of ideas.
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8:51 - 8:54They said the CEO could have asked them to present to the whole company
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8:54 - 8:57about their journey over the last two years and what they decided to do.
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8:57 - 9:01He could have asked them to think about which aspect of their technology
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9:01 - 9:05could fit with other parts of the organization.
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9:05 - 9:08He could have asked them to build some prototypes, some next-generation prototypes,
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9:08 - 9:10and seen how they would work.
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9:10 - 9:12But the thing is that any one of those
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9:12 - 9:15would require some effort and motivation.
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9:15 - 9:19And I think the CEO basically did not understand the importance of meaning.
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9:19 - 9:21If the CEO, just like our participants,
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9:21 - 9:24thought the essence of meaning is unimportant,
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9:24 - 9:26then he [wouldn't] care.
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9:26 - 9:29And he would tell them, "At the moment I directed you in this way,
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9:29 - 9:30and now that I am directing you in this way,
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9:30 - 9:32everything will be okay."
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9:32 - 9:35But if you understood how important meaning is,
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9:35 - 9:37then you would figure out that it's actually important
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9:37 - 9:39to spend some time, energy and effort
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9:39 - 9:42in getting people to care more about what they're doing.
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9:42 - 9:45The next experiment was slightly different.
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9:45 - 9:48We took a sheet of paper with random letters,
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9:48 - 9:52and we asked people to find pairs of letters that were identical next to each other.
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9:52 - 9:53That was the task.
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9:53 - 9:55And people did the first sheet.
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9:55 - 9:58And then we asked them if they wanted to do the next sheet for a little bit less money
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9:58 - 10:01and the next sheet for a little bit less money, and so on and so forth.
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10:01 - 10:03And we had three conditions.
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10:03 - 10:06In the first condition, people wrote their name on the sheet,
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10:06 - 10:10found all the pairs of letters, gave it to the experimenter.
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10:10 - 10:14The experimenter would look at it, scan it from top to bottom,
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10:14 - 10:18say "uh huh" and put it on the pile next to them.
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10:18 - 10:22In the second condition, people did not write their name on it.
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10:22 - 10:24The experimenter looked at it,
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10:24 - 10:27took the sheet of paper, did not look at it, did not scan it,
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10:27 - 10:31and simply put it on the pile of pages.
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10:31 - 10:33So you take a piece, you just put it on the side.
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10:33 - 10:35And in the third condition,
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10:35 - 10:43the experimenter got the sheet of paper and directly put it into a shredder.
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10:43 - 10:46What happened in those three conditions?
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10:46 - 10:50In this plot I'm showing you at what pay rate people stopped.
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10:50 - 10:55So low numbers mean that people worked harder. They worked for much longer.
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10:55 - 11:00In the acknowledged condition, people worked all the way down to 15 cents.
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11:00 - 11:03At 15 cents per page, they basically stopped these efforts.
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11:03 - 11:08In the shredder condition, it was twice as much -- 30 cents per sheet.
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11:08 - 11:10And this is basically the result we had before.
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11:10 - 11:14You shred people's efforts, output,
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11:14 - 11:16you get them not to be as happy with what they're doing.
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11:16 - 11:18But I should point out, by the way,
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11:18 - 11:21that in the shredder condition, people could have cheated.
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11:21 - 11:23They could have done not so good work,
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11:23 - 11:25because they realized that people were just shredding it.
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11:25 - 11:27So maybe the first sheet you would do good work,
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11:27 - 11:29but then you see nobody is really testing it,
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11:29 - 11:31so you would do more and more and more.
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11:31 - 11:33So in fact, in the shredder condition,
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11:33 - 11:36people could have submitted more work and gotten more money
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11:36 - 11:38and put less effort into it.
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11:38 - 11:40But what about the ignored condition?
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11:40 - 11:44Would the ignored condition be more like the acknowledged or more like the shredder,
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11:44 - 11:46or somewhere in the middle?
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11:46 - 11:49It turns out it was almost like the shredder.
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11:49 - 11:52Now there's good news and bad news here.
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11:52 - 11:57The bad news is that ignoring the performance of people
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11:57 - 12:01is almost as bad as shredding their effort in front of their eyes.
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12:01 - 12:05Ignoring gets you a whole way out there.
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12:05 - 12:09The good news is that by simply looking at something that somebody has done,
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12:09 - 12:12scanning it and saying "uh huh,"
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12:12 - 12:13that seems to be quite sufficient
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12:13 - 12:16to dramatically improve people's motivations.
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12:16 - 12:22So the good news is that adding motivation doesn't seem to be so difficult.
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12:22 - 12:24The bad news is that eliminating motivations
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12:24 - 12:26seems to be incredibly easy,
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12:26 - 12:30and if we don't think about it carefully, we might overdo it.
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12:30 - 12:33So this is all in terms of negative motivation
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12:33 - 12:36or eliminating negative motivation.
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12:36 - 12:40The next part I want to show you is something about the positive motivation.
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12:40 - 12:45So there is a store in the U.S. called IKEA.
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12:45 - 12:51And IKEA is a store with kind of okay furniture that takes a long time to assemble.
