Lost Hobbit
Z-Day London 2014 The Zeitgeist Movement
On Rewards and Motivation Zeitgeist Day 2014
[inaudible conversation]
Melissa Saviste
[plays clip from the talk show "The Lang and O'Leary Exchange"]
(Amanda Lang) The combined wealth - this according to Oxfam -
of the world's 85 richest people
is equal to the 3.5 billion poorest people.
(Kevin O’Leary) It’s fantastic.
And this is a great thing because it inspires everybody,
gets them motivation to look up to the 1% and say:
“I wanna become one of those people,
"I’m gonna fight hard to get up to the top.”
This is fantastic news, and of course I applaud it.
[awkward silence]
(O'Leary) What can be wrong with this?
(Lang) Really?
(O’Leary) Yes, really.
(Lang) So, somebody living on...
(O'Leary) I celebrate capitalism.
(Lang) ...a dollar a day in Africa is getting up in the morning
and saying “I’m gonna be Bill Gates”?
- O'Leary: That’s the motivation everybody needs. - Lang: The only thing...
- Lang: ...between me and that guy is 'motivation', - O'Leary: I'm not against charity!
- Lang: ... I just need to pull up my socks… - O'Leary: I am not against...
- Lang: ...oh wait, I don’t have socks!"
(O'Leary) Look. Don't tell me that you want to redistribute wealth again.
That's never gonna happen, ok?
(Lang) You know what, you take a simple stat like this which is neither good nor bad. It's just a fact...
(O'Leary) It's a celebratory stat. I'm very excited about it. I'm wonderful to see it happen.
I tell kids everyday: "if you"...
- O'Leary: What's wrong with this? - Lang: If this comes up at a cocktail party...
- O'Leary: No, no. Amanda: What's wrong with this statement? - Lang: ...what possible response to it...
- O'Leary: If you work hard, you might be stinking rich someday. - Lang: We're talking about people...
...in extreme abject poverty.
- Lang: ...that's how you get 3.5 billion... - O'Leary: No we're not!
- O'Leary: You were just talking... - Lang: ...in this category.
- O'Leary: ...about really rich people. - Lang: No.
That was Kevin O'Leary, a Canadian businessman
and probably someone you would not want in charge of the world.
Those were his ideas on human motivation.
He claims that money is what motivates people
and especially the prospect of being among the world's top percent richest
which unfortunately seems to be quite a common worldview today.
But is that true?
In Zeitgeist spirit, we're going to look at what the actual evidence says
because, as we obviously know, majority opinion or common sense
sometimes turns out to be incorrect.
First, some psychological experiments
which actually say that rewards can reduce already existing motivation.
In a 1971 experiment, Edward Deci had students assembling puzzle cubes
first without rewards, then for money and finally without rewards again.
He observed them secretly, what they were doing in their free time
and he noticed that, in their free time
they would happily play with the puzzle cubes
however, after the reward condition, and when rewards were removed,
they would work on the puzzles less,
they suddenly had less motivation to work on puzzles.
Another similar experiment was done with children
who had an intrinsic interest in drawing.
This means that they liked to draw for its own sake
just for the fun of it.
Not because of any external motivation.
Then, some of the children were given a reward certificate
on the condition of continuing to draw
and afterwards, they showed less interest in drawing
than those who never got any rewards
and also less interest than they themselves have had at the beginning.
The research has called this effect "over-justification":
if you give and additional reason to do something that is already interesting,
that makes people think
that the task is not worth doing without the rewards.
So, in other words,
the focus shifts from doing the task to just getting the reward.
Now, you might say that, well, motivation isn't that important,
as long as things get done, and things get done well.
And obviously offering rewards should make people try harder
and get better results.
So, Sam Glucksberg tested this with a simple puzzle.
Participants were given a box of tacks, a candle, a matchbox
and they were told to attach the candle to the wall.
Can you think of how you would do this?
Half of the participants were told that they would receive a monetary reward
if they were among the quickest to solve the problem.
This is a simplified version of the puzzle
that was given to another group of participants.
There is one crucial difference: the box of tacks has already been emptied
and in this version, the puzzle is really easy to solve.
The results showed that for the first task,
which is more difficult and requires some creative thinking,
performance suffers if rewards are involved.
This could again be that the focus shifts from the task to getting the money
or they might be getting too excited about the bonus reward.
On the other hand, they did do better in this version,
in the simple one,
when they were offered rewards,
because the task was really easy.
So, it would seem that is okay to keep paying people for simple manual tasks.
However, as you all know, this is not very relevant anymore
because you have things like self-checkouts and self-driving cars,
and in some places in Asia, you even have robot restaurants.
So what's left for humans to do are the mentally demanding creative tasks,
such as building and maintaining those robots.
