Prisoner 24601

One of my favorite musicals is Les Misérables, based upon the classic novel of the same name by Victor Hugo.  A few years ago, I downloaded the free ebook from Amazon with the hopes (or goal) of finally reading the novel.  I didn't make it past the first chapter, not because I thought it was boring, but because I had too many other things going on in my life at the time.  I still have hopes to try reading it again at some point in the future, because it is a great story.

The main character and protagonist in the story is a man named Jean Valjean ("Prisoner 24601"), who goes to jail for stealing a loaf of bread to feed himself, his sister, and her seven children (technically, he served only five years for stealing the bread - the remaining fourteen years were served as punishment following a number of failed escape attempts).  It's a great story with a lot of lessons on social justice, the law, and the nature of grace.  Victor Hugo himself described his purpose and motivation for writing the story in the novel's preface:

So long as there shall exist, by reason of law and custom, a social condemnation, which, in the face of civilization, artificially creates hells on earth, and complicates a destiny that is divine with human fatality; so long as the three problems of the age—the degradation of man by poverty, the ruin of women by starvation, and the dwarfing of childhood by physical and spiritual night—are not solved; so long as, in certain regions, social asphyxia shall be possible; in other words, and from a yet more extended point of view, so long as ignorance and misery remain on earth, books like this cannot be useless.

While conducting some research for another blog post, I came across an interesting study by Dan Ariely and colleagues in the journal, Emotion ("The Valjean Effect: Visceral States and Cheating").  The concept here is that when individuals are under the influence of a so-called visceral state (e.g., hunger, thirst, and fatigue), they are more apt to behave unethically to fulfill that state (similar to Jean Valjean stealing bread to assuage his family's hunger).  For the same reasons, individuals in these visceral states suffer from a kind of "motivational myopia" and focus solely on the goal of alleviating the visceral state, often at the expense of achieving other goals.  Ariely's team calls this phenomenon, the Valjean effect.

Ariely's team conducted three different studies to demonstrate the Valjean effect.  They used the visceral state of hunger in the first study (participants were recruited near a campus food court and had either just finished or were about to eat lunch).  Participants first rated their own degree of hunger and answered when they had last eaten, and then they participated in a contest of sorts.  They could win a snack pack (consisting of potato chips, a granola bar, a candy bar, and a mint) if they rolled an even number on a standard six-sided die.  Finally, they were asked how much they would be willing to pay for the snack pack (the hungrier they were, the more they would be willing to pay for the snacks).  Here is the fun part - participants were instructed to "take a couple of practice throws" before the contest.  The research personnel then made it quite obvious that they weren't paying attention to the participants, so conceivably the participants could cheat without getting caught.

Nearly three-fourths of participants stated that they rolled a winning (even) number - which is clearly more than what would be expected based upon chance (the odds of rolling an even number are 3/6, or 50%).  Participants who were hungrier or who reported a greater willingness-to-pay were much more likely to report a winning number, possibly consistent with the Valjean effect.  They repeated a similar design in the second study, this time using the visceral state of thirst (they recruited participants going in and out of the campus fitness center, and instead of a snack pack, they handed out a bottle of water).  Again, similar to the first study, thirsty students were more likely to report a winning number.

With the last study, participants were again recruited going in or out of the campus fitness center.  This time, however, participants could "win" either a bottle of water or a souvenir pen.  Thirsty participants were more likely to report a winning number when the prize was a bottle of water, but not when the prize was a pen.  In other words, the visceral state of thirst didn't lower participants general inhibitions against cheating (to win a pen).  Rather, they only cheated when they could win a prize (a water bottle) that would alleviate their visceral state (thirst).

Collectively, the results of these three studies support the concept that people will behave in potentially unethical ways when they are in a visceral state of hunger, thirst, or fatigue.  These visceral states lower our inhibitions against unethical behavior.  All of this brings to mind something known as Maslow's hierarchy of needs, first described by the American psychologist, Abraham Maslow in 1943 in his publication, "A Theory of Human Motivation".  The "hierarchy of needs" is often portrayed in the shape of a pyramid, although Maslow never displayed his theory using a pyramid.  The concept is that individuals must satisfy their most basic needs (primarily physiologic needs, such as the need for food, water, and rest, but also the need for both physical and psychological safety) before they become motivated to achieve higher-level needs (which focus primarily on the need for professional growth and development, self-actualization, etc).  

Building upon Ariely's study above, when these foundational physiological and psychological needs are absent, not only are individuals less likely to be motivated to work at other tasks, they are also more likely to do whatever it takes (even if by unethical means) to address these needs.  What's the leadership take-home message?  I hope it is fairly intuitive - take care of your people!  Make sure that their basic physiological and psychological needs are met (and this is not as easy as it sounds, particularly in health care when providers frequently skip meals while at work, don't get enough sleep at night, or work in a psychologically unsafe environment).  As Abraham Maslow himself said,  “The fact is that people are good. Give people affection and security, and they will give affection and be secure in their feelings and their behavior.”  And they will be motivated to work hard for the team.