What gets us to care and act, and be active.

And the starting point,

especially being in Chicago, close to the University of Chicago,

in the Economics Department of Chicago.

I think it is worthwhile to think that our basic idea about human motivation

is that we think about people like rats.

People don't like to work.

If we were left to our own accord what we would be doing,

we would be on a beach somewhere sipping mojitos...

And the ony reason we work is because we need to get money,

so that we can eventually sit on the beach drinking mojitos.

(Laughter)

But the basic motivation is to enjoy leisure and not work

and everything else is just a distraction in order so we can do that.

And it is a fine model, but we should ask ourselves,

is this a correct depiction of human motivation

is this really what gets us to act and to do things.

And one challenge you can think about is mountain climbing.

If you look at people who have climbed different mountains

and their depictions, and histories and stories

you would think this is the most miserable thing in the world.

People are cold, and have frostbite

It's hard to breathe, it's difficult.

I climbed a little peak in the Himalayas many years ago

and you would think that you would get to the top,

and sit there and enjoy the view.

No! It's cold, it's miserable, you're tired.

Just go down as fast as possible from that point on. (Laughter)

And if you think about this behavior

and say to yourself, here is something that every moment seems like agony,

it just seems like a punishment

and people go down, and all they want to do is go up again.

They want to recover first, but then they want to go up again.

How does this view fit with our notion

of people sitting on the beach drinking mojitos?

It looks like people are either suckers for punishment.

Right? We want to punish ourselves.

Or, that what really motivates us is not relaxation,

it's not comfort, it's other things.

It's about achievement, it's about conquering,

it's about pursuing some goal, it's about arriving at some peak.

I actually became interested in this topic

when one of my ex-students came to talk to me.

His name was David, he left university a few years earlier

and he became a consultant, or some banker on Wall Street.

And he worked for a big bank

and he told me that for a few weeks he worked on a big presentation

for a merger that was going to happen.

He worked evenings, he worked overtime to create this beautiful presentation

with statistics and graph and description.

He was really proud of his work, and he really enjoyed it.

And then he sent it to his boss, and his boss said,

"David, great job, the merger is cancelled."

And he was just devastated!

And the interesting thing about this

is that he said that from a functional perspective everything was great.

Here he was, he did a good job, he enjoyed it while he was doing it,

his boss appreciated it, and he was certain

that he would get a raise when the time came

but at the same time he couldn't care now.

And he was working on another document now, and just couldn't care to the same degree.

Now the question is, what happened to him? What is it?

Everything functional was OK, but something was missing.

So to look at this I decided to do a couple of little experiments.

And the experiments we started with were about building Bionicles.

So, Bionicles are little Lego robots, with about forty pieces,

and you're going to build them.

And we got people to come to the Student Center

and we said, "Hey, why don't you build Legos for money?"

You want to build the first one? You can get three dollars for it.

After they finished the first one we asked, "Do you want to build another one?"

"This one you can get $2.70 for.

When you've finished this one, do you want another one, for $2.40?"

$2.10

$1.80

And so on at a a diminishing pay rate.

And people basically had to decide when they want to stop.

At what time, the money they were getting

from building Legos was not worth their time.

And we did this in one of two conditions.

The first one was just the way I described to you now.

People build one Lego after another, after another, after another

and when they finished building all these Legos

when they finished building each of them,

we took them, we put them under the desk

and we told them that when they finished the whole experiment

we would take them, we would break them back,

and we would put them back in the boxes for the next participant.

This is what we call the 'meaningful' condition.

Not a really big meaning, we are academics, but little meaning. (Laughter)

The second experiment, we called the Sisyphic condition.

And in this experiment people started building one Lego

and when they finished it we took it back from them

and said: "Do you want to build another one?"

And if they wanted to build another one we handed them the second one,

but as they were working on the second one,

we were taking apart the first one in front of their eyes.

And then if they wanted to build a third one, we would give them that one back

So it was a complete recycling.

And we called this the Sisyphic condition, after Sisyphus,

who pushed the same rock over the same hill over and over.

And we can ask ourselves how much of the demotivating

aspects of Sisyphus come from the fact

that he pushed the same rock on the same hill

versus if it was a different hill every time.

So building something, having it destroyed

in front of your eyes and building it again

seems kind of an essential element for being unmotivated

and here is what we got.

In a meaningful condition people build about eleven robots

and in the Sisyphus condition they build seven.

We also asked other people who did not participate

in the experiment to predict what would people do.

How much more would people build in a 'meaningful' condition than in a 'Sisyphic' condition.

And people predicted correctly but dramatically underestimated the effect.

People thought that the difference would be about one robot

but the difference was much, much larger.

So we all understand that meaning is important

we just dramatically underestimate how important this is.

And I will tell you that I recently went to give a talk at a big software company.

And this was a company where a group of people

worked for two years designing a particular product,

and they thought this was the best product for this company.

