gestaltung kleines bad mit dusche

translator: timothy covellreviewer: morton bast i want to talk a little bit todayabout labor and work. when we think about how people work, the naive intuition we have is that people are like rats in a maze -- that all people care about is money, and the moment we give them money, we can direct them to work one way, we can direct them to work another way.

this is why we give bonuses to bankersand pay in all kinds of ways. and we really havethis incredibly simplistic view of why people work, and whatthe labor market looks like. at the same time, if you think about it, there's all kinds of strange behaviorsin the world around us. think about something like mountaineeringand mountain climbing. if you read books of peoplewho climb mountains, difficult mountains, do you think that those books are fullof moments of joy and happiness? no, they are full of misery.

in fact, it's all about frostbiteand having difficulty walking, and difficulty breathing -- cold, challenging circumstances. and if people were just tryingto be happy, the moment they would get to the top, they would say,"this was a terrible mistake. i'll never do it again." (laughter) "instead, let me sit on a beachsomewhere drinking mojitos."

but instead, people go down, and after they recover, they go up again. and if you think aboutmountain climbing as an example, it suggests all kinds of things. it suggests that we careabout reaching the end, a peak. it suggests that we careabout the fight, about the challenge. it suggests that there's all kindsof other things that motivate us to work or behave in all kinds of ways. and for me personally,i started thinking about this

after a student came to visit me. this was one of my studentsfrom a few years earlier, and he came one day back to campus. and he told me the following story: he said that for more than two weeks, he was workingon a powerpoint presentation. he was working in a big bank, and this was in preparationfor a merger and acquisition. and he was working very hardon this presentation --

graphs, tables, information. he stayed late at night every day. and the day before it was due, he sent his powerpointpresentation to his boss, and his boss wrote him back and said, "nice presentation,but the merger is canceled." and the guy was deeply depressed. now at the moment when he was working, he was actually quite happy.

every night he was enjoying his work, he was staying late, he was perfectingthis powerpoint presentation. but knowing that nobody would everwatch it made him quite depressed. so i started thinkingabout how do we experiment with this idea of the fruits of our labor. and to start with, we createda little experiment in which we gave people legos, and we asked them to build with legos. and for some people,we gave them legos and we said,

"hey, would you like to buildthis bionicle for three dollars? we'll pay you three dollars for it." and people said yes,and they built with these legos. and when they finished, we took it,we put it under the table, and we said, "would you liketo build another one, this time for $2.70?" if they said yes,we gave them another one, and when they finished, we asked them, "do you want to build another one?"for $2.40, $2.10, and so on,

until at some point people said, "no more. it's not worth it for me." this was what we calledthe meaningful condition. people built one bionicle after another. after they finished every one of them, we put them under the table. and we told them that at the endof the experiment, we will take all these bionicles,we will disassemble them, we will put them back in the boxes,

and we will use itfor the next participant. there was another condition. this other condition was inspiredby david, my student. and this other condition we calledthe sisyphic condition. and if you rememberthe story about sisyphus, sisyphus was punished by the godsto push the same rock up a hill, and when he almost got to the end, the rock would roll over,and he would have to start again. and you can think about thisas the essence of doing futile work.

you can imagine that if he pushedthe rock on different hills, at least he would havesome sense of progress. also, if you look at prison movies, sometimes the way that the guardstorture the prisoners is to get them to dig a hole,and when the prisoner is finished, they ask him to fill the holeback up and then dig again. there's somethingabout this cyclical version of doing something over and over and over that seems to beparticularly demotivating.

so in the second conditionof this experiment, that's exactly what we did. we asked people, "would you like to buildone bionicle for three dollars?" and if they said yes, they built it. then we asked them, "do you wantto build another one for $2.70?" and if they said yes,we gave them a new one, and as they were building it, we took apart the onethat they just finished.

and when they finished that, we said, "would you liketo build another one, this time for 30 cents less?" and if they said yes, we gave them the onethat they built and we broke. so this was an endless cycleof them building, and us destroying in front of their eyes. now what happens when you comparethese two conditions? the first thing that happened wasthat people built many more bionicles --

eleven in the meaningful condition, versus seven in the sisyphus condition. and by the way, we should point outthat this was not big meaning. people were not curing canceror building bridges. people were buildingbionicles for a few cents. and not only that, everybody knew that the bionicleswould be destroyed quite soon. so there was not a realopportunity for big meaning. but even the small meaningmade a difference.

