The Upside of Irrationality: The Unexpected Benefits of Defying Logic at Work and at Home. Dan Ariely

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СКАЧАТЬ his attention to the robot he was building, but his energy and excitement about building Bionicles was clearly diminished. When he finished his second construction, he paused. Should he build a third Bionicle or not? After a few seconds, he said he would build another one.

      Sean handed Chad the original box (the one Chad had assembled and Sean had disassembled), and Chad got to work. This time, he worked somewhat faster, but he abandoned his strategy; perhaps he felt he no longer needed an organizational strategy, or maybe he felt that the extra step was unnecessary.

      Meanwhile, Sean slowly took apart the second Bionicle Chad had just finished and placed the parts back into the second box. After Chad finished the third Bionicle, he looked it over and handed it to Sean. “That makes five sixty-seven,” Sean said. “Would you like to make another?”

      Chad checked his cell phone for the time and thought for a moment. “Okay,” he said, “I’ll make one more.”

      Sean handed him the second Bionicle for the second time, and Chad set about rebuilding it. (All the participants in his condition built and rebuilt the same two Bionicles until they decided to call it quits.) Chad managed to build both his Bionicles twice, for a total of four, for which he was paid $7.34.

      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 Bionicles when the payment was less than a dollar per robot.

      In addition to comparing the number of Bionicles our participants constructed in the two conditions, we wanted to see how the individuals’ liking of Legos influenced their persistence in the task. 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 Bionicles factories. The working conditions in the first Bionicles factory are very similar to those in the Sisyphean condition (which, sadly, is not very different from the structure of many workplaces). 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). You also observe their need for financial incentives to motivate them to continue working on their unpleasant task and how quickly they stop working once the payment drops below a certain level. 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 persist in the task, might be different.

      We actually conducted a related consultant experiment by describing the two experimental conditions to our participants and asking them to estimate the difference in productivity between the two factories. They basically got it right, estimating that the total output in the meaningful condition would be higher than the output in the Sisyphean condition. But they were wrong in estimating the magnitude of the difference. 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 dramatically underestimate its power.

      In this light, let’s think about the results of the Bionicles experiment in terms of real-life labor. Joe and Chad loved playing with Legos and were paid at the same rate. 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.^* All the participants most likely understood that the whole exercise was silly—after all, they were just making stuff from Legos, not designing a new dam, saving lives, or developing a new medication—but for those in Chad’s condition, watching their creations being deconstructed in front of their eyes was hugely demotivating. It was enough to kill any joy they’d accrued from building the Bionicles in the first place. This conclusion seemed to tally with David’s and Devra’s stories; 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.

      NOW THAT WE had ruined the childhood memories of half of our participants, it was time to try another approach to the same experiment. This time the experimental setup was based more closely on David’s experience. Once again, we set up a booth in the student center, but this time we tested three conditions and used a different task.

      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).

      In the first condition (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 ten instances of consecutive Ss. Once they finished a page, they handed it to the experimenter, who looked over the sheet from top to bottom, nodded in a positive way, 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 to write their names at the top of the sheet. After completing the task, they handed the sheet to the experimenter, who placed it on top of a high stack of papers without even a sidelong glance. 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 were impressed by the difference a simple acknowledgment made. Based on the outcome of СКАЧАТЬ