Why We Work by Barry Schwartz.
Title: Why We Work.
Author: Barry Schwartz.
Genre: Non-fiction, TED talk, psychology.
Country: U.S.
Language: English.
Publication Date: 2015.
Summary: Why do we work? The question seems so simple, but the answer is surprising, complex, and urgent. We've long been taught that the reason we work is primarily for a paycheck. In fact, we've shaped much of our society to accommodate this belief. Then why are so many people dissatisfied with their work, despite healthy compensation? And why do some people find immense fulfillment and satisfaction despite working low-paying jobs? Through this investigation of workers from all walks of life, psychologist Professor Schwartz dispels this myth. From hospitals to hair salons, auto plants to boardrooms, Schwartz reveals the trends and patterns that lead to happiness in the workplace, ultimately proving that the root of what drives us to do good work can rarely be incentivized, and that the cause of bad work is often an attempt to do just that. How did we get to this tangled place?
My rating: 8.5/10.
My review:
♥ When you ask people who are fulfilled by their work why they do the work they do, money almost never comes up. The list of nonmonetary reasons people give for doing their work is long and compelling.
Satisfied workers are engaged by their work. They lose themselves in it. Not all the time, of course, but often enough for that to be salient to them. Satisfied workers are challenged by their work. It forces them to stretch themselves-to go outside their comfort zones. These lucky people think the work they do is fun, often in the way that doing crossword puzzles or Sudoku is fun.
Why else do people work? Satisfied people do their work because they feel that they are in charge. Their workday offers them a measure of autonomy and discretion. And they use that autonomy and discretion to achieve a level of mastery or expertise.
These people do their work because it's an opportunity for social engagement. They do many of their tasks as part of teams, and even when they're working alone, there are plenty of opportunities for social interaction during work's quiet moments.
Finally, these people are satisfied with their work because they find what they do meaningful. Potentially, their work makes a difference to the world. It makes other people's lives better. And it may even make other people's lives better in ways that are significant.
Of course, few occupations have all these features, and none, I suspect, have all these features all the time. But features of work like these are what get us out of the house, get us to bring work home with us, encourage us to talk about our work with others, and make us reluctant to retire. We wouldn't work if we didn't get paid, but that's not at the core of why we do what we do. And in general, we think that material rewards are a pretty bad reason for working. Indeed, when we say of someone that "he's in it for the money," we are not merely being descriptive; we're passing judgment.
♥ According to a massive report published in 2013 by Gallup, the Washington, D.C.-based polling organization, there are twice as many "actively disengaged" workers in the world as there are "engaged" workers who like their jobs. Gallup has been measuring international employee satisfaction for almost two decades. In total it has polled 25 million employees in 189 different countries. The latest version gathered information from 230,000 full-time and part-time workers in 142 countries. Overall, Gallup found that only 13 percent of workers feel engaged by their jobs. These people feel a sense of passion for their work and they spend their days helping to move their organizations forward. The vast majority of us, some 63 percent, are not engaged. We are checked out, sleepwalking through our days, putting little energy into our work. And the rest of us are actively disengaged, actually hating our jobs. In other words, work is more often a source of frustration than one of fulfillment for nearly 90 percent of the world's workers. Think of the social, emotional, and perhaps even economic waste that this statistic represents. Ninety percent of adults spend half their waking lives doing things they would rather not be doing at places they would rather not be.
~~from Introduction.
♥ ..Smith's view of human beings was far more subtle, complex, and nuanced than what is captured in the quotes above. He did not believe that "man at work" told the full story, or even the most important story, about human nature. But in the hands of Smith's descendants, much if the nuance and subtlety was lost. More than a century later, Smith's views about work guided the father of what came to be called the "scientific management" movement, Frederick Winslow Taylor. Taylor used meticulous time and motion studies to refine the factory, as envisioned by Smith, so that human laborers were part of a well-oiled machine. And he designed compensation schemes that pushed employees to work hard, work fast, and work accurately. Not long after that, Smith's view was echoed in the thinking of the major figure in the psychology of the mid-twentieth century, B.F. Skinner. Skinner's studies of rats and pigeons engaged in simple, repetitive tasks, over ans over again, for rewards of food or water, provided the mantle of scientific rigor and a theoretical rationale for the workplace innovations developed by Taylor. Skinner showed that the behavior of animals could be powerfully influenced and precisely controlled by manipulating the amount and frequency of the rewards the behavior produced. Just as Taylor found that piecework (a fixed payment for each task completed) produced high performance in the factory, Skinner found that the pigeon equivalent of piecework produced high performance in the laboratory.
