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TO TRY TO get a feeling for how a high salary might change your behavior and influence your performance, imagine the following thought experiment: What if I paid you a lot of money, say $100,000, to come up with a very creative idea for a research project in the next seventy-two hours? What would you do differently? You would probably substitute some of your regular activities with others. You would not bother with your e-mail; you wouldn’t check Facebook; you wouldn’t leaf through a magazine. You would probably drink a lot of coffee and sleep much less. Maybe you would stay at the office all night (as I do from time to time). This means that you would work more hours, but would doing any of this help you be more creative?
Hours spent working aside, let’s consider how your thought process would change during those critical seventy-two hours. What would you do to make yourself more creative and productive? Would you close your eyes harder? Would you visualize a mountaintop? Bite your lips to a larger degree? Breathe deeply? Meditate? Would you be able to chase away random thoughts more easily? Would you type faster? Think more deeply? Would you do any of those things and would they really lead you to a higher level of performance?
This is just a thought experiment, but I hope it illustrates the idea that though a large amount of money would most likely get you to work many hours (which is why high payment is very useful as an incentive when simple mechanical tasks are involved), it is unlikely to improve your creativity. It might, in fact, backfire, because financial incentives don’t operate in a simple way on the quality of output from our brains. Nor is it at all clear how much of our mental activity is really under our direct control, especially when we are under the gun and really want to do our best.
NOW LET’S IMAGINE that you need a critical, lifesaving surgery. Do you think that offering your medical team a skyhigh bonus would really result in improved performance? Would you want your surgeon and anesthesiologist to think, during the operation, about how they might use the bonus to buy a sailboat? That would clearly motivate them to get the bonus, but would it get them to perform better? Wouldn’t you rather they devoted all of their mental energy to the task at hand? How much more effective might your doctors be in what the psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi called a “state of flow”—when they are fully engaged and focused on the task at hand and oblivious to anything else? I’m not sure about you, but for important tasks that require thinking, concentration, and cognitive skill, I would take a doctor who’s in a flow state any day.
A Few Words about Small and Large Decisions
For the most part, researchers like me carry out laboratory-based experiments. Most of these involve simple decisions, short periods of time, and relatively low stakes. Because traditional economists usually do not like the answers that our lab experiments produce, they often complain that our results do not apply to the real world. “Everything would change,” they say, “if the decisions were important, the stakes were higher, and people tried harder.” But to me, that’s like saying that people always get the best care in the emergency room because the decisions made there are often literally life and death. (I doubt many people would argue that this is the case.) Absent empirical evidence one way or the other, such criticism of laboratory experiments is perfectly reasonable. It is useful to have some healthy skepticism about any results, including those generated in relatively simple lab experiments. Nevertheless, it is not clear to me why the psychological mechanisms that underlie our simple decisions and behaviors would not be the same ones that underlie more complex and important ones.
CARING AS A DOUBLE-EDGED SWORD
First Knight, a movie that came out in 1995 starring Sean Connery and Richard Gere, demonstrates one extreme way of dealing with the way motivation affects performance. Richard Gere’s character, Sir Lancelot, is a vagabond expert swordsman who duels to pay the bills. Toward the beginning of the film, he sets up a kind of mini sparring clinic where the villagers pay to test their skills against him while he dispenses witty advice for their improvement. At one point, Lancelot suggests that someone out there must be better than he, and wouldn’t that person love to win the gold pieces he happens to have clinking around in a bag?
Finally, an enormous blond man named Mark challenges him. They fight furiously for a brief time. Then, of course, Lancelot disarms Mark. The latter, confused, asks Lancelot how he managed to disarm him and whether it was a trick. Lancelot smilingly says that that’s just how he fights, no trick to it. (Well, there is one mental trick, as we discover later.) When Mark asks Lancelot to teach him, Lancelot pauses for a moment before giving his lesson. He offers Mark three tips: first, to observe the man he’s fighting and learn how he moves and thinks; second, to await the make-or-break moment in the match and go for it then. Up to that point, Mark smiles and nods happily, sure he can learn to do those things. Lancelot’s final tip, however, is a little more difficult to follow. He tells his eager student that he can’t care about living or dying. Mark stares into his face, astonished; Lancelot smiles sadly and walks off into the sunset like a medieval cowboy.
