In this section, we're going to talk about labor and motivation.
And there's a little story that two men are playing golf.
And as one of them is about to swing his club and hit the ball, they see a funeral
procession passing by. The guy puts his club down, he turns
around to look at the procession, he takes his hat off and puts it on his
chest. Then he kind of watch as the funeral
procession goes, until they disappear over the corner.
The moment they disappear he picks his club back, hits the, the ball.
His friend looks at him and says really I'm really impressed I'm so touched and
moved. We're in the middle of a golf game and
you all of a sudden saw this funeral, you stopped everything you showed your
respect for the funeral and for the dead. This is incredibly moving and touching.
And the guy looks at him and says, well after all we were married for 30 years.
[NOISE] What is the issue with motivation and labor?
The reality is that when we think about it in a naive way we have a very simple
equation for what gets people to work. We think it's all about money and money
is the key to labor and motivation. More money leads higher to higher amount
of work, less money leads to less. The wonderful thing about human nature is
we have all kinds of drivers that actually can change our motivation.
And that's what we're going to focus about.
We're going to look at the role of things like feeling of completion.
And feeling of connection. Eh, camaraderie, goals.
All kinds of things that basically change human motivation.
And the hope is that by the end of this eh, section, we will have a better grasp
about the whole range of things that can motivate people.
And perhaps even more important about the things that we need to do to get people
not to be unmotivated and unhappy with their workplace.
[MUSIC][MUSIC][NOISE]
So I want us to think about the marketplace and I want us to think about
labor. And ask yourself what are the things that
motivate people to work. Now the standard thinking about
motivation is that people are like mice in a, in a maze.
That's all we care about is the particular reward, the cheese, the food
that, that we're getting. And if you think about life from this
perspective that people only care about the tangible rewards that they could get.
You would design a particular kind of a workplace.
And by the way, I don't think that this is a, a bad description for all places of
labor, I think there's some things people do just for the money.
That there's no other motivation. But the reality is that if you think
about your job, and if you think about the jobs of people close to you.
How much of the motivation do you think is really driven just by the pure reward.
Just by the money that we're getting. And by nothing.
Else. And if you think about it, you'll
probably come to the conclusion that not much of our motivation toward label is
described by that. For example, if I took my job as a
university professor, and I tried to think about what is it about my
particular rewards that could be described in terms of money.
Imagine we wrote an equation and we wrote all the possible things that could
motivate people. We could include things like pride, and
we could include things like reputation, a sense of purpose, meaning and comradery
and feeling that you're doing something for the world and so on and money as
well. How much of the total description could
be attributed to money? Is money, money just one element?
You know, some people who think of it as the only element.
But I would like to talk about the fact that there are many other elements.
And those other elements are often incredibly important to understanding
total motivation. So let's take a step back, and let's
think about something as simple as mountain climbing.
George Loewenstein has a beautiful description of this.
When you look at mountain climbing, you look at professional mountain climbers
who climb all kinds of difficult peaks. And you read there books.
What do you think you get from those books?
Do you get moments of elation and happiness?
Do they describe are they about to sing and dance and tell jokes?
As they go up the mountains? No.
It seems like it's pure misery every moment.
There are frostbite. It's difficult to breathe.
It's tough. It's painful.
You don't read these books and get a sense that these are people who are
having fun. You get a sense that they would be better
off sitting on a beach somewhere drinking mojitos.
But nevertheless, they do it. And not only do they do it, but the
moment they get up, they go down again. And when they come back, it's not as if
they said, this was the biggest mistake of my life.
They say, No, I want to do this again. By the way, I climbed when I was young I
climbed a mountain in the Himalayas called Annapurna.
It was about a month of hiking and climbing.
And this was not as, as really serious and difficult as people who climb things
like Everest and go out, all the way up to the tip.
But it was incredibly painful and difficult.
And when I got to the top, I thought I would just sit there for awhile and take
in the scenery and enjoy it, but the reality was, it was so cold.
That I just walked down as fast as I could out of there.
And again I don't describe it as happiness.
But now many years later I keep on thinking that.
I think, keep on thinking back into this event and I would like to go back.
Now the description of mountain climbing, and the description of sitting on the
beach drinking margaritas are incredibly different.
Nevertheless, people are getting some joy from mountain climbing.
