Jean Paul was intensely social. Left alone in her cage for too long, she would pluck at her own feathers, something she did when she was bored. As I discovered, parrots have a particularly acute need to engage in mental activity, so I invested in several toys specifically designed to preclude parrot boredom. One such puzzle, called SeekaTreat, was a stack of multicolored wooden tiers of decreasing size that form a kind of pyramid. Made of wood, the tiers were connected through the center with a cord. Within each tier, there were half-inch-deep “treat wells” designed to hold tasty parrot treats. To get at the food, Jean Paul had to lift each tier and uncover the treat, which was not very easy to do. Over the years, the SeekaTreat and other toys like it kept Jean Paul happy, curious, and interested in her environment.
THOUGH I DIDN’T know it at the time, there was an important concept behind the SeekaTreat. “Contrafreeloading,” a term coined by the animal psychologist Glen Jensen, refers to the finding that many animals prefer to earn food rather than simply eating identical but freely accessible food.
To better understand the joy of working for food, let’s go back to the 1960s when Jensen first took adult male albino rats and tested their appetite for labor. Imagine that you are a rat participating in Jensen’s study. You and your little rodent friends start out living an average life in an average cluster of cages, and every day, for ten days, a nice man in a white lab coat gives you 10 grams of finely ground Purina lab crackers precisely at noon (you don’t know it’s noon, but you eventually pick up on the general time). After a few days of this pattern, you learn to expect food at noon every day, and your rat tummy begins rumbling right before the nice man shows up—exactly the state Jensen wants you in.
Once your body is conditioned to eating crackers at noon, things suddenly change. Instead of feeding you at the time of your maximal hunger, you have to wait another hour, and at one o’clock, the man picks you up and puts you in a well-lit “Skinner box.” You are ravenous. Named after its original designer, the influential psychologist B. F. Skinner, this box is a regular cage (similar to the one you are used to), but it has two features that are new to you. The first is an automated food dispenser that releases food pellets every thirty seconds. Yum! The second is a bar that for some reason is covered with a tin shield.
At first, the bar isn’t very interesting, but the food dispenser is, and that is where you spend your time. The food dispenser releases food pellets every so often for twenty-five minutes, until you have eaten fifty food pellets. At that point you are taken back to your cage and given the rest of your food for the day.
The next day, your lunch hour passes by again without food, and at 1:00 P.M. you are placed back into the Skinner box. You’re ravenous but unhappy because this time the food dispenser doesn’t release any pellets. What to do? You wander around the cage, and, passing the bar, you realize that the tin shield is missing. You accidentally press the bar, and immediately a pellet of food is released. Wonderful! You press the bar again. Oh joy!—another pellet comes out. You press again and again, eating happily, but then the light goes off, and at the same time, the bar stops releasing food pellets. You soon learn that when the light is off, no matter how much you press the bar, you don’t get any food.
Just then the man in the lab coat opens the top of the cage and places a tin cup in a corner of the cage. (You don’t know it, but the cup is full of pellets.) You don’t pay attention to the cup; you just want the bar to start producing food again. You press and press, but nothing happens. As long as the light is off, pressing the bar does you no good. You wander around the cage, cursing under your rat breath, and go over to the tin cup. “Oh my!” you say to yourself. “It’s full of pellets! Free food!” You begin chomping away, and then suddenly the light comes on again. Now you realize that you have two possible food sources. You can keep on eating the free food from the tin cup, or you can go back to the bar and press it for food pellets. If you were this rat, what would you do?
Assuming you were like all but one of the two hundred rats in Jensen’s study, you would decide not to feast entirely from the tin cup. Sooner or later, you would return to the bar and press it for food. And if you were like 44 percent of the rats, you would press the bar quite often—enough to feed you more than half your pellets. What’s more, once you started pressing the bar, you would not return so easily to the cup with the abundant free food.
Jensen discovered (and many subsequent experiments confirmed) that many animals—including fish, birds, gerbils, rats, mice, monkeys, and chimpanzees—tend to prefer a longer, more indirect route to food than a shorter, more direct one.* That is, as long as fish, birds, gerbils, rats, mice, monkeys, and chimpanzees don’t have to work too hard, they frequently prefer to earn their food. In fact, among all the animals tested so far the only species that prefers the lazy route is—you guessed it—the commendably rational cat.
This brings us back to Jean Paul. If she were an economically rational bird and interested only in expending as little effort as possible to get her food, she would simply have eaten from the tray in her cage and ignored the SeekaTreat. Instead, she played with her SeekaTreat (and other toys) for hours because it provided her with a more meaningful way to earn her food and spend her time. She was not merely existing but mastering something and, in a sense, “earning” her living.•*
THE GENERAL IDEA of contrafreeloading contradicts the simple economic view that organisms will always choose to maximize their reward while minimizing their effort. According to this standard economic view, spending anything, including energy, is considered a cost, and it makes no sense that an organism would voluntarily do so. Why work when they can get the same food—maybe even more food—for free?