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12:51 - 12:53(Laughter)
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12:53 - 12:56And I don't know about you, but every time I assemble one of those,
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12:56 - 13:00it takes me much longer, it's much more effortful, it's much more confusing.
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13:00 - 13:03I put things in the wrong way.
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13:03 - 13:06I can't say enjoy those pieces.
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13:06 - 13:09I can't say I enjoy the process.
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13:09 - 13:13But when I finish it, I seem to like those IKEA pieces of furniture
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13:13 - 13:15more than I like other ones.
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13:15 - 13:20And there's an old story about cake mixes.
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13:20 - 13:23So when they started cake mixes in the '40s,
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13:23 - 13:26they would take this powder and they would put it in a box,
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13:26 - 13:31and they would ask housewives to basically pour it in, stir some water in it,
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13:31 - 13:35mix it, put it in the oven, and -- voila! -- you had cake.
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13:35 - 13:38But it turns out they were very unpopular.
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13:38 - 13:39People did not want them.
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13:39 - 13:42And they thought about all kinds of reasons for that.
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13:42 - 13:43Maybe the taste was not good.
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13:43 - 13:45No, the taste was great.
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13:45 - 13:50What they figured out was that there was not enough effort involved.
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13:50 - 13:53It was so easy that nobody could serve cake to their guests
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13:53 - 13:55and say, "Here is my cake."
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13:55 - 13:57No, no, no, it was somebody else's cake.
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13:57 - 13:59It was as if you bought it in the store.
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13:59 - 14:01It didn't really feel like your own.
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14:01 - 14:03So what did they do?
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14:03 - 14:07They took the eggs and the milk out of the powder.
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14:07 - 14:08(Laughter)
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14:08 - 14:12Now you had to break the eggs and add them.
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14:12 - 14:15You had to measure the milk and add it, mixing it.
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14:15 - 14:18Now it was your cake. Now everything was fine.
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14:18 - 14:27(Applause)
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14:27 - 14:30Now I think a little bit like the IKEA effect,
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14:30 - 14:32by getting people to work harder,
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14:32 - 14:36they actually got them to love what they're doing to a higher degree.
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14:36 - 14:39So how do we look at this question experimentally?
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14:39 - 14:41We asked people to build some origami.
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14:41 - 14:44We gave them instructions on how to create origami,
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14:44 - 14:46and we gave them a sheet of paper.
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14:46 - 14:50And these were all novices, and they built something that was really quite ugly --
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14:50 - 14:53nothing like a frog or a crane.
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14:53 - 14:56But then we told them, we said, "Look, this origami really belongs to us.
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14:56 - 14:59You worked for us, but I'll tell you what, we'll sell it to you.
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14:59 - 15:01How much do you want to pay for it?"
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15:01 - 15:04And we measured how much they were willing to pay for it.
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15:04 - 15:06And we had two types of people.
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15:06 - 15:08We had the people who built it,
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15:08 - 15:13and we had the people who did not build it and just looked at it as external observers.
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15:13 - 15:15And what we found was that the builders thought
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15:15 - 15:19that these were beautiful pieces of origami,
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15:19 - 15:21and they were willing to pay for them five times more
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15:21 - 15:25than the people who just evaluated them externally.
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15:25 - 15:28Now you could say, if you were a builder,
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15:28 - 15:34do you think that, "Oh, I love this origami, but I know that nobody else would love it?"
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15:34 - 15:40Or do you think, "I love this origami, and everybody else will love it as well?"
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15:40 - 15:42Which one of those two is correct?
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15:42 - 15:45Turns out the builders not only loved the origami more,
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15:45 - 15:49they thought that everybody would see the world in their view.
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15:49 - 15:52They thought everybody else would love it more as well.
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15:52 - 15:55In the next version we tried to do the IKEA effect.
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15:55 - 15:57We tried to make it more difficult.
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15:57 - 16:00So for some people we gave the same task.
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16:00 - 16:04For some people we made it harder by hiding the instructions.
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16:04 - 16:08At the top of the sheet, we had little diagrams of how do you fold origami.
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16:08 - 16:11For some people we just eliminated that.
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16:11 - 16:14So now this was tougher. What happened?
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16:14 - 16:20Well in an objective way, the origami now was uglier, it was more difficult.
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16:20 - 16:22Now when we looked at the easy origami,
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16:22 - 16:26we saw the same thing: Builders loved it more, evaluators loved it less.
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16:26 - 16:28When you looked at the hard instructions,
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16:28 - 16:31the effect was larger.
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16:31 - 16:36Why? Because now the builders loved it even more.
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16:36 - 16:39They put all this extra effort into it.
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16:39 - 16:43And evaluators? They loved it even less.
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16:43 - 16:47Because in reality it was even uglier than the first version.
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16:47 - 16:53Of course, this tells you something about how we evaluate things.
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16:53 - 16:55Now think about kids.
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16:55 - 16:59Imagine I asked you, "How much would you sell your kids for?"
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16:59 - 17:02Your memories and associations and so on.
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17:02 - 17:05Most people would say for a lot, a lot of money --
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17:05 - 17:07on good days.