Judging from this advice, it seems that Lancelot fights better than anyone else because he has found a way to bring the stress of the situation to zero. If he doesn’t care whether he lives or dies, nothing rides on his performance. He doesn’t worry about living past the end of the fight, so nothing clouds his mind and affects his abilities—he is pure concentration and skill.
Seen from this perspective, the findings presented in this chapter suggest that our tendency to behave irrationally and in ways that are undesirable might increase when the decisions are more important. In our India experiment, the participants behaved very much as standard economics would predict when the incentives were relatively low. But they did not behave as standard economics would predict when it really mattered and the incentives were highest.
COULD ALL THIS mean that sometimes we might actually behave less rationally when we try harder? If that’s so, what is the correct way to pay people without overstressing them? One simple solution is to keep bonuses low—something those bankers I met with might not appreciate. Another approach might be to pay employees on a straight salary basis. Though it would eliminate the consequences of overmotivation, it would also eradicate some of the benefits of performance-based payment. A better approach might be to keep the motivating element of performance-based payment but eliminate some of the nonproductive stress it creates. To achieve this, we could, for example, offer employees smaller and more frequent bonuses. Another approach might be to offer employees a performance-based payment that is averaged over time—say, the previous five years, rather than only the last year. This way, employees in their fifth year would know 80 percent of their bonus in advance (based on the previous four years), and the immediate effect of the present year’s performance would matter less.
Whatever approach we take to optimize performance, it should be clear that we need a better understanding of the links between compensation, motivation, stress, and performance. And we need to take our peculiarities and irrationalities into account.
P.S. I WOULD like to dedicate this chapter to my banker friends, who repeatedly “enjoy” hearing my opinion about their salaries and are nevertheless still willing to talk to me.
CHAPTER 2 The Meaning of Labor (#ulink_479b101a-9d06-551e-884f-acf34d82727c)
What Legos Can Teach Us about the Joy of Work
On a recent flight from California, I was seated next to a professional-looking man in his thirties. He smiled as I settled in, and we exchanged the usual complaints about shrinking seat sizes and other discomforts. We both checked our e-mail before shutting down our iPhones. Once we were airborne, we got to chatting. The conversation went like this:
HE: So how do you like your iPhone?
ME: I love it in many ways, but now I check my e-mail all the time, even when I am at traffic lights and in elevators.
HE: Yeah, I know what you mean. I spend much more time on e-mail since I got it.
ME: I’m not sure if all these technologies make me more productive, or less.
HE: What kind of work do you do?
Whenever I’m on a plane and start chatting with the people sitting next to me, they often ask or tell me what they do for a living long before we exchange names or other details about our lives. Maybe it’s a phenomenon more common in America than in other places, but I’ve observed that fellow travelers everywhere—at least the ones who make conversation—often discuss what they do for a living before talking about their hobbies, family, or political ideology.
The man sitting next to me told me all about his work as a sales manager for SAP, a large business management software firm that many companies use to run their back-office systems. (I knew something about the technology because my poor, suffering assistant at MIT was forced to use it when the university switched to SAP.) I wasn’t terribly interested in talking about the challenges and benefits of accounting software, but I was taken by my seatmate’s enthusiasm. He seemed to really like his job. I sensed that his work was the core of his identity—more important to him, perhaps, than many other things in his life.
ON AN INTUITIVE level, most of us understand the deep interconnection between identity and labor. Children think of their potential future occupations in terms of what they will be (firemen, teachers, doctors, behavioral economists, or what have you), not about the amount of money they will earn. Among adult Americans, “What do you do?” has become as common a component of an introduction as the anachronistic “How do you do?” once was—suggesting that our jobs are an integral part of our identity, not merely a way to make money in order to keep a roof over our heads and food in our mouths. It seems that many people find pride and meaning in their jobs.
In contrast to this labor-identity connection, the basic economic model of labor generally treats working men and women as rats in a maze: work is assumed to be annoying, and all the rat (person) wants to do is to get to the food with as little effort as possible and to rest on a full belly for the most time possible. But if work also gives us meaning, what does this tell us about why people want to work? And what about the connections among motivation, personal meaning, and productivity?