now we had another versionof this experiment. in this other version of the experiment, we didn't put people in this situation, we just described to them the situation, much as i am describing to you now, and we asked them to predictwhat the result would be. what happened? people predicted the right directionbut not the right magnitude. people who were just giventhe description of the experiment

said that in the meaningful condition, people would probably buildone more bionicle. so people understandthat meaning is important, they just don't understandthe magnitude of the importance, the extent to which it's important. there was one other pieceof data we looked at. if you think about it, there aresome people who love legos, and some people who don't. and you would speculatethat the people who love legos

would build more legos,even for less money, because after all,they get more internal joy from it. and the people who love legos lesswould build less legos because the enjoymentthat they derive from it is lower. and that's actually what we foundin the meaningful condition. there was a very nice correlationbetween the love of legos and the amount of legos people built. what happened in the sisyphic condition? in that condition,the correlation was zero --

there was no relationshipbetween the love of legos, and how much people built, which suggests to methat with this manipulation of breaking thingsin front of people's eyes, we basically crushed any joythat they could get out of this activity. we basically eliminated it. soon after i finishedrunning this experiment, i went to talk to a bigsoftware company in seattle. i can't tell you who they were,but they were a big company in seattle.

this was a groupwithin the software company that was put in a different building, and they asked them to innovate, and create the next big productfor this company. and the week before i showed up, the ceo of this big software companywent to that group, 200 engineers, and canceled the project. and i stood there in front of 200 of the most depressedpeople i've ever talked to.

and i described to themsome of these lego experiments, and they said they felt like they hadjust been through that experiment. and i asked them, i said, "how many of you now show upto work later than you used to?" and everybody raised their hand. i said, "how many of you now go homeearlier than you used to?" everybody raised their hand. i asked them, "how many of you now add not-so-kosher thingsto your expense reports?"

and they didn't raise their hands, but they took me out to dinner and showed me what they could dowith expense reports. and then i asked them, i said, "what could the ceo have doneto make you not as depressed?" and they came up with all kinds of ideas. they said the ceo could have askedthem to present to the whole company about their journeyover the last two years and what they decided to do.

he could have asked them to thinkabout which aspect of their technology could fit with other partsof the organization. he could have asked them to buildsome next-generation prototypes, and see how they would work. but the thing is that any one of thosewould require some effort and motivation. and i think the ceo basically did notunderstand the importance of meaning. if the ceo, just like our participants, thought the essenceof meaning is unimportant, then he [wouldn't] care.

and he would say, "at the momenti directed you in this way, and now that i'm directingyou in this way, everything will be okay." but if you understoodhow important meaning is, then you would figure outthat it's actually important to spend some time, energy and effort in getting people to care moreabout what they're doing. the next experimentwas slightly different. we took a sheet of paperwith random letters,

and we asked peopleto find pairs of letters that were identical next to each other. that was the task. people did the first sheet, then we asked if they wanted to doanother for a little less money, the next sheet for a little bitless, and so on and so forth. and we had three conditions. in the first condition, peoplewrote their name on the sheet, found all the pairs of letters,

gave it to the experimenter, the experimenter would look at it, scan it from top to bottom, say "uh huh," and put iton the pile next to them. in the second condition,people did not write their name on it. the experimenter looked at it, took the sheet of paper,did not look at it, did not scan it, and simply put it on the pile of pages. so you take a piece,you just put it on the side.

in the third condition, the experimenter got the sheet of paper, and put it directly into a shredder. what happened in those three conditions? in this plot i'm showing youat what pay rate people stopped. so low numbers meanthat people worked harder. they worked for much longer. in the acknowledged condition, people worked all the waydown to 15 cents.

at 15 cents per page, they basically stopped these efforts. in the shredder condition, it was twiceas much -- 30 cents per sheet. and this is basicallythe result we had before. you shred people's efforts, output -- you get them not to be as happywith what they're doing. but i should point out, by the way, that in the shredder condition,people could have cheated. they could have done not so good work,

because they realizedpeople were just shredding it. so maybe the first sheetyou'd do good work, but then you see nobodyis really testing it, so you would do more and more and more. so in fact, in the shredder condition, people could have submitted more workand gotten more money, and put less effort into it. but what about the ignored condition? would the ignored conditionbe more like the acknowledged

or more like the shredder,or somewhere in the middle? it turns out it wasalmost like the shredder. now there's good news and bad news here. the bad news is that ignoringthe performance of people is almost as bad as shreddingtheir effort in front of their eyes. ignoring gets you a whole way out there. the good news is that by simply lookingat something that somebody has done, scanning it and saying "uh huh," that seems to be quite sufficient

to dramatically improvepeople's motivations. so the good news is that adding motivation doesn't seem to be so difficult. the bad news isthat eliminating motivations seems to be incredibly easy, and if we don't think about itcarefully, we might overdo it. so this is all in termsof negative motivation, or eliminating negative motivation. the next part i want to show youis something about positive motivation.

so there is a storein the u.s. called ikea. and ikea is a storewith kind of okay furniture that takes a long time to assemble. i don't know about you, but every time i assemble one of those, it takes me much longer,it's much more effortful, it's much more confusing,i put things in the wrong way -- i can't say i enjoy those pieces. i can't say i enjoy the process.