When I described contrafreeloading to one of my rational economist friends (yes, I still have some of these), he immediately explained to me how Jensen’s results do not, in fact, contradict standard economic reasoning. He patiently told me why this research was irrelevant to questions of economics. “You see,” he said, as one would to a child, “economic theory is about the behavior of people, not rats or parrots. Rats have very small brains and almost nonexistent neocortices,* so it is no wonder that these animals don’t realize that they can get food for free. They are just confused.”
“Anyway,” he continued, “I am sure that if you were to repeat Jensen’s experiment with normal people, you would not find this contrafreeloading effect. And I am a hundred percent positive that if you had used economists as your participants, you would not see anyone working unnecessarily!”
He had a valid point. And though I felt that it is possible to generalize about the way we relate to work from those animal studies, it was also clear to me that some experiments on adult human contrafreeloading were in the cards. (It was also clear that I should not do the experiment on economists.)
What do you think? Do humans, in general, exhibit contrafreeloading, or are they more rational? What about you?
“Small-M” Motivations
After David left my office, I started thinking about his and Devra’s disappointments. The lack of an audience for their work had made a big difference in their motivation. What is it aside from a paycheck, I wondered, that confers meaning on work? Is it the small satisfaction of focused engagement? Is it that, like Jean Paul, we enjoy feeling challenged by whatever it is we’re doing and satisfactorily completing a task (which creates a small level of meaning with a small m)? Or maybe we feel meaning only when we deal with something bigger. Perhaps we hope that someone else, especially someone important to us, will ascribe value to what we’ve produced? Maybe we need the illusion that our work might one day matter to many people. That it might be of some value in the big, broad world out there (we might call this Meaning with a large M)? Most likely it is all of these. But fundamentally, I think that almost any aspect of meaning (even small-m meaning) can be sufficient to drive our behavior. As long as we are doing something that is somewhat connected to our self-image, it can fuel our motivatio
n and get us to work much harder.
Consider the work of writing, for example. Once upon a time, I wrote academic papers with an eye on promotion. But I also hoped—and still hope—that they might actually influence something in the world. How hard would I work on an academic paper if I knew for sure that only a few people would ever read it? What if I knew for sure that no one would ever read my work? Would I still do it?
I truly enjoy the research I do; I think it’s fun. I’m excited to tell you, dear reader, about how I have spent the last twenty years of my life. I’m almost sure my mother will read this book,* and I’m hoping that at least a few others will as well. But what if I knew for sure that no one would ever read it? That Claire Wachtel, my editor at HarperCollins, would decide to put this book in a drawer, pay me for it, and never publish it? Would I still be sitting here late at night working on this chapter? No way. Much of what I do in life, including writing my blog posts, articles, and these pages, is driven by ego motivations that link my effort to the meaning that I hope the readers of these words will find in them. Without an audience, I would have very little motivation to work as hard as I do.
* * *
BLOGGING FOR TREATS
Now think about blogging. The number of blogs out there is astounding, and it seems that almost everyone has a blog or is thinking about starting one. Why are blogs so popular? Not only is it because so many people have the desire to write; after all, people wrote before blogs were invented. It is also because blogs have two features that distinguish them from other forms of writing. First, they provide the hope or the illusion that someone else will read one’s writing. After all, the moment a blogger presses the “publish” button, the blog can be consumed by anybody in the world, and with so many people connected, somebody, or at least a few people, should stumble upon the blog. Indeed, the “number of views” statistic is a highly motivating feature in the blogosphere because it lets the blogger know exactly how many people have at least seen the posting. Blogs also provide readers with the ability to leave their reactions and comments—gratifying for both the blogger, who now has a verifiable audience, and the reader-cum-writer. Most blogs have very low readership—perhaps only the blogger’s mother or best friend reads them—but even writing for one person, compared to writing for nobody, seems to be enough to compel millions of people to blog.
* * *
Building Bionicles
A few weeks after my conversation with David, I met with Emir Kamenica (a professor at the University of Chicago), and Dražen Prelec (a professor at MIT) at a local coffee shop. After discussing a few different research topics, we decided to explore the effect of devaluation on motivation for work. We could have examined Large-M Meaning—that is, we could have measured the value that people who are developing a cure for cancer, helping the poor, building bridges, and otherwise saving the world every day place on their jobs. But instead, and maybe because the three of us are academics, we decided to set up experiments that would examine the effects of small-m meaning—effects that I suspect are more common in everyday life and in the workplace. We wanted to explore how small changes in the work of people like David the banker and Devra the editor affected their desire to work. And so we came up with an idea for an experiment that would test people’s reactions to small reductions in meaning for a task that did not have much meaning to start with.
ONE FALL DAY in Boston, a tall mechanical engineering student named Joe entered the student union at Harvard University. He was all ambition and acne. On a crowded bulletin board boasting flyers about upcoming concerts, lectures, political events, and roommates wanted, he caught sight of a sign reading “Get paid to build Legos!”