Sucking the Meaning out of Work
In 2005, I was sitting in my office at MIT, working on yet another review,
(#litres_trial_promo) when I heard a knock at the door. I looked up and saw a familiar, slightly chubby face belonging to a young man with brown hair and a funny goatee. I was sure I knew him, but I couldn’t place him. I did the proper thing and invited him in. A moment later I realized that he was David, a thoughtful and insightful student who had taken my class a few years earlier. I was delighted to see him.
Once we were settled in with coffee, I asked David what had brought him back to MIT. “I’m here to do some recruiting,” he said. “We’re looking for new blood.” David went on to tell me what he’d been up to since graduating a few years earlier. He’d landed an exciting job in a New York investment bank. He was making a high salary and enjoying fantastic benefits—including having his laundry done—and loved living in the teeming city. He was dating a woman who, from his description, seemed to be a blend of Wonder Woman and Martha Stewart, though admittedly they had been together for only two weeks.
“I also wanted to tell you something,” he said. “A few weeks ago, I had an experience that made me think back to our behavioral economics class.”
He told me that earlier that year he’d spent ten weeks on a presentation for a forthcoming merger. He had worked very hard on analyzing data, making beautiful plots and projections, and he had often stayed in the office past midnight polishing his PowerPoint presentation (what did bankers and consultants do before PowerPoint?). He was delighted with the outcome and happily e-mailed the presentation to his boss, who was going to make the presentation at the all-important merger meeting. (David was too low in the hierarchy to actually attend the meeting.)
His boss e-mailed him back a few hours later: “Sorry, David, but just yesterday we learned that the deal is off. I did look at your presentation, and it is an impressive and fine piece of work. Well done.” David realized that his presentation would never see the light of day but that this was nothing personal. He understood that his work shone, because his boss was not the kind of person who gave undeserved compliments. Yet, despite the commendation, he was distraught with the outcome. The fact that all his effort had served no ultimate purpose created a deep rift between him and his job. All of a sudden he didn’t care as much about the project in which he had invested so many hours. He also found that he didn’t care as much about other projects he was working on either. In fact, this “work to no end” experience seemed to have colored David’s overall approach to his job and his attitude toward the bank. He’d quickly gone from feeling useful and happy in his work to feeling dissatisfied and that his efforts were futile.
“You know what’s strange?” David added. “I worked hard, produced a high-quality presentation, and my boss was clearly happy with me and my work. I am sure that I will get very positive reviews for my efforts on this project and probably a raise at the end of the year. So, from a functional point of view, I should be happy. At the same time, I can’t shake the feeling that my work has no meaning. What if the project I’m working on now gets canceled the day before it’s due and my work is deleted again without ever being used?”
Then he offered me the following thought experiment. “Imagine,” he said in a low, sad voice, “that you work for some company and your task is to create PowerPoint slides. Every time you finish, someone takes the slides you’ve just made and deletes them. As you do this, you get paid well and enjoy great fringe benefits. There is even someone who does your laundry. How happy would you be to work in such a place?”
I felt sorry for David, and in an attempt to comfort him, I told him a story about my friend Devra, who worked as an editor at one of the major university presses. She had recently finished editing a history book—work she had enjoyed doing and for which she had been paid. Three weeks after she submitted the final manuscript to the publishing house, the head editor decided not to print it. As was the case with David, everything was fine from a functional point of view, but the fact that no readers would ever hold the book in their hands made her regret the time and care she had put into editing it. I was hoping to show David that he was not alone. After a minute of silence he said, “You know what? I think there might be a bigger issue around this. Something about useless or unrequited work. You should study it.”
It was a great idea, and in a moment, I’ll tell you what I did with it. But before we do that, let’s take a detour into the worlds of a parrot, a rat, and contrafreeloading.
Will Work for Food
When I was sixteen, I joined the Israeli Civil Guard. I learned to shoot a World War II–era Russian carbine rifle, set up roadblocks, and perform other useful tasks in case the adult men were at war and we youth were left to protect the home front. As it turned out, the main benefit of learning how to shoot was that from time to time it excused me from school. In those years in Israel, every time a high school class went on a trip, a student who knew how to use a rifle was asked to join it as a guard. Since this duty also meant substituting a few days of classes with hiking and enjoying the countryside, I was always willing to volunteer, even if I had to give up an exam for the call of duty.
(#litres_trial_promo)
On one of these trips I met a girl, and by the end of the trip I had a crush on her. Unfortunately, she was one class behind me in school and our schedules did not coincide, making it difficult for me to see her and learn whether she felt the same about me. So I did what any moderately resourceful teenager would do: I discovered an extracurricular interest of hers and made it mine as well.
