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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Dan Ariely
Read between
February 13 - February 18, 2018
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.
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.
THE GENERAL IDEA of contrafreeloading contradicts the simple economic view that organisms will always choose to maximize their reward while minimizing their effort.
“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!”
What do you think? Do humans, in general, exhibit contrafreeloading, or are they more rational? What about you?
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.
experiment. As luck would have it, he was assigned to the meaningful condition.
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.”
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.
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.
Unlike Joe, Chad was assigned to a procedure that among ourselves we fondly called the “Sisyphean” condition.
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.”
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 B...
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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 Bio...
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the first Bionicle...
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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).
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 pe...
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estimating that the total output in the meaningful condition would be higher than the output in the Sisyphean condition.
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 dramat...
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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.*
for those in Chad’s condition, watching their creations being deconstructed in front of their eyes was hugely demotivating.
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.
We created a sheet of paper with a random sequence of letters on it and asked the participants to find instances where the letter S was followed by another letter S. We told them that each sheet contained ten instances of consecutive Ss and that they would have to find all ten instances in order to complete a sheet. We also told them about the payment scheme: they would be paid $0.55 for the first completed page, $0.50 for the second, and so on (for the twelfth page and thereafter, they would receive nothing).
(which we called acknowledged),
we asked the students to write their names on each sheet prior to starting the task and then to find the t...
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they handed it to the exp...
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and placed it upside down on top of a large pile of completed sheets. The instructions for the ignored condition were basically the same, but we didn’t ask participants...
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In the third, ominously named shredded condition, we did something even more extreme. Once the participant handed in their sheet, instead of adding it to a stack of papers, the experimenter immediately fed the paper into a shredder, right before the participant’s eyes, without even looking at it.
we found that about half (49 percent) of those in the acknowledged condition went on to complete ten sheets or more, whereas only 17 percent in the shredded condition completed ten sheets or more.
The results showed that participants in the acknowledged condition completed on average 9.03 sheets of letters; those in the shredded condition completed 6.34 sheets; and those in the ignored
condition (drumroll, please) completed 6.77 sheets (and only 18 percent of them completed ten sheets or more). The amount of work produced in the ignored condition was much, much closer to the performance in the shredded condition than to that in the acknowledged condition.
THIS EXPERIMENT TAUGHT us that sucking the meaning out of work is surprisingly easy. If you’re a manager who really wants to demotivate your employees, destroy their work in front of their eyes. Or, if you want to be a little subtler about it, just ignore them and their efforts. On the other hand, if you want to motivate people working with you and for y...
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The participants in the shredded condition quickly realized that they could cheat, because no one bothered to look at their work. In fact, if these participants were rational, upon realizing that their work was not checked, those in the shredded condition should have cheated, persisted in the task the longest, and made the most money. The fact that the acknowledged group worked longer and the shredded group worked the least further suggests that when it comes to labor, human motivation is complex. It can’t be reduced to a simple “work for money” trade-off.
As I reflected on the situations facing David, Devra, and others, my thoughts eventually lighted on my administrative assistant.
On paper, Jay had a simple enough job description: he was managing my research accounts, paying participants, ordering research supplies, and arranging my travel schedule. But the information technology that Jay had to use made his job a sort of Sisyphean task.
The SAP accounting software he used daily required him to fill in numerous fields on the appropriate electronic forms, sending these e-forms to other people, who filled in a few more fields, who in turn sent the e-forms to someone else, who approved the expenses and subsequently passed them to yet another person, who actually settled the accounts. Not only was poor Jay doing only a small p...
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Why did they break tasks into so many components, put each person in charge of only small parts, and never show them the overall progress or completion of their tasks? I suspect it all has to do with the ideas of efficiency brought to us by Adam Smith.
Nations, division of labor is an incredibly effective way to achieve higher efficiency in the production process.
Modern IT infrastructure allows us to break projects into very small, discrete parts and assign each person to do only one of the many parts. In so doing, companies run the risk of taking away employees’ sense of the big picture, purpose, and sense of completion.
If companies really want their workers to produce, they should try to impart a sense of meaning—not just through vision statements but by allowing employees to feel a sense of completion and ensuring that a job well done is acknowledged. At the end of the day, such factors can exert a huge influence on satisfaction and productivity.
Pride of creation and ownership runs deep in human beings. When we make a meal from scratch or build a bookshelf, we smile and say to ourselves, “I am so proud of what I just made!” The question is: why do we take ownership in some cases and not others? At what point do we feel justified in taking pride in something we’ve worked on?