These are the sort of tasks that
Glucksberg showed are hindered by the promise of rewards.
In case you're wondering whether increasing the reward amount might work,
there was an experiment done by Dan Ariely and colleagues in rural India,
where they could offer the participants money
that to them was worth a year's salary.
They found that performance suffered most
when they were offered the biggest amount.
So, perhaps, when all you can think about is
what you're gonna do with your big bonus once you get it,
you might not get much actual work done.
One thing that all these experiments had in common
was that a tangible reward such as money or a reward certificate
was offered on condition of the participant doing something
and even the biggest critics of this line of research agree that
this is one condition where performance does suffer.
So, what should we do while we're in a system where we do need money to live?
Dan Pink, in his book "Drive", suggest that companies should pay their employees
well and unconditionally,
so the the issue of money would be off the table
and they could focus on their work.
The same idea could be applied to whole countries,
which is what the proponents of Basic Income are suggesting.
They believe that, if you provide everyone with enough money to cover basic needs,
then people would still continue to work.
They would work on what they love doing
because of people's natural desire to make the world a better place,
while being stuck in a non-rewarding job,
just for the sake of being alive,
more often hinders their ability to do so.
This is similar to Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs idea
that there are some basic needs
but once they're taken care of
and people have security about their job, house and so on,
they can focus on higher needs
which are relationships, self-esteem and self-actualization.
But if there's uncertainty about the future,
then that prevents the individuals from achieving their true potential.
On top of this pyramid of needs is self-actualization
which essentially means contributing something useful and lasting to society
which is quite a different view
from those who think that people only want to work
when externally incentivized.
Back to the idea of Basic Income.
So, what happens if people's basic and security needs are taken care of?
Thankfully this experiment has been carried out a few times in the world.
Here is an early example from Canada.
At that time, North American governments were quite enthusiastic about the idea.
They were even thinking about expanding this all over the United States and Canada.
This pilot project was run from 1974 to '79,
but, unfortunately, it stopped due to the recession,
and all the data from the project was archived
because the government thought it had failed.
They were finally discovered and analyzed in 2009
and the results were quite interesting.
They showed minimal effects on employment.
The only groups that worked substantially less were new mothers and teenagers,
because, well, taking care of children and studying are very important
and also, as a result, graduation rates went up,
other people had more opportunities to choose the sort of work they were doing
and, very importantly, hospital visits went down and mental health improved
which actually saves the country some money.
A more recent pilot study was carried out in a small settlement in Namibia,
in the years 2008-09.
The results were very dramatic.
When at the start of the experiment,
food poverty levels were at 76% then they went down to 16%.
So, essentially, people didn't have to worry about food anymore.
They could have stopped working at all,
but, to the contrary, employment actually went up by 10%
because people now had money to start their own businesses
and they had money to buy from those businesses.
This shows how even a small boost to resources helps people put them to good use
rather than increasing dependency on the free money
which the critics were predicting.
In addition, parents could now pay their kids' school fees
so school attendance doubled,
and drop out rates went to almost zero,
which is largely because the children were no longer malnourished.
Also crime rates went down by 42%
'cause people no longer had to steal from each other.
Unfortunately, though, the Namibian government isn't planning to make this nationwide,
even though the calculations show it would only cost 3% of the GDP.
However, there is a government somewhere in the world where it might be possible.
In Switzerland, there's still the old tradition of direct democracy,
and they hold regular referenda on major issues.
To propose a referendum, you need 100 000 signatures
which is what the proponents of Basic Income have done.
The votes will be held in the next two or three years,
and it will be an interesting experiment to see.
Will the Swiss people become desensitized and stop working?
The evidence so far is just probably not,
but if the evidence so far has not been enough,
there are plenty of more examples.
[different open-source projects shown on screen]
And in addition to all of these,
various statistics show that
between 30 to 50% of people volunteer at least once a month,
and remember, all of this happens while they still have day jobs.
So, after all these examples, you might be wondering
what is it then that motivates people?
I'll give you four theories, which probably, all have a lot of truth in it and they will overlap.
First of all there's the Maslow theory mentioned before,
then there's Deci and Ryan's Self-Determination theory
which lists the elements as competence, autonomy and relatedness,
a large emphasis is on autonomy,
being able to choose what to do, how to do it,
when to do it and who to do it with.
They say that this also explains the previous experiments
because getting someone to do something for a reward
is essentially a form of control,
it's trying to control the people's behavior
by offering them something that they really need.
Often in workplaces, the needs for autonomy are not covered,
'cause you don't often have a choice
of what sort of work you do or how.
However, in some more progressive work places,
they do try to increase autonomy, for example,
Google gives employees 20% of time to work on whatever they want,
and from this you have things like Gmail and Google News.