As an aspiring engineer, Joe had always loved building things. Drawn to anything that required assembling, Joe had naturally played with Legos throughout his childhood. When he was six years old, he had taken his father’s computer apart, and a year later, he had disassembled the living room stereo system. By the time he was fifteen, his penchant for taking objects apart and putting them back together again had cost his family a small fortune. Fortunately, he had found an outlet for his passion in college, and now he had the opportunity to build with Legos to his heart’s content—and get paid for it.
A few days later, at the agreed-upon time, Joe showed up to take part in our experiment. As luck would have it, he was assigned to the meaningful condition. Sean, the research assistant, greeted Joe as he entered the room, directed him to a chair, and explained the procedure to him. Sean showed Joe a Lego Bionicle—a small fighting robot—and then told Joe that his task would involve constructing this exact type of Bionicle, made up of forty pieces that had to be assembled in a precise way. Next, Sean told Joe the rules for payment. “The basic setup,” he said, “is that you will get paid on a diminishing scale for each Bionicle you assemble. For the first Bionicle, you will receive two dollars. After you finish the first one, I will ask you if you want to build another one, this time for eleven cents less, which is a dollar eighty-nine. If you say that you want to build another one, I will hand you the next one. This same process will continue in the same way, and for each additional Bionicle you build, you will get eleven cents less, until you decide that you don’t want to build any more Bionicles. At that point, you will receive the total amount of money for all the robots you’ve created. There is no time limit, and you can build Bionicles until the benefits you get no longer outweigh the costs.”
Joe nodded, eager to get started. “And one last thing,” Sean warned. “We use the same Bionicles for all of our participants, so at some point before the next participant shows up, I will have to disassemble all the Bionicles you build and place the parts back in their boxes for the next participant. Everything clear?”
Joe quickly opened the first box of plastic parts, scanned the assembly instructions, and began building his first Bionicle. He obviously enjoyed assembling the pieces and seeing the weird robotic form take shape. Once finished, he arranged the robot in a battle position and asked for the next one. Sean reminded him how much he would make for the next Bionicle ($1.89) and handed him the next box of pieces. Once Joe started working on the next Bionicle, Sean took the construction that Joe had just finished and placed it in a box below the desk where it was destined to be disassembled for the next participant.
Like a man on a mission, Joe continued building one Bionicle after another, while Sean continued storing them in the box below the table. After he’d finished assembling ten robots, Joe announced that he’d had his fill and collected his pay of $15.05. Before Joe took off, Sean asked him to answer a few questions about how much he liked Legos in general and how much he had enjoyed the task. Joe responded that he was a Lego fan, that he had really enjoyed the task, and that he would recommend it to his friends.
The next person in line turned out to be a young man named Chad, an exuberant—or perhaps overcaffeinated—premed student. Unlike Joe, Chad was assigned to a procedure that among ourselves we fondly called the “Sisyphean” condition. This was the condition we wanted to focus on.
* * *
THE MYTH OF SISYPHUS
We used the term “Sisyphean” as a tribute to the mythical king Sisyphus, who was punished by the gods for his avarice and trickery. Besides murdering travelers and guests, seducing his niece, and usurping his brother’s throne, Sisyphus also tricked the gods.
Before he died, Sisyphus, knowing that he was headed to the Underworld, made his wife promise to refrain from offering the expected sacrifice following his death. Once he reached Hades, Sisyphus convinced kindhearted Persephone, the queen of the Underworld, to let him return to the upper world, so that he could ask his wife why she was neglecting her duty. Of course, Persephone had no idea that Sisyphus had intentionally asked his wife not to make the sacrifice, so she agreed, and Sisyphus escaped the Underworld, refusing to return. Eventually Sisyphus was captured and carried back, and the angry gods gave him his punishment: for the rest of eternity, he was forced to push
a large rock up a steep hill, in itself a miserable task. Every time he neared the top of the hill, the rock would roll backward and he would have to start over.
Of course, our participants had done nothing deserving of punishment. We simply used the term to describe the condition that the less fortunate among them experienced.
* * *
Sean explained the terms and conditions of the study to Chad in exactly the same way he had to Joe. Chad grabbed the box, opened it, removed the Bionicle’s assembly instruction sheet, and carefully looked it over, planning his strategy. First he separated the pieces into groups, in the order in which they would be needed. Then he began assembling the pieces, moving quickly from one to another. He went about the task cheerily, finished the first Bionicle in a few minutes, and handed it to Sean as instructed. “That’s two dollars,” Sean said. “Would you like to build another one for a dollar eighty-nine?” Chad nodded enthusiastically and started working on his second robot, using the same organized approach.
While Chad was putting together the first pieces of his next Bionicle (pay attention, because this is where the two conditions differed), Sean slowly disassembled the first Bionicle, piece by piece, and placed the pieces back into the original box.
“Why are you taking it apart?” Chad asked, looking both puzzled and dismayed.
“This is just the procedure,” Sean explained. “We need to take this one apart in case you want to build another Bionicle.”
Chad returned 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.