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17:07 - 17:08(Laughter)
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17:08 - 17:10But imagine this was slightly different.
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17:10 - 17:12Imagine if you did not have your kids,
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17:12 - 17:15and one day you went to the park and you met some kids,
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17:15 - 17:16and they were just like your kids.
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17:16 - 17:18And you played with them for a few hours.
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17:18 - 17:20And when you were about to leave, the parents said,
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17:20 - 17:24"Hey, by the way, just before you leave, if you're interested, they're for sale."
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17:24 - 17:27(Laughter)
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17:27 - 17:29How much would you pay for them now?
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17:29 - 17:32Most people say not that much.
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17:32 - 17:37And this is because our kids are so valuable,
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17:37 - 17:39not just because of who they are,
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17:39 - 17:43but because of us, because they are so connected to us
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17:43 - 17:45and because of the time and connection.
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17:45 - 17:48And by the way, if you think that IKEA instructions are not good,
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17:48 - 17:50think about the instructions that come with kids.
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17:50 - 17:51Those are really tough.
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17:51 - 17:52(Laughter)
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17:52 - 17:57By the way, these are my kids, which, of course, are wonderful and so on.
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17:57 - 17:59Which comes to tell you one more thing,
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17:59 - 18:01which is, much like our builders,
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18:01 - 18:05when they look at the creature of their creation,
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18:05 - 18:10we don't see that other people don't see things our way.
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18:10 - 18:13Let me say one last comment.
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18:13 - 18:16If you think about Adam Smith versus Karl Marx,
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18:16 - 18:20Adam Smith had the very important notion of efficiency.
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18:20 - 18:23He gave an example of a pin factory.
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18:23 - 18:26He said pins have 12 different steps,
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18:26 - 18:31and if one person does all 12 steps, production is very low.
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18:31 - 18:33But if you get one person to do step one
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18:33 - 18:35and one person to do step two and step three and so on,
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18:35 - 18:38production can increase tremendously.
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18:38 - 18:44And indeed, this is a great example and the reason for the Industrial Revolution and efficiency.
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18:44 - 18:46Karl Marx, on the other hand,
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18:46 - 18:49said that the alienation of labor is incredibly important
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18:49 - 18:53in how people think about the connection to what they are doing.
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18:53 - 18:56And if you make all 12 steps, you care about the pin.
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18:56 - 19:00But if you make one step every time, maybe you don't care as much.
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19:00 - 19:03And I think that in the Industrial Revolution,
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19:03 - 19:06Adam Smith was more correct than Karl Marx,
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19:06 - 19:09but the reality is that we've switched
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19:09 - 19:11and now we're in the knowledge economy.
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19:11 - 19:14And you can ask yourself, what happens in a knowledge economy?
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19:14 - 19:17Is efficiency still more important than meaning?
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19:17 - 19:19I think the answer is no.
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19:19 - 19:21I think that as we move to situations
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19:21 - 19:24in which people have to decide on their own
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19:24 - 19:28about how much effort, attention, caring, how connected they feel to it,
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19:28 - 19:32are they thinking about labor on the way to work and in the shower and so on,
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19:32 - 19:36all of a sudden Marx has more things to say to us.
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19:36 - 19:41So when we think about labor, we usually think about motivation and payment as the same thing,
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19:41 - 19:45but the reality is that we should probably add all kinds of things to it --
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19:45 - 19:50meaning, creation, challenges, ownership, identity, pride, etc.
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19:50 - 19:54And the good news is that if we added all of those components and thought about them,
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19:54 - 19:57how do we create our own meaning, pride, motivation,
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19:57 - 20:01and how do we do it in our workplace and for the employees,
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20:01 - 20:05I think we could get people to both be more productive and happier.
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20:05 - 20:06Thank you very much.
-
20:06 - 20:08(Applause)
- Title:
- What makes us feel good about our work?
- Speaker:
- Dan Ariely
- Description:
-
What motivates us to work? Contrary to conventional wisdom, it isn't just money. But it's not exactly joy either. It seems that most of us thrive by making constant progress and feeling a sense of purpose. Behavioral economist Dan Ariely presents two eye-opening experiments that reveal our unexpected and nuanced attitudes toward meaning in our work. (Filmed at TEDxRiodelaPlata.)
- Video Language:
- English
- Team:
- closed TED
- Project:
- TEDTalks
- Duration:
- 20:26
Camille Martínez edited English subtitles for What makes us feel good about our work? | ||
Krystian Aparta commented on English subtitles for What makes us feel good about our work? | ||
Krystian Aparta edited English subtitles for What makes us feel good about our work? | ||
Thu-Huong Ha edited English subtitles for What makes us feel good about our work? | ||
Thu-Huong Ha approved English subtitles for What makes us feel good about our work? | ||
Thu-Huong Ha edited English subtitles for What makes us feel good about our work? | ||
Thu-Huong Ha edited English subtitles for What makes us feel good about our work? | ||
Thu-Huong Ha edited English subtitles for What makes us feel good about our work? |
Krystian Aparta
The English transcript was updated on 6/5/2015.