Also "Post-it notes" were developed by the stationery company 3M
by letting the employees come up with whatever they wanted.
Dan Pink slightly modified the three words
and his version is autonomy, mastery and purpose.
We'll come back to mastery and purpose in the next few slides.
Finally, Alfie Kohn in his book "Punished by Rewards",
he uses 3 C's: collaboration, content and choice,
to which you could possibly add challenge.
He also quotes this fellow name Herzberg, who said:
"If you want people to do a good job,
"give them a good job to do", and
"Idleness, indifference and irresponsibility
are a perfectly valid responses to absurd work".
[Screen: MOTIVATION It's not that I'm lazy, it's that I just don't care]
This is from the film "Office Space".
Coming back to mastery.
There's a theory by a Hungarian psychologist with a ridiculously difficult name [screen: Csikszentmihalyi],
which I'm not going to pronounce,
he describes the state of optimal experience, called "flow"
which means that you're completely immersed in your task,
you almost loose sense of the passing of time,
and you even forget if you're hungry or thirsty.
Kinda of like the quote by Isaac Asimov:
"Nothing interferes with my concentration.
"You could put an orgy in my office
"and I wouldn't look up - well, maybe once".
According to the theory, the state of flow will be reached
if the difficulty of the task matches the person's skills.
So if the task is just a little bit challenging, as if it's too easy, then it will be boring;
if it's too hard, it will produce more anxiety than anything.
The study showed that this state is three times as likely to happen at work
than in free time and also people are often happier in workflow
than in leisure activities that do not produce a flow state
such as watching TV,
which creates a quite odd paradox
because people still spend an awful lot of time watching TV
and this brings up an important point that people often don't realize:
how much they can enjoy work.
And they think that work must be boring just because it's work,
which is an attitude worth challenging.
The importance of purpose is pretty much self-evident.
If you have a purpose then you have a reason to do something
and then you must have motivation to do it.
As we said about common sense before,
it's still worth looking at it scientifically.
Dan Ariely has tested this with experiments with Lego Bionicles and paper shredders.
In the Bionicle experiment, participants were instructed to put together Lego Bionicles,
and they were paid decreasing amounts of money to do it
but everyone was paid the same.
However, there were two conditions.
In the first condition, as soon as they built the Bionicle,
the experimenter would take it apart again;
In the second condition, the Bionicles would stay there
and the participants could see all the previous Bionicoles they had built.
In the second condition, they built on average more Bionicles than in the other condition.
Also, with paper shredders, they did a task on paper
and in the first condition, the experimenter would acknowledge the work they had done,
scan it in, and put in a pile.
In the second condition, the experimenter ignored what they had done
and just put it in a pile;
and in a third condition, they ran it through a paper shredder.
As you can guess, in the third condition,
the participants lost their motivation quite quickly,
whereas if their work was acknowledged, then they had more motivation to do it.
In fact, having to do an pointless job is so unpleasant
that has actually been used as a punishment.
First in the Greek myth of Sisyphus who, as a punishment, had to run a boulder up a hill,
but as soon as he almost reached the top,
the boulder come down again and he had to start over.
In the real world, it has been used in prisons where prisoners had to dig holes
and fill them up again.
That was before the institutions realized that they could actually profit off the prisoners
by making them do real work.
So it's no wonder that too many people in today's jobs lack motivation
and hate going to work every day,
'cause there are so many jobs that simply don't seem to have a purpose,
sometimes jobs we could even do without
such as sandwich board advertisements.
But often jobs are even created for the sake of creating jobs
just because of the way the monetary system works
...or malfunctions, more like.
Sadly, though, sometimes the most purposeful jobs don't even pay you a single penny
or if they do, then they pay you much less than the other jobs.
But on the bright side, people do them anyway.
So, what I would like to leave you with is a few ideas on what to do with all of this info.
First , obviously, you can use all these examples
whenever someone claims that without money nothing would get done
which is something we all probably hear a lot.
Secondly, I would like you to ask yourself: what motivates you?
What is it that you do, in your free time, that you feel has a purpose,
that fulfills you, that challenges you?
And if there isn't anything like that right now, maybe you can think of something
that you could be doing because often it's best to lead by example
and you could also be yet another contribution
to the growing evidence that people do things
just because of intrinsic motivation,
not because of money.
And finally you could ask your friends the same questions:
What motivates them? Would they still be working if a Resource-Based Economy happened
or if they received a Basic Income?
Or would they just sit on their couch all day?
Well, after all, even Kevin from the beginning video...
(There should be a picture here...)
(There we go.)
Even Kevin from the beginning video is occasionally intrinsically motivated.
[Screen: Kevin O'Leary playing guitar]
Thank you.