Payoff

The Hidden Logic That Shapes Our Motivations

Dan Ariely

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster/ TED
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781501120053
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Applied Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Bestselling author Dan Ariely reveals fascinating new insights into motivation—showing that the subject is far more complex than we ever imagined. Every day we work hard to motivate ourselves, the people we live with, the people who work for and do business with us. In this way, much of what we do can be defined as being "motivators." From the boardroom to the living room, our role as motivators is complex, and the more we try to motivate partners and children, friends and coworkers, the clearer it becomes that the story of motivation is far more intricate and fascinating than we've assumed. Payoff investigates the true nature of motivation, our partial blindness to the way it works, and how we can bridge this gap. With studies that range from Intel to a kindergarten classroom, Ariely digs deep to find the root of motivation—how it works and how we can use this knowledge to approach important choices in our own lives. Along the way, he explores intriguing questions such as: Can giving employees bonuses harm productivity? Why is trust so crucial for successful motivation? What are our misconceptions about how to value our work? How does your sense of your mortality impact your motivation?

1

How to Destroy Motivation, or: Work as a Prison Movie

Why it’s astonishingly easy to demotivate someone

Life is never made unbearable by circumstances, but only by lack of meaning and purpose.

—Viktor E. Frankl

A few years ago, I was invited to speak about the topic of decision making to a group of a few hundred engineers at a big Seattle-based software firm. During the years before I met them, the mandate for this carefully recruited, experienced, and brainy bunch had been to create something fabulously innovative that would become the next big thing for this staid software company.

The engineers dove into the challenge with enthusiasm. They conducted tons of research. They built an almost-working prototype. They were all proud of their work, having spent long hours—including evenings and weekends away from their families—to make this awesome thing happen. They believed their invention would transform their company and make it the innovation giant it should have been.

After a short introduction, I started talking about some research that I was working on. I began by describing a set of experiments that Emir Kamenica (a professor at the University of Chicago), Drazen Prelec (a professor at MIT), and I had carried out—studies that unexpectedly resonated with the engineers.⁴

In these experiments, we asked participants to build some Lego Bionicles. These are marvelously weird Lego creatures that kids can creatively assemble in many different ways. We picked Bionicles as the object of our investigation because the joy of Lego is almost universal across cultures and ages, and because building with them resembles, at least conceptually, the creative process that is so central to innovation in the workplace.

We divided the participants into two different conditions. We offered the participants in one group $2 for the first Bionicle they built. We told them that at the end of the experiment, we would disassemble the Bionicles, put the pieces back in the box, and use the same Bionicle parts for the next participant. The participants seemed perfectly happy with this process.

After these participants assembled their first Bionicle, we placed their completed creations under the table for later disassembly. We then asked: “Would you like to build another one, this time for eleven cents less, for $1.89?” If the person said yes, we gave him another one, and when they finished that one, we asked, “Do you want to build another?” this time for $1.78, another for $1.67, and so on. At some point, the participants said, “No more. It’s not worth it for me.” On average, participants in this condition built eleven Bionicles for a total take-home pay of a bit more than $14.

The participants in the second condition were promised the same amount of money per Bionicle, so they had the same financial incentive. But this time, as soon as they finished building a Bionicle and started working on the next one, we began disassembling their completed Bionicle. Right before their eyes. Once we finished undoing their work, we placed the parts back in the box.

The first group built their Bionicles in what we called the “meaningful” condition, so called because they were allowed to feel that they had completed their work satisfactorily. We called the second condition the “Sisyphic” condition—named after the ancient Greek story about Sisyphus, who was condemned by the gods to roll a boulder up a hill only to have it roll down again and again for eternity. Those in the Sisyphic condition managed to build an average of seven Bionicles—four fewer than those in the “meaningful” condition.

As I described this experiment to the engineers, I added that we also looked at individual differences in terms of Lego love. Some people are naturally enthusiastic about building Bionicles, while others not so much. We wanted to see how this individual difference translated to productivity. In the meaningful condition, some participants were unenthusiastic about making Bionicles, so they made fewer of them. In contrast, those who loved making these creations were happy to assemble them for relatively small amounts of money. Basically, people who loved the task kept on going because they enjoyed the process and found meaning in it. (Of course, we weren’t talking about Meaning with a capital M. These folks weren’t curing cancer or building bridges; they were building plastic toys, and they understood that their creatures would be taken apart quite soon.)