♥ I don't mean to suggest here that work was bliss prior to the industrial revolution. By no means. But the work of farmers, craftsmen, and shopkeepers, hard though it may have been, offered people a fair amount of discretion, autonomy, and variety in what they did each day. It gave them a chance to use their ingenuity to solve problems as they arose and to develop more effective ways to get their work done. All that opportunity was left behind when people walked through the factory doors.
♥ The lesson here is that just how important material incentives are to people will depend on how the human workplace is structured. And if we structure it in keeping with the false idea that people work only for pay, we'll create workplaces that make this false idea true. Thus, it's not true that "you just can't get good help anymore." It is true that you just can't get good help anymore when you only give people work to do that is deadening and soulless. What it takes to "get good help" is jobs that people want to do. And we'll see that this aspiration for good work is not "pie-in-the-sky" idealism. It is well within our grasp.
♥ Ideas or theories about human nature have a unique place in the sciences. We don't have to worry that the cosmos will be changed by our theories about the cosmos. The planets really don't care what we think or how we theorize about them. But we do have to worry that human nature will be changed by our theories of human nature. Forty years ago, the distinguished anthropologist Clifford Geertz said that human beings are "unfinished animals." What he meant is that it is human nature to have a human nature that is very much the product of the society that surrounds us. That human nature is more created than discovered. We "design" human nature, by designing the institutions within which people live. So we must ask ourselves just what kind of a human nature we want to help design.
If we want to help design a human nature that seeks and finds challenge, engagement, meaning, and satisfaction from work, we have to start building our way out of a deep hole that almost three centuries of misconception about human motivation and human nature have put us in, and help foster workplaces in which challenge, engagement, meaning, and satisfaction are possible.
♥ As Peter Warr, a professor of work psychology, has pointed out, to be satisfied with our work, we typically need a belief in the purpose of what we do.
♥ People who see their work as a "job" enjoy little discretion and experience minimal engagement or meaning. People with jobs see work as a necessity of life, they work for pay, they would switch jobs if given the chance to earn more money, they can't wait to retire, and they would not encourage their friends or children to follow in their footsteps. They are the embodiment of Adam Smith's ideas about people's attitudes toward work.
People who see their work as a "career" generally enjoy more discretion and are more engaged. They may even enjoy what they do. But their focus is on advancement. They see themselves as following a trajectory that leads to promotion, higher salary, and better work.
It is people who see their work as a "calling" who find it most satisfying. For them, work is one of the most important parts of life, they are pleased to be doing it, it is a vital part of their identity, they believe their work makes the world a better place, and they would encourage their friends and children to do this kind of work. People whose work is a calling get great satisfaction from what they do.
♥ About twenty years ago, Ray Anderson, the late CEO of the immensely successful carpet manufacturer, Interface, had what he described as an epiphany. Here he was, with more money than he or his heirs would know what to do with, when he realized that his company was poisoning the environment. Carpet making is (or was) a petroleum-intensive industry and Interface's environmental footprint was huge. Anderson wondered what good it would do to leave his grandchildren great wealth if the price of accumulating that wealth was an uninhabitable planet. So Anderson resolved to transform every aspect of Interface's operations, moving to achieve a zero footprint goal by 2020. He assumed that the development of new production processes and a commitment to pollution control would cost money-a lot of it. But he was willing to sacrifice the bottom line to achieve a social good.
