EDWARD'S LECTURE NOTES:
More notes at http://tanguay.info/learntracker
C O U R S E
A Beginner's Guide to Irrational Behavior
Prof. Dan Ariely, Duke University
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C O U R S E L E C T U R E What Motivates Us to Do Work Notes taken on May 10, 2016 by Edward Tanguay |
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labor and motivation
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what gets people to work
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we often think it is mainly about money
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we think more money leads to a higher amount of work
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motivation
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standard thinking is that people are like mice in a maze
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we think all we care about is the particular tangible reward we are getting
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there are some jobs that people do just for the money
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but human nature has all kinds of drivers that can change our motivation
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completion
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connection
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camaraderie
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goals
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pride
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reputation
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sense of purpose
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life meaning
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feeling you are doing something for the world
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mountain climbing
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when you look at mountain climbing and you read their books
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these books are often long descriptions of pure misery
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frost bite
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difficult to breathe
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it's tough
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it's painful
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rock climbers often don't describe their experiences as happiness but they are incredibly motivating experiences
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yet people are getting some joy from mountain climbing
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sense of accomplishment
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achievement
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overcoming nature
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proving something to yourself
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it would be different if
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you knew you could never reach the top
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you knew when you reached the bottom again, your memory would be erased
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the issue of meaning
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sometimes we give people money in order to motivate them in another way as well
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story
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a person works on Wall street
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spends weeks preparing for a presentation for a merger
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finishes with a sense of accomplishment
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sends the presentation stack to his boss
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boss response "thank you, but the merger has been cancelled"
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this person feels deflated
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the boss gives him a raise for the good work he did on the presentation
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person still feels demotivated
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his creation is never going to have any use and nobody else is ever going to see it
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he is demotivated to work on other projects
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story
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woman works at editor in a university press agency
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worked on a history book for a long time
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when they handed the final manuscript out the publisher decided not to print it
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she was demotivated
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story
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many university professors spend years on works which they publish and nobody reads
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we are motivated to do things we find meaningful
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experiment
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legos and bionicals
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asked people to build bionicals for money
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first group
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if you build this one we will pay you $3.00
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they built it
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then we asked if they would like to build another one for $2.70
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after each of them are built, we would put the one they build under the table
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we kept offering to pay them to build these for increasingly lower prices: $2.40, $2.10, etc.
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at some point they stopped
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they stopped
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reminds us of the Myth of Sisyphus
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doing the same thing again and again with no sense of progress
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if the rock fell to the bottom of a new hill, you might feel some progress, but because it is the same hill, makes the task meaningless
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doing the same task over and over without a sense of progress can be the ultimate demotivator
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guards do this to prisoners
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dig a hole, fill it in
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move rocks, move them back
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the uselessness of work will demotivate people
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second group
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do you want to build a bionical for $3.00 and so on lower and lower as the first group
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but we would dismantle them and put the pieces back in the box for them to use again
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people stop quicker building these the less meaning they see in it
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result: we can extrapolate that one needs to pay people less the meaningful a job is
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the consultant experiment
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people would predict how much people would work in the meaningful and the Sysiphic condition
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consultants predicted that those building bionicals in the meaningful condition would produce more
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but they predicted that it would be more by about one bionical but it was about four
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result: people understand the role of meaning in work, but they don't understand the degree to which it is important
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another question:
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how much does one's love of Legos affect the number built?
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expected to find a positive correlation
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found this in the meaningful condition
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not in the meaningless condition
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the meaningless condition chokes the joy even a joy they previously had