What are the possible joys these people could get out of this?
And you can think about all kinds of ways in which people do get joy out of these
very difficult, complex activities. A sense of accomplishment, a sense of
competition, achievement. Overcoming nature.
Proving something to yourself. Right?
You could think to yourself what would happen if you knew in advance that you
could never reach the top? You could reach 90% but never reach the
top. Would it be the same?
Would you be motivated? Probably not.
It's probably the sense of accomplishment.
Getting to the top without it, it wouldn't be the same.
What if you knew that the moment you got down, your memory would be erased and you
could never remember all that? Would you do it?
Probably not. Probably part of it has to do with the
fact that it enriches our life, our understanding of what we can do and so
on. So if you think about it, and
mountaineering is obviously an extreme example.
But I think it does bring into mind this idea that we do things for all kinds of
reasons. And sure, money is one reason.
But it's not necessarily the richness of all reasons, and not necessarily the most
important one. Now, I should point out that sometimes,
what we do is we give people money as a way to get to the other objective as
well. So we can give people the sense of
achievement, or competition, or personal progress by giving them money, but it
doesn't mean that that's what they're really getting.
They're getting a sense of achievement through money they might have gotten
through something else. They get a sense of competition, they get
it through money they might have gotten it through something else.
But instead of just thinking about money I want us to think about the whole range
of what, what people aim for, strive for, and get value out of.
And for me this became the most salient when one of my past students came to
visit me one day. He popped into my office, this was quite
a few years after he left school. he reminded me who he was.
Because I have too many students. And sometimes, I forget, their names.
And then he sat down, and he described to me the following case.
he was on Wall Street. He seemed to be very happy.
He seemed to have a very high paying job. He seems to be dating a wonderful woman.
working long hours. But, nevertheless, being very happy.
But he described to me the following thing.
He said that, for weeks. He's been working on this presentation
for merger and acquisition. And he worked on the presentation
creating graphs and data points and speaking points and benefits and so on.
And the day before the merger was going to go through he sent his boss the final
deck, the final power points presentation...
And very quickly, he got the note back saying, thank you very much.
Good job. The merger is cancelled.
[SOUND] And he felt immediately deflated. Now, he worked on that for weeks.
Overtime, late at night, on the weekends, trying to do everything beautiful and his
boss appreciated it. And he said his boss would give him raise
because he did such a good job but nevertheless he was incredibly
demotivated. The fact that his creation was never
going to have any use and nobody else is ever going to see it made him lose faith
in his job. In fact he wasn't sure he wants to work
now on other projects like that. Now from an objective perspective,
everything was okay. He worked, he enjoyed things as he was
working. It was only after he finished, that
somebody was not going to use it. I had another friend who told me a
similar story. Her name was Devra, still is Devra.
And she worked as an editor in one of the university presses.
And she got this book in history that she really loved and thought was a great
book, and she actually worked very hard to improve it.
She was a fantastic editor. She gave me some comments on one of my
books, too. She worked really well on that book.
She felt that the book started by being good and she made it even better.
She was very proud of her job. And when they handed the final manuscript
out, the publishing house, the university publishing house decide not to publish
this manuscript. She got paid.
Her boss appreciate her job, her work. As she enjoyed it what she was doing she
felt she was contributing but nevertheless because this was not going
to see the light of day all of a sudden it had no, it had no meaning.
And I can think to myself, if it's a university professor, right?
What happens when you write things that nobody reads.
You can think to yourself, what would happen if you wrote a blog post that you
knew eh, nobody would read, or you write a paper that nobody would read.
What is it about the joy of work that depends on something else happening with
this outcome of this work? And this of course is the issue of
meaning. It's the issue that when we have
something, it's not just the creation of the thing that is important, it's the
meaning that it stands for. And if it has a meaning, we can be much
more motivated toward it, and if it doesn't, it kind of goes away.
So, the way we decide to starting looking at this is to get people to build legos.
In our particular case, bionicles. Bionicles are little lego robots that you
can create. They're kind of cute, they're kind of
interesting, don't take too long to build.
And we ask people to come and build them for money.
And the way we had it done is in a few different conditions.
In one condition, we asked people to build one, and we said, if you build this
one, we'll pay you $3. Would you like to do it?