And after two years of working on it,

the week before I came, the CEO cancelled he project

and I've never seen a group of more demotivated people in my life.

And they all told me they felt like they were part of this Lego experiment.

They worked for a long time and something was just destroyed in front of them.

And I think basically their boss had the same mistake as our prediction experiment

where he understood that meaning is probably a little bit important,

but just didn't understand how big it is

and now he had a group of people who were completely demotivated, and so on.

Now, there was another interesting part of this experiment

which is if you look at the correlation between

how much people love Legos naturally and how much they persisted,

you would expect that people who love Lego would build a lot

and people who don't love Lego would build a little;

there would be some individual difference.

And indeed there [were] individual differences

In a meaningful condition people who loved Legos built more

and people who didn't love them didn't build as many.

In the Sisyphic condition the correlation was zero,

which tells me that we basically choked every inch of enjoyment

people had naturally from Legos.

People come with a natural appreciation for Legos, some people,

and we were basically able to crush that...

(Laughter)

So, the next experiment we wanted to find out

what even smaller differences could make.

So we gave people a sheet of paper with a lot of letters on it and we said,

"Look for two letters next to each other that are the same,"

it was a random set and we did the same thing.

We paid them more for the first sheet, less for the next sheet, and so on.

And we had three conditions.

In the first condition, every time you gave me a sheet, if I was the experimenter,

I would ask you to write your name on the top, I would look at it like this.

I would say "Aha!" and I would put it on the pile.

In the next condition you didn't have to write your name.

I would just take the sheet of paper and, without looking at it,

I would just put it on the big pile of paper;

no acknowledgement, just putting it down.

In the third condition, if you gave me a sheet of paper,

I immediately took it and shredded it. (Laughter)

And now the question is how much would people work in those three conditions.

And what I'm going to show you here is what is the minimum

amount of money people are willing to work for, right?

How long did it go, so low amounts of money mean that people enjoy it more.

So we got the replication on the first result.

In the acknowledged condition when you say,

"Aha!" people were willing to work up to $0.15 per page

really low wages.

In the shredded condition they wanted twice as much money

and the question is, what happens in the ignored condition?

Is the ignored condition like the shredded?

Is it like the acknowledged? Is it somewhere in the middle?

It turns out it was very similar to the shredded condition.

So if you really want to demotivate people shredding their work

is really good for that. (Laughter)

But it turns out that simply ignoring them

gets you a big part of the way, in fact, almost... (Laughter)

So this was one part of motivation,

it's about feeling meaning for what you are doing

and acknowledged and so on, and we mostly did this

by destroying people's motivation.

Let's think for a second about the other part,

that is how we can get people to be more motivated.

How we can get people to do more

and, the idea came to me here after going to IKEA

so I don't know about you, but I like IKEA but every time I get this furniture,

I find myself that it takes me much longer than I expected to build this

and the instructions seem confusing.

I often do a step and then have to backtrack

and when I have to guess something I think I guess wrong more than 50% of the time.

Lots of these things, and the thought is:

Is it that a result of this? Do I love my furniture more?

The fact that I have to build them, that I create them,

does that create a particular attachment between me and my furniture?

I call this the IKEA effect

And some evidence for this exists from cake mixes.

So when cake mixes came up in the fifties

to the surprise of the people who made up the cake mixes

they were not very popular

and the question is, why?

Pie crusts were popular, cookies were popular

all kinds of other ready mixes were popular, but not cakes.

And one of the theories was maybe people didn't have to do much for these cakes

maybe if you take a mix and add some water

put it in the oven and then make it

and someone says, "What a great cake!," you just can't feel good about it.

Maybe it was the fact that it didn't require

as much work that made cake mixes not as appealing.

This was known as the 'egg theory.'

And what they did to test it was, they took the eggs out of the cake mix.

All of a sudden the cake mix was the same,

you just had to add eggs and some milk to it.

What happened now? Cake mixes became much more popular.

Somehow having to put work into something makes it more appealing.

We decided to try this out,

so we gave people instructions to do origami

on the top you have the --

(Laughter)

-- on the top you have a list of what all the signs mean

and then you have a list of instruction of how to do origami

that is not that easy to do

and we asked people to do it.

And what happened? People created stuff

that didn't really look like what it was supposed to,

these were not origami experts.

But if you looked at how much people valued the origami

there were some auctions and people could bid for it, and so on.

It turns out that people who did not build the origami

thought it wasn't that exciting,

and people who built the origami thought it was just fantastic.

People who built the origami thought it was great.

But, moreover, people who built the origami

when we asked them to predict how much the other people valued this origami

they thought they would value them as much as they did.

So what happened is that the people who build the origami

not only thought it was wonderful,

they also thought that other people would view it their way.

Now we had another condition that was again going back to IKEA

we had people who got easy instructions

and for some people we hid the top part