Name: 【TED】Dan Ariely: What makes us feel good about our work? (What makes us feel good about our work? | Dan Ariely)
Uploaded: 2013-06-01T08:51:49.000Z
Duration: 20 min 27 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

To-infinitive

is that people are like rats in a maze --

This is why we give bonuses to bankers and pay in all kinds of ways.

And we really have this incredibly simplistic view

of why people work and what the labor market looks like.

there's all kinds of strange behaviors in the world around us.

Think about something like mountaineering and mountain climbing.

If you read books of people who climb mountains, difficult mountains,

do you think that those books are full of moments of joy and happiness?

In fact, it's all about frostbite and difficulty to walk

And if people were just trying to be happy,

they would say, "This was a terrible mistake.

"Instead, let me sit on a beach somewhere drinking mojitos."

and after they recover, they go up again.

And if you think about mountain climbing as an example,

It suggests that we care about reaching the end, a peak.

It suggests that we care about the fight, about the challenge.

It suggests that there's all kinds of other things

that motivate us to work or behave in all kinds of ways.

And for me personally, I started thinking about this

This was a student that was one of my students a few years earlier.

He said that for more than two weeks, he was working on a PowerPoint presentation.

This was in preparation for a merger and acquisition.

And he was working very hard on this presentation --

he sent his PowerPoint presentation to his boss,

"Nice presentation, but the merger is canceled."

he was staying late, he was perfecting this PowerPoint presentation.

But knowing that nobody would ever watch that made him quite depressed.

So I started thinking about how do we experiment

with this idea of the fruits of our labor.

And to start with, we created a 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 build this Bionicle for three dollars?

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 like to build another one, this time for $2.70?"

If they said yes, we gave them another one.

"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 called the meaningful condition.

After they finished every one of them, we put them under the table.

And we told them that at the end of the experiment,

we will take all these Bionicles, we will disassemble them,

we will put them back in the boxes, and we will use it for the next participant.

This other condition was inspired by David, my student.

And this other condition we called the Sisyphic condition.

And if you remember the story about Sisyphus,

Sisyphus was punished by the gods to push the same rock up a hill,

the rock would roll over, and he would have to start again.

And you can think about this as the essence of doing futile work.

You can imagine that if he pushed the rock on different hills,

at least he would have some sense of progress.

sometimes the way that the guards torture the prisoners

and when the prisoner is finished, they ask him to fill the hole back up and then dig again.

There's something about this cyclical version

of doing something over and over and over

that seems to be particularly demotivating.

So in the second condition of this experiment, that's exactly what we did.

We asked people, "Would you like to build one Bionicle for three dollars?"

Then we asked them, "Do you want to build another one for $2.70?"

And if they said yes, we gave them a new one,

we took apart the one that they just finished.

Subtitles ListPlay Video

【TED】Dan Ariely: What makes us feel good about our work? (What makes us feel good about our work? | Dan Ariely)

incredibly

eliminate

effort

basically