So Interface began a journey to change what it makes, how it makes it, and what it does with its waste. As of 2013, it had cut energy use in half, shifted to renewable energy, and cut waste to a tenth of what it was. How much profit was sacrificed? None at all! Interface employees were so motivated by the opportunity to work for the common good, and challenged by the need to find innovative modifications of the production process, that their work became much more effective and efficient. And the company, realizing that its new mission would demand creative partnership from top to bottom of the organization, flattened its hierarchy and gave employees much more discretion and control over what they did. The strength of the company's shared vision encouraged collaboration and cooperation. Progress toward sustainability require creative solutions. So a culture that encouraged openness and allowed for failure emerged. In the company's words:
The evidence of a successful, lasting cultural change at Interface can be found in the great number of innovations conceived of and implemented by employees on the shop floor. Interface employees are connected to something bigger than making carpet. Sustainability has inspired and empowered associates with a committed sense of higher purpose.
The result of Anderson's vision, twenty years out, is a company that remains extremely successful and is populated by employees who are eager to come to work every day. He documented the transformation of Interface in his 2009 book, Confessions of a Radical Industrialist: Profits, People, Purpose-Doing Business by Respecting the Earth. You don't need to be working for an organization that saves lives to find meaning and purpose in what you do. You just need to be doing work that makes people's lives better.
♥ The lesson from the custodians, the carpet makers, and the hairdressers is that virtually any job has the potential to offer people satisfaction. Jobs can be organized to include variety, complexity, skill development, and growth. They can be organized to provide the people who do them with a measure of autonomy. And perhaps most important, they can be made meaningful by connecting them to the welfare of others.
This last point just can't be overemphasized. Management researcher Adam Grant and various collaborators have shown that just by making salient the potential effects of one's work on others, a work fore can be inspired. Consider this example. Many universities employ undergraduates to reach out by phone to alumni and parents of current students and ask for contributions. What could be more delightful than a call from your alma mater, asking for money? Do you pick it up when caller ID tells you who's calling? If you do, do you politely let the solicitor finish her spiel? If, by some miracle, you do, do you actually make a contribution? These calls are annoying and nervy, after all the money you paid in tuition. Now imagine yourself on the other end, spending two or three hours making calls to people who don't want to answer them, and soliciting people who don't want to respond. It's a tough way to make a living, and the success rate of these solicitations is minuscule. But what Grant found is that a tiny intervention, designed to remind callers of the purpose of their calls, was informative. Grant arranged for solicitors to be visited by a student who owed his life-changing scholarship to phone solicitations just like this. The student was effusive in his enthusiasm for his education and his gratitude to those who made it possible.
Having heard the student, the solicitors went off to do their excruciating jobs. Miraculously, their performance was transformed. They made more calls per hour, and got many more contributions, than did a comparable group of solicitors who had not heard the student. Same job. Same pay. But inspired by seeing the effects of their efforts vividly portrayed, twice as effective. Such is the power of giving work meaning and significance.
♥ Jeffrey Pfeffer laid it all out in his book The Human Equation. Pfeffer's book was not concerned especially with asking what it takes to create workplaces in which people thrive. He was asking what it takes to create workplaces that succeed-that make for growing, sustainably profitable companies. ..Pfeffer identifies a number of factors that effective organizations have in common:
1. They provide a high degree of employment security, which build employee loyalty and trust.
2. They rely on self-managed teams and decentralized decision-making. That is, employees are given a lot of discretion and autonomy. This also enhances trust, in addition to reducing the need for employees whose man job is to watch other employees.
3. They pay more than the market demands, which makes employees feel valued. But they don't rely very much on individual incentives to induce people to work hard. When the company does well, all employees benefit through some form of gain sharing. They're all in it together.
4. They provide extensive training, both when people start to work and as an ongoing process. This training represents a significant investment in employees, which again builds loyalty and trust. And continued training means that employees keep facing new challenges and developing new skills. By way of contrast, Pfeffer reports a study showing that in the automobile industry, Japan spends an average of 364 hours training each new employee, Europe spends 178, and the United States spends 21.
5. They measure employee performance, but they don't overmeasure employee performance, trusting that their employees will want to do right by the company and, with enough training, will succeed.
6. They put great emphasis on the company mission, not just in occasional speeches by the CEO, but in day-to-day practices up and down the organization.