About a mile from our town lived a guy we called “Birdman” who had endured a miserable and lonely childhood in Eastern Europe during the Holocaust. Hiding from the Nazis in the forest, he found much comfort in the animals and birds around him. After he eventually made it to Israel, he decided to try to make the childhood of the kids around him much better than his, so he collected birds from all over the globe and invited children to come and experience the wonders of the avian world. The girl I liked used to volunteer in the Birdman’s aviary, and so I joined her in cleaning cages, feeding the birds, telling visitors stories about them, and—most amazingly—watching the birds hatch, grow, and interact with one another and the visitors. After a few months, it became clear that the girl and I had no future but the birds and I did, so I continued to volunteer for a while.
Some years later, after my main hospitalization period, I decided to get a parrot. I selected a relatively large, highly intelligent Mealy Amazon parrot and named her Jean Paul. (For some reason, I decided that female parrots should have French male names.) She was a handsome bird; her feathers were mostly green with some light blue, yellow, and red at the tips of her wings, and we had lots of fun together. Jean Paul loved talking and flirting with nearly everyone who happened by her cage. She would come near me to be petted any time I passed her cage, bowing her head very low and exposing the back of her neck, and I would try to produce baby talk as I ruffled the feathers on her neck. Whenever I took a shower, she would perch in the bathroom and twitch happily when I splashed water drops at her.
Jean Paul was intensely social. Left alone in her cage for too long, she would pluck at her own feathers, something she did when she was bored. As I discovered, parrots have a particularly acute need to engage in mental activity, so I invested in several toys specifically designed to preclude parrot boredom. One such puzzle, called SeekaTreat, was a stack of multicolored wooden tiers of decreasing size that form a kind of pyramid. Made of wood, the tiers were connected through the center with a cord. Within each tier, there were half-inch-deep “treat wells” designed to hold tasty parrot treats. To get at the food, Jean Paul had to lift each tier and uncover the treat, which was not very easy to do. Over the years, the SeekaTreat and other toys like it kept Jean Paul happy, curious, and interested in her environment.
THOUGH I DIDN’T know it at the time, there was an important concept behind the SeekaTreat. “Contrafreeloading,” a term coined by the animal psychologist Glen Jensen, refers to the finding that many animals prefer to earn food rather than simply eating identical but freely accessible food.
To better understand the joy of working for food, let’s go back to the 1960s when Jensen first took adult male albino rats and tested their appetite for labor. Imagine that you are a rat participating in Jensen’s study. You and your little rodent friends start out living an average life in an average cluster of cages, and every day, for ten days, a nice man in a white lab coat gives you 10 grams of finely ground Purina lab crackers precisely at noon (you don’t know it’s noon, but you eventually pick up on the general time). After a few days of this pattern, you learn to expect food at noon every day, and your rat tummy begins rumbling right before the nice man shows up—exactly the state Jensen wants you in.
Once your body is conditioned to eating crackers at noon, things suddenly change. Instead of feeding you at the time of your maximal hunger, you have to wait another hour, and at one o’clock, the man picks you up and puts you in a well-lit “Skinner box.” You are ravenous. Named after its original designer, the influential psychologist B. F. Skinner, this box is a regular cage (similar to the one you are used to), but it has two features that are new to you. The first is an automated food dispenser that releases food pellets every thirty seconds. Yum! The second is a bar that for some reason is covered with a tin shield.
At first, the bar isn’t very interesting, but the food dispenser is, and that is where you spend your time. The food dispenser releases food pellets every so often for twenty-five minutes, until you have eaten fifty food pellets. At that point you are taken back to your cage and given the rest of your food for the day.
The next day, your lunch hour passes by again without food, and at 1:00 P.M. you are placed back into the Skinner box. You’re ravenous but unhappy because this time the food dispenser doesn’t release any pellets. What to do? You wander around the cage, and, passing the bar, you realize that the tin shield is missing. You accidentally press the bar, and immediately a pellet of food is released. Wonderful! You press the bar again. Oh joy!—another pellet comes out. You press again and again, eating happily, but then the light goes off, and at the same time, the bar stops releasing food pellets. You soon learn that when the light is off, no matter how much you press the bar, you don’t get any food.
