But we didn't stop there, we kept on doing one more experiment.
And this other experiment, looks slightly different.
We gave people a sheet of paper, with lots and lots of letters, randomly arranged
letters, and we asked people to find pairs of letters.
That were the same, ss for example, or bb and so on.
And we paid people. We paid people more for the first sheet,
and less for the second sheet. And less for the third sheet, and so on.
And after they submitted each of them, we asked them, do you want to do the next one
for slightly less money, and so on. And we had the regular condition in which
we asked people to write their name on it. And on every sheet and when they submitted
it. The experimenter looked at the sheet from
top to bottom, scanned it, said aha and put it down on the pile of paper.
In the second condition we didn't ask people to write their name on it and the
experimenter now didn't even look at the sheet.
They just took the sheet and put it on the pile.
And in the third condition the experimenter, there was no name, the
experimenter took the sheet and directly put it through a shredder.
So there was not even a recognition of anything.
And we call this the acknowledge condition, the ignored condtion and the
shredder. Condition and the question was, when
people started working they started getting high price and then the question
again is what price would they stop? And what we found was in this shredded
condition people stopped at about $0.30 cents per page.
In the acknowledge condition they stopped at $0.15 per page.
So people were willing to work much, much more for much lower pay in the acknowledge
condition. Which means that the moment you say to
somebody, you look at their work, you say uh-huh.
It's a much, much better situation. People are willing to work for much less
money but what happened in the ignored condition, right?
The shredder was the extreme negligence and lack of caring.
The acknowledge was, you know in our case the, the most rewarding from a personal
relationship. What happened in the ignore?
You don't destroy the work but you don't look at it and you don't say uh-huh.
It turns out that was exactly like the shredder.
And there's kind of two pieces of news here.
The first piece of news is that if you want to get people to feel that they are
getting something in terms of meaning, appreciation and so on, it's not that
hard. All you need to do is to look at their job
and say aha. That gets a lot of the job done.
Not to mention if you say thank you or some other sense of appreciation.
On the negative side, it means that ignoring people, even to a slight degree
gets you almost all the way as if you're shredding their work, right?
I mean, think about it. The shredding condition was clearly
unimportant. The ignored condition got people almost
all the way, right? So if shredding was really demotivating.
Just ignoring got you almost all the way to that, to that level.
Which means that both, it's easy to get people to feel motivated, but it's also
incredibly easy to eliminate every sense of motivation.
And if you think about life this way, you could probably think about lots of people
around you working for you, with you, your own work.
And ask the question of, how do we inject more meaning into this situation?
What are the cases that we can increase meaning?
And what are the cases in which we can at least, eliminate the decreasing of
meaning? And I think, in both of those areas,
there's lots of room for improvement.