Companies that have all or most of these characteristics are industry leaders, across many industries. Companies that rely on performance bonuses and other incentives, on close supervision, on minimizing individual employee responsibility and discretion, and on saving money on training by designing jobs that don't take much training, lag behind. And Pfeffer suggests something of a downward spiral. A company starts to have trouble, because of low profits, high costs, and poor customer service. This leads to efforts to cut costs and make the company "lean and mean": less training, salary reductions, layoffs, part-time workers, a freeze on hiring and promotion. These changes lead to deceased worker motivation to excel, decreased effort, even worse customer service, less job satisfaction and more turnover, which in turn leads to more trouble for the business. In short, you take discretion, engagement, and meaning out of work and people get less satisfaction from doing it. As they get less satisfaction from doing it, they do it less well. As they do it less well, their supervisors take even more discretion away. The "cure" makes the disease even worse.
♥ ..psychologist Barbara Fredrickson has shown, when people are happy, they work better and they work smarter. Much of Fredrickson's work is summarized in her book Positivity, and her central insight is that when people are in states of positive emotion, they think expansively and creatively. They are in what Fredrickson calls a "broaden and build" mode of engagement with the world. When people are in states of negative emotion, in contrast, they hunker down defensively, worried about making mistakes or going wrong. Danger gives us tunnel vision. But when we're not under threat, and get satisfaction from the work we do, our positive emotional state will enable us to do better work, which in turn will create more positive emotion, which in turn will promote even better work, and so on. Positivity nurtures itself, and an environment is created in which the work just keeps getting better, and the workers just keep getting more satisfaction out of what they do. Everybody wins-the workers, their employers, and the clients and customers.
♥ So on my path to adulthood, I did some bad work and I did some good work. And the difference between the good and the bad had less to do with my actual duties than it did with the context in which my duties were embedded. Someone working beside me, either in my family's business or in the psychology lab, might have regarded what she did as just a job, or even a bad job. But not me. There was meaning to be found in those activities, and I was able to find it. The lesson I draw-half a century later-from my varied summer work experiences is that it needn't take a lot to turn bad work into good. And it needn't take a lot to turn good work into bad.
♥ Factories like this have mostly left American shores, but one sees the same pattern played out in modern versions of the factory, like call centers and order-fulfillment centers. Workers in both environments are micromanaged. In call centers, they've given detailed scripts to follow (which is necessary, since they are often located in a different country, thousands of miles away, have trouble with the language and, beyond the scripts, know almost nothing of the products or services about which they are taking calls). Is this an efficient way for human beings to spend their time? That depends on how you do the accounting. When people have this kind of work to do, they are deprived of the meaning and engagement we encountered in the last chapter. So every worker spends half of his or her waking life deprived. Perhaps the pay compensates, but I don't think so. And existing research bears me out. In a comprehensive article about the significance of salary to job satisfaction, Timothy Judge and colleagues reviewed the results of eighty-six studies that included about fifteen thousand employees. Their analysis of the data from all these studies combined suggested that level of pay had very little effect on either job satisfaction or pay satisfaction.
So it is unlikely that pay compensates for routinized, meaningless work. More likely, such workers are resigned to living lives in which their work is nothing but drudgery.
♥ In what has become a famous example of the benefits of organizing production in a way that engages employees, Toyota, whose system of production gives workers a great deal more autonomy and variety in what they do than a typical assembly line, took over a failed General Motors plant in California in 1983. They didn't change the workforce. They didn't change the equipment. All they changed was the production system. The result was a dramatic improvement in both productivity and quality. When you create an environment in which workers are respected, they want to be there and they want to work. The labor costs associated with the production of vehicles dropped almost 50 percent under the Toyota production system.
♥ There are legitimate reasons-financial and medical-to worry about doctors who do too much, which the fee-for-service structure of medicine encouraged. But an incentive scheme like "risk-sharing" will turn doctors who do too much into doctors who do too little. What we need, of course, is doctors who do just the right amount. We might say of such doctors that they are good doctors. But is there an incentive structure that will produce the right amount? The incentive for doctors to produce the right amount is their desire to practice medicine well. If they have that desire, no further material incentives are needed. Instead, we just have to make sure that the incentives that are actually in place don't have perverse effects on the quality of medical care. After all, doctors do have to make a living. We just want to make sure that what they have to do to make a living doesn't interfere with what it takes to be a good doctor.