Just then the man in the lab coat opens the top of the cage and places a tin cup in a corner of the cage. (You don’t know it, but the cup is full of pellets.) You don’t pay attention to the cup; you just want the bar to start producing food again. You press and press, but nothing happens. As long as the light is off, pressing the bar does you no good. You wander around the cage, cursing under your rat breath, and go over to the tin cup. “Oh my!” you say to yourself. “It’s full of pellets! Free food!” You begin chomping away, and then suddenly the light comes on again. Now you realize that you have two possible food sources. You can keep on eating the free food from the tin cup, or you can go back to the bar and press it for food pellets. If you were this rat, what would you do?
Assuming you were like all but one of the two hundred rats in Jensen’s study, you would decide not to feast entirely from the tin cup. Sooner or later, you would return to the bar and press it for food. And if you were like 44 percent of the rats, you would press the bar quite often—enough to feed you more than half your pellets. What’s more, once you started pressing the bar, you would not return so easily to the cup with the abundant free food.
Jensen discovered (and many subsequent experiments confirmed) that many animals—including fish, birds, gerbils, rats, mice, monkeys, and chimpanzees—tend to prefer a longer, more indirect route to food than a shorter, more direct one.
(#litres_trial_promo) That is, as long as fish, birds, gerbils, rats, mice, monkeys, and chimpanzees don’t have to work too hard, they frequently prefer to earn their food. In fact, among all the animals tested so far the only species that prefers the lazy route is—you guessed it—the commendably rational cat.
This brings us back to Jean Paul. If she were an economically rational bird and interested only in expending as little effort as possible to get her food, she would simply have eaten from the tray in her cage and ignored the SeekaTreat. Instead, she played with her SeekaTreat (and other toys) for hours because it provided her with a more meaningful way to earn her food and spend her time. She was not merely existing but mastering something and, in a sense, “earning” her living.
(#litres_trial_promo)
THE GENERAL IDEA of contrafreeloading contradicts the simple economic view that organisms will always choose to maximize their reward while minimizing their effort. According to this standard economic view, spending anything, including energy, is considered a cost, and it makes no sense that an organism would voluntarily do so. Why work when they can get the same food—maybe even more food—for free?
When I described contrafreeloading to one of my rational economist friends (yes, I still have some of these), he immediately explained to me how Jensen’s results do not, in fact, contradict standard economic reasoning. He patiently told me why this research was irrelevant to questions of economics. “You see,” he said, as one would to a child, “economic theory is about the behavior of people, not rats or parrots. Rats have very small brains and almost nonexistent neocortices,
(#litres_trial_promo) so it is no wonder that these animals don’t realize that they can get food for free. They are just confused.”
“Anyway,” he continued, “I am sure that if you were to repeat Jensen’s experiment with normal people, you would not find this contrafreeloading effect. And I am a hundred percent positive that if you had used economists as your participants, you would not see anyone working unnecessarily!”
He had a valid point. And though I felt that it is possible to generalize about the way we relate to work from those animal studies, it was also clear to me that some experiments on adult human contrafreeloading were in the cards. (It was also clear that I should not do the experiment on economists.)
What do you think? Do humans, in general, exhibit contrafreeloading, or are they more rational? What about you?
“Small-M” Motivations
After David left my office, I started thinking about his and Devra’s disappointments. The lack of an audience for their work had made a big difference in their motivation. What is it aside from a paycheck, I wondered, that confers meaning on work? Is it the small satisfaction of focused engagement? Is it that, like Jean Paul, we enjoy feeling challenged by whatever it is we’re doing and satisfactorily completing a task (which creates a small level of meaning with a small m)? Or maybe we feel meaning only when we deal with something bigger. Perhaps we hope that someone else, especially someone important to us, will ascribe value to what we’ve produced? Maybe we need the illusion that our work might one day matter to many people. That it might be of some value in the big, broad world out there (we might call this Meaning with a large M)? Most likely it is all of these. But fundamentally, I think that almost any aspect of meaning (even small-m meaning) can be sufficient to drive our behavior. As long as we are doing something that is somewhat connected to our self-image, it can fuel our motivation and get us to work much harder.