But here’s what was so interesting: In the Sisyphic condition, we discovered that there was no relationship between the internal joy of making Bionicles and productivity. Those who weren’t terribly excited about Bionicles created about seven of them—the same number as those who loved building them. In general, we should expect that those who love Bionicles would build more of them, but by dismantling their creations right before their eyes, we crushed any joy that the Bionicle-loving participants could get out of this otherwise fun activity.

As I was describing these results, one of the chief engineers stopped me. “We completely understand the experiment you’re talking about,” he said, “because we’ve all just been part of the Sisyphic condition.”

They all nodded in sorrowful agreement. The chief engineer continued talking. “Last week, our CEO told us that our project was canceled, that the whole initiative was going to be scrapped, and that soon we would be assigned to other projects.”

Up to that point, I had wondered why the people sitting in front of me were so lethargic and depressed. Now I understood.

“Your situation,” I told them, “is also the way that some movies depict breaking the spirit of prisoners. Does anyone here remember the famous prison-yard scene from the movie The Last Castle?”

Several people nodded. In the movie, Robert Redford plays the role of Eugene Irwin, a court-martialed three-star lieutenant general who is sentenced to ten years in prison. Soon after he is imprisoned, he challenges the warden over the bad treatment of prisoners and is punished for insubordination. His punishment is to move enormous rocks from one side of the prison yard to another. The task is so daunting that many of the prisoners think he will pass out before finishing; others cheer him on. After hours of back-breaking work, Irwin manages a final push of energy. He pulls up the last huge rock, carries it across the yard, and drops it triumphantly onto the pile. The prisoners go wild. It looks like a happy ending—until a few seconds later when the warden tells the prisoner he’s not finished with the job and orders him to put the rocks back.

Irwin continues to move the rocks back until sunset, but, though he accomplishes this harsh punishment, there is no sign of triumph from him or his fellow prisoners.

“What added to the torture,” I explained to the engineers, “wasn’t just that he had to carry all those terribly heavy rocks; it was the fact that the goal of moving them from one side of the prison yard to the other was taken away. And by forcing Irwin to put the rocks back, the warden drained him and all the prisoners of any potential feeling of accomplishment, making the victory a hollow one. This type of futile battle is the same as Sisyphus’s.” I added, “If Sisyphus were pushing his rock up a new hill every time, he would have a sense of progress. But because he keeps pushing the same rock up the same hill over and over, his work is completely meaningless.”

That’s when I overheard one of the engineers sitting in the front row mumble to another, “So we’re basically working in a prison movie.”

Shredding Motivation

The connection between our experiments and how events unfolded in the lives of the software engineers was uncanny. I immediately felt both connected to them and sorry for them, as their work had been brutally robbed of meaning. I am not sure whether, at that point in the conversation, I should have moved to a less charged topic, but I was so fascinated by the unexpected match between our Bionicle experiments and the engineers’ experience that I decided to push forward and describe a few more experiments on motivation and futility at work.

“In another experiment, we printed letters in random order on many sheets of paper,” I explained. “We then asked participants to find pairs of identical letters that were next to each other.”

When participants finished the first sheet, they were paid 55 cents. We then asked them if they wanted to do another sheet for 5 cents less, and so on. (This was the same diminishing-payment approach we used in the Bionicles experiment, just with a different task and different amounts of money.) In this experiment, we had three conditions. In the “acknowledged” condition, each participant wrote their name on the top left of the sheet, found all the pairs of letters they could, and then walked over to the experimenter and gave the paper to him. The experimenter looked at it carefully from top to bottom, said “Uh-huh,” and placed it facedown on a pile on the left side of his desk. He then asked the participant if he or she wanted to work on another sheet for five cents less, or if they would rather stop and get paid for their work. If the participant wanted another sheet, the process continued.

The “ignored” condition was slightly less meaningful. This time, the participants didn’t write their names down, and when they handed in their sheets, the experimenter didn’t even look at their papers. He simply placed them facedown in a pile on the left side of his desk without any kind of acknowledgment.

We called the last and most extreme condition the “shredded” condition. In this condition, when participants handed their sheets to the experimenter, they were not acknowledged at all. The experimenter just inserted the sheets into a large shredder next to his desk. He then turned to the participants and asked if they wanted to do another sheet for a payment of 5 cents less.