I don't want to suggest that offering financial incentives to doctors to withhold services will induce all doctors to do less than they should. But it doesn't have to affect all doctors. As Atul Gawande documented in a New Yorker article a few years ago, what doctors do is very much influenced by what are the customary practices in their local communities. Some prestigious hospital sets a standard for the proportion of children born by cesarean delivery, or the proportion of joint injuries diagnosed by expensive MRIs instead of less expensive X-rays, and other institutions follow suit. This leads to dramatic regional differences in the frequency with which such procedures are done with little or no difference in the types of cases doctors face-or the outcomes of these cases. So when some doctors start doing too little because they are offered incentives to withhold services, or too much because they are compensated for each procedure, what they do can become the practice norm, so that eventually, even doctors not incentivized to do too little or too much are doing too little or too much.
It may seem obvious that incentivizing doctors to withhold services is a bad idea-one that will lead, inevitably, to inadequate medical care. But it can't be too obvious because, right now, the same mistake is being repeated. In an effort to lower the nation's health bill, health policy experts are advocating the creation of "accountable care organizations," medical groups whose performance is to be measured against high standards of excellence. So far, so good. There is certainly nothing wrong with expecting doctors to be accountable for the quality of their care. But system architects aren't content with establishing high standards and then expecting doctors to try to meet them. Is there any reason to believe that these efforts will be any different in their results than the efforts to incentivize teachers to produce excellent test results?
It seems that no matter how many times in the past we have gotten evidence that material incentives failed to produce the results we sought from practicing professionals, we turn to them again the next time we want to improve quality. Somehow, system designers repeatedly fail to appreciate that when material incentives are put front and center, other values essential to motivating employees get crowded out. And it is these other values that are responsible for excellent performance. This happens on the factory floor. It happens in teaching. It happens in medicine. And it happens in law.
♥ In 1986, the American Bar Association (ABA) was concerned enough to create a Commission on Professionalism, whose report called on the judiciary, the practicing bar, and law schools to take steps to promote public service and "resist the temptation to make the acquisition of wealth a primary goal of law practice."
What happens to law school graduates when they actually go to work for one of these firms is often gradual and subtle. The culture of money making seeps in slowly. No one take s a young lawyer aside and says, "Jane, we here at Smith and Jones are obsessed with money. From this point forward the most important thing in your life has to be billing hours and generating business. Honesty and fairness are okay in moderation, but don't let them interfere with making money."
Schiltz, who, like Dr. Hilfiker, fled his job because of what it was doing to him, went into teaching (at Notre Dame Law School) and tried to prepare his students for what to expect. "You will become unethical," Schiltz warned his students, "a little bit at a time."
Not by "shredding incriminating documents or bribing jurors" but "by cutting a corner here, by stretching the truth a bit there." "It will start," said Schiltz, "with your time sheets and the extraordinary pressure to achieve the mandatory number of billable hours."
..The little lies on the time sheets will create the habit of little lies.
You will get busy and your partner will ask whether you proofread a lengthy prospectus and you will say yes even though you didn't. And then you will be drafting a brief and you will quote language from a Supreme Court opinion even though you will know that, when read in context, the language does not remotely suggest what you are implying it suggests.
After a couple of years, Schiltz told his students, you'll stop even noticing that lying and cheating have become part of your everyday practice. "Your entire frame of reference will change" and the dozens of quick decisions you make every day will "reflect a set of values that embodies not what is right or wrong but what is profitable, and what you can get away with."
"What is profitable." "What you can get away with." Notice how this plays into the belief that people work (only) for pay. The only way to get people to work hard, work well, and work right is to make it worth their while-to pay them for hard, good work. Just as Adam Smith would have said. And what's the harm? Suppose a lawyer is committed to serving his clients and to serving justice. Making it worth his while will only get him to work harder. Suppose a doctor is committed to easing suffering and curing disease. And making it worth a dedicated teacher's while will only make him more engaged with his task. In other words, if people already have one reason to do something well (their commitment to excellence at their work) and you give them a second reason (financial incentives), this should only make the motivation stronger. It's a simple matter of logic that two reasons are better than one.
If only. For forty years, psychologists and economists have been studying this seemingly logical assumption empirically, and finding that it doesn't hold. Adding financial incentives to situations in which people are motivated to work hard and well without them seems to undermine rather than enhance the motives people already have. Economist Bruno Frey calls it "motivational crowding out." Psychologists Edward Deci, Richard Ryan, and Mark Lepper talk about how "extrinsic" motivation, like the pursuit of money, undermines "intrinsic" motivation.