Consider the work of writing, for example. Once upon a time, I wrote academic papers with an eye on promotion. But I also hoped—and still hope—that they might actually influence something in the world. How hard would I work on an academic paper if I knew for sure that only a few people would ever read it? What if I knew for sure that no one would ever read my work? Would I still do it?
I truly enjoy the research I do; I think it’s fun. I’m excited to tell you, dear reader, about how I have spent the last twenty years of my life. I’m almost sure my mother will read this book,
(#litres_trial_promo) and I’m hoping that at least a few others will as well. But what if I knew for sure that no one would ever read it? That Claire Wachtel, my editor at HarperCollins, would decide to put this book in a drawer, pay me for it, and never publish it? Would I still be sitting here late at night working on this chapter? No way. Much of what I do in life, including writing my blog posts, articles, and these pages, is driven by ego motivations that link my effort to the meaning that I hope the readers of these words will find in them. Without an audience, I would have very little motivation to work as hard as I do.
BLOGGING FOR TREATS
Now think about blogging. The number of blogs out there is astounding, and it seems that almost everyone has a blog or is thinking about starting one. Why are blogs so popular? Not only is it because so many people have the desire to write; after all, people wrote before blogs were invented. It is also because blogs have two features that distinguish them from other forms of writing. First, they provide the hope or the illusion that someone else will read one’s writing. After all, the moment a blogger presses the “publish” button, the blog can be consumed by anybody in the world, and with so many people connected, somebody, or at least a few people, should stumble upon the blog. Indeed, the “number of views” statistic is a highly motivating feature in the blogosphere because it lets the blogger know exactly how many people have at least seen the posting. Blogs also provide readers with the ability to leave their reactions and comments—gratifying for both the blogger, who now has a verifiable audience, and the reader-cum-writer. Most blogs have very low readership—perhaps only the blogger’s mother or best friend reads them—but even writing for one person, compared to writing for nobody, seems to be enough to compel millions of people to blog.
Building Bionicles
A few weeks after my conversation with David, I met with Emir Kamenica (a professor at the University of Chicago), and Dražen Prelec (a professor at MIT) at a local coffee shop. After discussing a few different research topics, we decided to explore the effect of devaluation on motivation for work. We could have examined Large-M Meaning—that is, we could have measured the value that people who are developing a cure for cancer, helping the poor, building bridges, and otherwise saving the world every day place on their jobs. But instead, and maybe because the three of us are academics, we decided to set up experiments that would examine the effects of small-m meaning—effects that I suspect are more common in everyday life and in the workplace. We wanted to explore how small changes in the work of people like David the banker and Devra the editor affected their desire to work. And so we came up with an idea for an experiment that would test people’s reactions to small reductions in meaning for a task that did not have much meaning to start with.
ONE FALL DAY in Boston, a tall mechanical engineering student named Joe entered the student union at Harvard University. He was all ambition and acne. On a crowded bulletin board boasting flyers about upcoming concerts, lectures, political events, and roommates wanted, he caught sight of a sign reading “Get paid to build Legos!”
As an aspiring engineer, Joe had always loved building things. Drawn to anything that required assembling, Joe had naturally played with Legos throughout his childhood. When he was six years old, he had taken his father’s computer apart, and a year later, he had disassembled the living room stereo system. By the time he was fifteen, his penchant for taking objects apart and putting them back together again had cost his family a small fortune. Fortunately, he had found an outlet for his passion in college, and now he had the opportunity to build with Legos to his heart’s content—and get paid for it.
A few days later, at the agreed-upon time, Joe showed up to take part in our experiment. As luck would have it, he was assigned to the meaningful condition. Sean, the research assistant, greeted Joe as he entered the room, directed him to a chair, and explained the procedure to him. Sean showed Joe a Lego Bionicle—a small fighting robot—and then told Joe that his task would involve constructing this exact type of Bionicle, made up of forty pieces that had to be assembled in a precise way. Next, Sean told Joe the rules for payment. “The basic setup,” he said, “is that you will get paid on a diminishing scale for each Bionicle you assemble. For the first Bionicle, you will receive two dollars. After you finish the first one, I will ask you if you want to build another one, this time for eleven cents less, which is a dollar eighty-nine. If you say that you want to build another one, I will hand you the next one. This same process will continue in the same way, and for each additional Bionicle you build, you will get eleven cents less, until you decide that you don’t want to build any more Bionicles. At that point, you will receive the total amount of money for all the robots you’ve created. There is no time limit, and you can build Bionicles until the benefits you get no longer outweigh the costs.”
