The Search for Meaning

If you aren't following the behavioral economist and author Dan Ariely, you are missing out!  A few years ago, I took one of his massive open online courses (MOOCs) and thoroughly enjoyed it.  He's written a number of books on his research, and he now has a feature ("Ask Ariely") in the weekend edition of the Wall Street Journal.  His research has covered topics as diverse as the use of behavioral economics for clinical management of heart failure to the use of default orders in clinical informatics to dishonesty and cheating (see my post on the Valjean effect).  He's even published a study to determine whether it is better to rip the bandage off quickly or slowly peel it off (as it turns out, most people preferred the slow approach).  

I've posted about Ariely's research in the past (see "Are trick-or-treaters honest?" and "The IKEA effect").  Today I wanted to talk about another interesting study that he published in the Journal of Economic Behavior & Organizations.  The titles of Ariely's papers are typically eye-catching, and this one was no different ("Man's search for meaning: The case of Legos").  He starts with a rather interesting quote from the famous economist, John Maynard Keynes: 

If human nature felt no...satisfaction (profit apart) in constructing a factory, a railway, a mine or a farm, there might not be much investment as a result of cold calculation...Enterprise only pretends to itself to be mainly motivated by the statement in its own prospectus.

In other words, identity (the sense of who we are as individuals), pride, and meaning (the "why" of what we do) are all left out of the standard economic models of labor supply and demand.  Recognizing that the "meaning" tied to our work is important, Ariely and his colleagues conducted a set of controlled laborastory experiments to determine the effect of "meaning" on labor supply.  In the first experiment, undergraduate students were randomly assigned to one of three conditions - Acknowledged, Ignored, or Shredded.  All three groups were told to find 10 instances of two consecutive letters ("s" in this case) on a sheet of paper.  Once they finished, they were given a new sheet of paper with the same instructions.  They were paid $0.55 for the first sheet, and with each subsequent sheet they were paid $0.05 less until they decided to stop.  

Subjects in the Acknowledged group were told to write their name at the top of each sheet of paper, and each sheet was collected and filed by the experimenter as each subject finished it.  When subjects in the Ignored group finished, each sheet was placed in a large stack of other sheets - the experimenter did not look at the sheet.  Finally, once subjects in the Shredded group handed in each sheet, the sheet was placed in a shredder without looking at it.  Notice that the subjects could cheat in either the Ignored or Shredded groups (the experimenter never looked at the sheet, the subjects didn't write their names on the top of each sheet, and any "evidence" of cheating was lost when the sheets were either filed in a large stack of other sheets or shredded).

Subjects completed an average of 9.03, 6.77, and 6.34 sheets and received a total of $3.01, $2.60, and $2.42 in the Acknowledged, Ignored, and Shredded conditions, respectively.  Notably, almost half of the subjects in the Acknowledged group were willing to work until their wage dropped all the way to zero!  Apparently, adding some degree of "meaning" to a rather inconsequential and otherwise meaningless task (by requiring each subject to write his or her name at the top of every sheet and having the experimenter examine it before filing it away).  

The next experiment was very similar.  Subjects (again, undergraduate students) were randomly assigned to one of two conditions, Meaningful versus Sisyphus (recall that Sisyphus was the Greek hero who was forever condemned to roll a rock up a steep hill every day).  Subjects were paid for assembling Bionicle Lego models (each consisting of 40 separate parts, which required about 10 minutes to assemble), again according to a declining wage schedule ($2.00 for the first model, $1.89 for the second, and declining by $0.11 to a minimum of $0.02 after the 20th model).  After building each model, subjects in the Meaningful group placed each assembled model on the desk in front of the experimenter, who would then hand over a new model.  Conversely, subjects in the Sisyphus group handed over their assembled model to the experimenter, who would then hand over a second model and then disassemble the model first.  Once the subject finished the second model, the experimenter would hand over the disassembled first model, and so on.  The subjects in the Meaningful group built significantly more models and received significantly more money than those in the Sisyphus group (average 10.6 models and $14.40 versus an average of 7.2 models and $11.52).  Again, the loss of "meaning" in the work decreased the subjects' willingness to keep going on to assemble more models.  

Ariely concludes that "meaning, at least in part, derives from the connection between work and some purpose, however insignificant or irrelevant that purpose may be to the worker's personal goals.  When that connection is severed, when there is no purpose, work becomes absurd, alienating, or even demeaning."  As it turns out, small effects of meaning in terms of recognition and purpose can translate into even larger effects on workers' motivation and productivity!  

Just look at how mountaineers are motivated to climb seemingly impossible mountains for the simple reason that "It is there" (see this great study by George Loewenstein "Because it it there: the challenge of mountaineering...for utility theory"). Conversely, taking away meaning can have an equally powerful impact, albeit in the opposite direction, on motivation and productivity.  For example, breaking up a large job (say, building a car) into several smaller steps (as on an assembly line) can actually take away the perceived meaning of the work, particularly if each worker doesn't see the final product of his or her efforts.

Ariely mentions one last implication that I found interesting.  He mentions that a number of studies have suggested that close supervision of workers may undermine intrinsic motivation and decrease worker productivity (see for example, "The hidden cost of control" by Armin Falk and Michael Kosfeld or "The transparency paradox" by Ethan Bernstein).  Ariely suggests that the way that workers are supervised may be particularly relevant.  If the "supervision" is perceived as interest in the worker (similar to what had occurred in the first experiment with the sheets of paper) - i.e. adding meaning to his or her work - may actually improve productivity without the negative side effects of control.

As concentration camp survivor, psychologist, and author Viktor Frankl writes in Man's Search for Meaning,  "Those who have a 'why' to live, can bear with almost any 'how'.”  Powerful words for sure.  He goes on to write further:

“Don't aim at success. The more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side effect of one's personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one's surrender to a person other than oneself. Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it. I want you to listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge. Then you will live to see that in the long-run—in the long-run, I say!—success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think about it.”