but when i finish it, i seem to like thoseikea pieces of furniture more than i like other ones. and there's an old story about cake mixes. so when they startedcake mixes in the '40s, they would take this powderand they would put it in a box, and they would ask housewivesto basically pour it in, stir some water in it, mix it, put it in the oven,and -- voila -- you had cake.

but it turns out they were very unpopular. people did not want them, and they thought aboutall kinds of reasons for that. maybe the taste was not good? no, the taste was great. what they figured out wasthat there was not enough effort involved. it was so easy that nobodycould serve cake to their guests and say, "here is my cake." no, it was somebody else's cake,as if you bought it in the store.

it didn't really feel like your own. so what did they do? they took the eggs and the milkout of the powder. now you had to breakthe eggs and add them, you had to measure the milkand add it, mixing it. now it was your cake.now everything was fine. (applause) now, i think a little bitlike the ikea effect, by getting people to work harder,

they actually got them to lovewhat they're doing to a higher degree. so how do we look at thisquestion experimentally? we asked people to build some origami. we gave them instructionson how to create origami, and we gave them a sheet of paper. and these were all novices, and they built somethingthat was really quite ugly -- nothing like a frog or a crane.

but then we told them,"look, this origami really belongs to us. you worked for us, but i'll tellyou what, we'll sell it to you. how much do you want to pay for it?" and we measured how muchthey were willing to pay for it. and we had two types of people: we had the people who built it, and the people who did not build it, and just looked at itas external observers. and what we foundwas that the builders thought

that these were beautifulpieces of origami -- and they were willing to payfive times more for them than the people who justevaluated them externally. now you could say --if you were a builder, do you think [you'd say],"oh, i love this origami, but i know that nobodyelse would love it?" or "i love this origami,and everybody else will love it as well?" which one of those two is correct? turns out the buildersnot only loved the origami more,

they thought that everybodywould see the world in their view. they thought everybody elsewould love it more as well. in the next version,we tried to do the ikea effect. we tried to make it more difficult. so for some people, we gave the same task. for some people, we made it harderby hiding the instructions. at the top of the sheet,we had little diagrams of how you fold origami. for some people, we just eliminated that.

so now this was tougher. well in an objective way, the origami now was uglier,it was more difficult. now when we looked at the easyorigami, we saw the same thing -- builders loved it more,evaluators loved it less. when you looked at the hard instructions, the effect was larger. why? because now the buildersloved it even more.

they put all this extra effort into it. and evaluators? they loved it even less. because in reality, it was even uglierthan the first version. of course, this tells you somethingabout how we evaluate things. now think about kids. imagine i asked you, "how muchwould you sell your kids for?" your memories and associations and so on. most people would sayfor a lot, a lot of money.

on good days. but imagine this was slightly different. imagine if you did not have your kids. and one day you went to the parkand you met some kids. they were just like your kids, and you played with them for a few hours, and when you were about to leave,the parents said, "hey, by the way, just before you leave,if you're interested, they're for sale." how much would you pay for them now?

most people say not that much. and this is because our kidsare so valuable, not just because of who they are, but because of us, because they are so connected to us, and because of the time and connection. by the way, if you thinkikea instructions are not good, what about the instructions that comewith kids, those are really tough. by the way, these are my kids, which,of course, are wonderful and so on.

which comes to tell you one more thing, which is, much like our builders, when they look at the creatureof their creation, we don't see that other peopledon't see things our way. let me say one last comment. if you think about adam smithversus karl marx, adam smith had a very importantnotion of efficiency. he gave an example of a pin factory. he said pins have 12 different steps,

and if one person does all 12 steps,production is very low. but if you get one person to do step one, and one person to do step twoand step three and so on, production can increase tremendously. and indeed, this is a great example, and the reason for the industrialrevolution and efficiency. karl marx, on the other hand, said that the alienationof labor is incredibly important in how people think about the connectionto what they are doing.

and if you do all 12 steps,you care about the pin. but if you do one step every time,maybe you don't care as much. i think that in the industrial revolution, adam smith was morecorrect than karl marx. but the reality is that we've switched, and now we're in the knowledge economy. you can ask yourself, what happensin a knowledge economy? is efficiency still moreimportant than meaning? i think the answer is no.

i think that as we move to situations in which people haveto decide on their own about how much effort, attention,caring, how connected they feel to it, are they thinking about laboron the way to work, and in the shower and so on, all of a sudden marxhas more things to say to us. so when we think about labor, we usually think about motivationand payment as the same thing, but the reality is that we shouldprobably add all kinds of things to it --

meaning, creation, challenges,ownership, identity, pride, etc. the good news is that if we addedall of those components and thought about them -- how do we create our ownmeaning, pride, motivation, and how do we do it in our workplace, and for the employees -- i think we could get people to beboth more productive and happier. thank you very much.

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