Joe nodded, eager to get started. “And one last thing,” Sean warned. “We use the same Bionicles for all of our participants, so at some point before the next participant shows up, I will have to disassemble all the Bionicles you build and place the parts back in their boxes for the next participant. Everything clear?”
Joe quickly opened the first box of plastic parts, scanned the assembly instructions, and began building his first Bionicle. He obviously enjoyed assembling the pieces and seeing the weird robotic form take shape. Once finished, he arranged the robot in a battle position and asked for the next one. Sean reminded him how much he would make for the next Bionicle ($1.89) and handed him the next box of pieces. Once Joe started working on the next Bionicle, Sean took the construction that Joe had just finished and placed it in a box below the desk where it was destined to be disassembled for the next participant.
Like a man on a mission, Joe continued building one Bionicle after another, while Sean continued storing them in the box below the table. After he’d finished assembling ten robots, Joe announced that he’d had his fill and collected his pay of $15.05. Before Joe took off, Sean asked him to answer a few questions about how much he liked Legos in general and how much he had enjoyed the task. Joe responded that he was a Lego fan, that he had really enjoyed the task, and that he would recommend it to his friends.
The next person in line turned out to be a young man named Chad, an exuberant—or perhaps overcaffeinated—premed student. Unlike Joe, Chad was assigned to a procedure that among ourselves we fondly called the “Sisyphean” condition. This was the condition we wanted to focus on.
Sean explained the terms and conditions of the study to Chad in exactly the same way he had to Joe. Chad grabbed the box, opened it, removed the Bionicle’s assembly instruction sheet, and carefully looked it over, planning his strategy. First he separated the pieces into groups, in the order in which they would be needed. Then he began assembling the pieces, moving quickly from one to another. He went about the task cheerily, finished the first Bionicle in a few minutes, and handed it to Sean as instructed. “That’s two dollars,” Sean said. “Would you like to build another one for a dollar eighty-nine?” Chad nodded enthusiastically and started working on his second robot, using the same organized approach.
THE MYTH OF SISYPHUS
We used the term “Sisyphean” as a tribute to the mythical king Sisyphus, who was punished by the gods for his avarice and trickery. Besides murdering travelers and guests, seducing his niece, and usurping his brother’s throne, Sisyphus also tricked the gods.
Before he died, Sisyphus, knowing that he was headed to the Underworld, made his wife promise to refrain from offering the expected sacrifice following his death. Once he reached Hades, Sisyphus convinced kindhearted Persephone, the queen of the Underworld, to let him return to the upper world, so that he could ask his wife why she was neglecting her duty. Of course, Persephone had no idea that Sisyphus had intentionally asked his wife not to make the sacrifice, so she agreed, and Sisyphus escaped the Underworld, refusing to return. Eventually Sisyphus was captured and carried back, and the angry gods gave him his punishment: for the rest of eternity, he was forced to push a large rock up a steep hill, in itself a miserable task. Every time he neared the top of the hill, the rock would roll backward and he would have to start over.
Of course, our participants had done nothing deserving of punishment. We simply used the term to describe the condition that the less fortunate among them experienced.
While Chad was putting together the first pieces of his next Bionicle (pay attention, because this is where the two conditions differed), Sean slowly disassembled the first Bionicle, piece by piece, and placed the pieces back into the original box.
“Why are you taking it apart?” Chad asked, looking both puzzled and dismayed.
“This is just the procedure,” Sean explained. “We need to take this one apart in case you want to build another Bionicle.”
Chad returned his attention to the robot he was building, but his energy and excitement about building Bionicles was clearly diminished. When he finished his second construction, he paused. Should he build a third Bionicle or not? After a few seconds, he said he would build another one.
Sean handed Chad the original box (the one Chad had assembled and Sean had disassembled), and Chad got to work. This time, he worked somewhat faster, but he abandoned his strategy; perhaps he felt he no longer needed an organizational strategy, or maybe he felt that the extra step was unnecessary.
Meanwhile, Sean slowly took apart the second Bionicle Chad had just finished and placed the parts back into the second box. After Chad finished the third Bionicle, he looked it over and handed it to Sean. “That makes five sixty-seven,” Sean said. “Would you like to make another?”