You might reason that those in the “ignored” condition would have quickly learned once they completed their first sheet that they could cheat. No one was checking their work, so why bother finding all the pairs of letters? Why not earn more money for less work? You could also reason that the temptation to cheat would be even stronger for those in the “shredded” condition. Why not shirk and get paid for doing nothing? If this were the case, we thought we would find that participants in the “ignored” and “shredded” conditions would have chosen to work longer for less money. But did they?

Here is what we found: In the “acknowledged” condition, participants stopped when the pay rate fell to around 15 cents—indicating that doing more was not worth their time. In contrast, participants in the “shredded” condition stopped working far earlier, at about 29 cents. These results show that when we are acknowledged for our work, we are willing to work harder for less pay, and when we are not acknowledged, we lose much of our motivation.

What about the “ignored” condition? You might think it would be somewhere between the “acknowledged” and the “shredded” conditions, but where? Would the results fall closer to the “acknowledged” or to those of the “shredded” condition? Perhaps exactly in the middle?

In fact, participants who experienced the “ignored” condition stopped working when the payment per page was around 27.5 cents—only 1.5 cents less than the participants whose work was shredded. This suggests that if you really want to demotivate people, “shredding” their work is the way to go, but that you can get almost all the way there simply by ignoring their efforts. Acknowledgment is a kind of human magic—a small human connection, a gift from one person to another that translates into a much larger, more meaningful outcome. On the positive side, these results also show that we can increase motivation simply by acknowledging the efforts of those working with us.

• • •

As I described these results and their implications, the software engineers looked increasingly grumpy. Sadly, there are many employees of many companies in the same state.

According to Gallup, which has been collecting data on employee engagement for many years, American workers are generally unmotivated in their jobs—a problem that has risen steadily by about 2 percent a year since Gallup began examining this issue in 2000. Today, more than 50 percent of employees are disengaged, while only about 17 percent are “actively disengaged.”⁵ Negative motivation is a big deal, because when people are disengaged, they show up late, they leave early, they fail to keep on top of their expense accounts, they do the least that they can, and sometimes they even actively sabotage their employers.

Why are people so demotivated at work? I think it’s partially because of the persistence of an industrial-era view of labor that is largely accepted as truth. This view holds that the labor market is a place where individuals exchange work for wages (regardless of how meaningless the labor is) and that people typically don’t really care what happens to their work as long as they are fairly compensated for it.

This view of labor as a work-wage exchange springs from Adam Smith’s 1776 magnum opus The Wealth of Nations, in which Smith described the benefits of breaking a large task into components, assigning one person to each specific task, and encouraging them to specialize in performing it. In his famous example of the pin factory, Smith argued that having one person make every part of a pin would result in low productivity. In contrast, he envisioned an efficient workplace built on a division of labor. It looked like this: “One man draws out the wire, another straights it, a third cuts it, a fourth points it, a fifth grinds it at the top for receiving a head.”⁶

From the perspective of the factory owner in the Industrial Revolution, this approach of breaking tasks into components and letting people specialize in their specific tasks, bit by bit and hour after hour, yielded a lot of efficiency gains. But from the workers’ point of view, this approach meant that they were nothing more than cogs in a wheel. They were working only to earn a wage, with no real sense of how their tasks fit into the big picture. From this industrial-era point of view, capitalism and labor were based on a simple equation: individuals needed and wanted stuff; companies made and shipped the stuff people wanted; laborers worked at dismal jobs for long hours so they could buy stuff. Workers were assumed to view work as unpleasant, but the reward was assumed to be so important (a paycheck) that it was worth suffering through to achieve it and then exchange it for stuff.

It’s astonishing to me how some ideas endure even when it’s obvious that they are no longer relevant. Smith’s industrial-era view of labor has been passed down for generations as an indisputable truth, but as our experiments and many others show, there is a lot more to work than money and things to buy. As the great economist John Maynard Keynes observed, “If human nature felt no temptation to take a chance . . . no satisfaction (profit apart) in constructing a factory, a railway, a mine or a farm, there might not be much investment as a result of cold calculation . . . Enterprise only pretends to itself to be mainly motivated by the statement in its own prospectus.”⁷

• • •

This is how I explained to the software engineers how their motivation equation got distorted. First, I asked them for their reflections.

“These days, how many of you show up to work later than you used to?” I asked.

Everybody raised their hands.

“How many of you now go home earlier than you used to?”

Again, they all raised their hands.

“How many of ...