People said, yes. They built it up.
They finished it. Then we said, would you like to build
another one, for $2.70? And if they said yes we gave them another
one and we took the first one that they built and put it under the table in a
box. And we told them that when the experiment
is going to be over we're going to take all the ones that they're going to be
building today. We're going to take them into pieces, put
them back into the boxes for the next participant.
And if they build the one for 270 we said you want to build another one for 240,
and another one for 210 and another one for 180 and so on until they decide to
stop. And we call this the meaningful
condition. People created something.
They created more until they decide to stop.
And what we measured was at what point did they stop?
At what point? The value of building it was not worth it
for them. How much money they were getting was not
going to offset the unpleasantness of building these legos.
The second condition we call the Sisyphus condition.
Now if you remember the story of Sisyphus, Sisyphus was punished by the
Gods. To push a big rock up the hill, and just
before he got to the end, the rock would roll over all the way to the beginning.
And Sisyphus had to push it again and again and again.
And this is a particular version of torture, right, when you have to do the
same thing again and again, with no sense of progress.
You could imagine what would happen if you pushed a rock up the hill, and at the
end it would come to the bottom of another hill, and another hill, and
another hill, and another hill. Then you would feel some progress.
But the fact that it's the same hill over, and over, and over, it's kind of
the, at least in the perception, it's the ultimate way of demotivating people.
Actually, if you look at prison movies, often that's what the guards do to
prisoners. They get them to dig a hole and then they
get them to put the the soil back into the hole, and they get them to do, dig it
again or they get them to move rocks from one side of the yard to another side of
the yard and back and so, so forth. There is something about the uselessness
of work when you just repeat something and destroy it, it seems to be.
[COUGH] Crucial. So in this specific condition we're
starting the same way. We gave people a Lego robot, and we said
would you like to build this for $3. They said yes.
They built it. And when they finished, we asked would
you like to build another one for $ 2.70. And if they said yes we gave them the
next one. But as they were building the next one,
we took the first one apart. Already, put it back in the pieces into
the box. And if they wanted to build a third one,
for $2.40 this time, we basically gave them back the first one they built.
So in reality they build the same two bionicles.
They would build and they would break, and they would build and they would
break, and so on. And this is the Sisyphic condition
because of this endless cycle of building and breaking.
So the first thing we find out, is that people built many more Bionicles in the
meaningful condition and the sisyphic condition.
And this is something that people basically understand that these
meaningful condition is much more important than the sisyphus condition
attribute more meaning, they enjoy it more.
You need to pay people less money. If you think about it, people get paid
less and less and less and less. And if they continue more in the
meaningful condition, it means you need less money to offset these people.
In the Sisyphus condition the task was not as fun, and so they only worked when
they got paid more. We did another version of this experiment
that we called the Consultant Experiment. And we described to people the
experiment, basically as I'm doing now. And we asked them to predict.
How much people would work in the meaningful condition, and how much they
would work in the sisyphic condition. We said imagine two factories.
In one of them, people work like the meaningful condition, another one they
work like a sisyphic condition. By the way, we never use these names, the
sisyphic and meaningful, but we describe those two conditions.
And we say how, how much effort, how much motivation, how much output do you think
there will be in both factories? And these consultants predicted that the
meaningful condition would have a better output then Sisyphic condition.
But they thought the effect would basically by one bionicle when in reality
the difference was about four Bionicles. So people understand the role of meaning.
They just don't understand it enough. They don't understand the extent.
To which it is important. And the final thing we found out is that
we created the correlation between how much people love Legos.
You know, some people love Legos, some people don't right.
That's a natural variations it's connected to all kinds of other things.
And we ask how is the love of Lego connected to amount of bionicles?
You would build. And you would expect that people who love
Legos, who get more internal joy from Legos would build more Legos even if they
got paid less. And people who don't like Legos that much
would only work when they get paid more money and when they get paid a little
less, they would stop. So we expect a positive correlation
between love of Lego. And the amount of bionicles.
And that's basically what we found in a meaningful condition.
But in the Sisyphus condition the correlation was zero.
Which basically tells us, that once we got to the Sisyphus condition, we were
able to choke the joy of those people. We were able to make this an unpleasant
Task. We're able to eliminate every particular
value that they got from enjoying building Legos.