Chad checked his cell phone for the time and thought for a moment. “Okay,” he said, “I’ll make one more.”
Sean handed him the second Bionicle for the second time, and Chad set about rebuilding it. (All the participants in his condition built and rebuilt the same two Bionicles until they decided to call it quits.) Chad managed to build both his Bionicles twice, for a total of four, for which he was paid $7.34.
After paying Chad, Sean asked him, as he did with all participants, whether he liked Legos and had enjoyed the task.
“Well, I like playing with Legos, but I wasn’t wild about the experiment,” Chad said with a shrug. He tucked the payment into his wallet and quickly left the room.
What did the results show? Joe and the other participants in the meaningful condition built an average of 10.6 Bionicles and received an average of $14.40 for their time. Even after they reached the point where their earnings for each Bionicle were less than a dollar (half of the initial payment), 65 percent of those in the meaningful condition kept on working. In contrast, those in the Sisyphean condition stopped working much sooner. On average, that group built 7.2 Bionicles (68 percent of the number built by the participants in the meaningful condition) and earned an average of $11.52. Only 20 percent of the participants in the Sisyphean condition constructed Bionicles when the payment was less than a dollar per robot.
In addition to comparing the number of Bionicles our participants constructed in the two conditions, we wanted to see how the individuals’ liking of Legos influenced their persistence in the task. In general, you would expect that the more a participant loved playing with Legos, the more Bionicles he or she would complete. (We measured this by the size of the statistical correlation between these two numbers.) This was, indeed, the case. But it also turned out that the two conditions were very different in terms of the relationship between Legos-love and persistence in the task. In the meaningful condition the correlation was high, but it was practically zero in the Sisyphean condition.
What this analysis tells me is that if you take people who love something (after all, the students who took part in this experiment signed up for an experiment to build Legos) and you place them in meaningful working conditions, the joy they derive from the activity is going to be a major driver in dictating their level of effort. However, if you take the same people with the same initial passion and desire and place them in meaningless working conditions, you can very easily kill any internal joy they might derive from the activity.
IMAGINE THAT YOU are a consultant visiting two Bionicles factories. The working conditions in the first Bionicles factory are very similar to those in the Sisyphean condition (which, sadly, is not very different from the structure of many workplaces). After observing the workers’ behavior, you would most likely conclude that they don’t like Legos much (or maybe they have something specific against Bionicles). You also observe their need for financial incentives to motivate them to continue working on their unpleasant task and how quickly they stop working once the payment drops below a certain level. When you deliver your PowerPoint presentation to the company’s board, you remark that as the payment per production unit drops, the employees’ willingness to work dramatically diminishes. From this you further conclude that if the factory wants to increase productivity, wages must be increased substantially.
Next, you visit the second Bionicles factory, which is structured more similarly to the meaningful condition. Now imagine how your conclusions about the onerous nature of the task, the joy of doing it, and the level of compensation needed to persist in the task, might be different.
We actually conducted a related consultant experiment by describing the two experimental conditions to our participants and asking them to estimate the difference in productivity between the two factories. They basically got it right, estimating that the total output in the meaningful condition would be higher than the output in the Sisyphean condition. But they were wrong in estimating the magnitude of the difference. They thought that those in the meaningful condition would make one or two more Bionicles, but, in fact, they made an average of 3.5 more. This result suggests that though we can recognize the effect of even small-m meaning on motivation, we dramatically underestimate its power.
In this light, let’s think about the results of the Bionicles experiment in terms of real-life labor. Joe and Chad loved playing with Legos and were paid at the same rate. Both knew that their creations were only temporary. The only difference was that Joe could maintain the illusion that his work was meaningful and so continued to enjoy building his Bionicles. Chad, on the other hand, witnessed the piece-by-piece destruction of his work, forcing him to realize that his labor was meaningless.
(#litres_trial_promo) All the participants most likely understood that the whole exercise was silly—after all, they were just making stuff from Legos, not designing a new dam, saving lives, or developing a new medication—but for those in Chad’s condition, watching their creations being deconstructed in front of their eyes was hugely demotivating. It was enough to kill any joy they’d accrued from building the Bionicles in the first place. This conclusion seemed to tally with David’s and Devra’s stories; the translation of joy into willingness to work seems to depend to a large degree on how much meaning we can attribute to our own labor.