Here's an example. An Israeli day care center was faced with a problem: more and more parents were coming late-after closing-to pick up their kids. Since the day care center couldn't very well lock up and leave toddlers sitting alone on the steps awaiting their errant parents, they were stuck. Exhortation to come on time did not have the desired effect, so the day care center resorted to a fine for lateness. Now parents would have two reasons to come on time. It was their obligation, and they would pay a fine for failing to meet that obligation.
But the day care center was in for a surprise. When they imposed a fine for lateness, lateness increased. Prior to the imposition of a fine, about 25 percent of parents came late. When the fine was introduced, the percentage of latecomers rose, to about 33 percent. As the fines continued, the percentage of latecomers continued to go up, reaching about 40 percent by the sixteenth week.
Why did the fines have this paradoxical effect? To many of the parents, it seemed that a fine was just a price (indeed, "A Fine Is a Price" was the title if the article reporting this finding). We know that a fine is not a price. A price is what you pay for a service or a good. It's an exchange between willing participants. A fine, in contrast, is punishment for a transgression. A $25 parking ticket is not the price for parking; it's the penalty for parking where parking is not permitted. But there is nothing to stop people from interpreting a fine as a price. If it costs you $30 to park in a downtown garage, you might well calculate that it's cheaper to park illegally on the street. Any notion of moral sanction is lost. You're not doing the "wrong" thing; you're doing the economical thing. And to get you to stop, we'll have to make the fine (price) for parking illegally higher than the price for parking in a garage.
That's exactly what happened in the day care centers. Prior to the imposition of fines, parents knew it was wrong to come late. Obviously, many of the parents did not regard this transgression as serious enough to get them to stop committing it, but there was no question that what they were doing was wrong. But when fines were introduced, the moral dimension of their behavior disappeared. It was now a straightforward financial calculation. "They're giving me permission to be late. Is it worth $25? Is that a good price to pay to let me stay in the office a few minutes longer? Sure is!" The fine allows parents to reframe their behavior as an exchange of a fee (the "fine") for a "service" (fifteen minutes extra care). The fines demoralized what had previously been a moral act. And this is what incentives can do in general. They can change the question in people's minds from "Is this right or wrong?" to "Is this worth the price?"
Once lost, this moral dimension is hard to recover. When, near the end of the study, the fines for lateness were discontinued, lateness became even more prevalent. By the end of the study, the incidence of lateness had almost doubled. It's as though the introduction of fines permanently altered parents' framing of the situation from a moral transaction to an economic one. When the fines were lifted, lateness simply became a better deal.
..These studies of Israeli parents and Swiss citizens are surprising. You're more likely to order a dish that tastes good and is good for you than one that just tastes good. You're more likely to buy a car that's reliable and fuel efficient than one that
is just reliable. But when the parents at the day care center were given a second reason to be on time-the fines-it undermined their first reason, that it was the right thing to do. And the Swiss who were given two reasons to accept a nuclear waste site were less likely to say yes than those only given one. So reasons don't always add; sometimes, they compete.
..It might seem that if you are inclined to do someone a favor, the offer of compensation should only give you a second reason to do what you were inclined to do already. Again, two reasons are better than one. Except that they're not. The offer of money tells people implicitly that they are operating in the financial/commercial domain, not the social domain. The offer of money leads them to ask, "Is it worth my time and effort?" That is not a question they ask themselves when someone asks them for a favor. Thus, social motives and financial ones complete.
This sort of motivational competition doesn't always happen, and despite years if empirical evidence, I don't think we fully understand it yet. But clearly, the lesson is that incentives can be a dangerous weapon. A critic of this research might say that the problem is not incentives, but dumb incentives. No doubt, some incentives are dumber than others. But no incentives can ever be smart enough to substitute for people who do the right thing because it's the right thing.
♥ When we lose confidence that people have the will to do the right thing, and we turn to incentives, we find that we get what we pay for. Teachers teach to the test, so that test scores go up without students learning more. Doctors do more, or fewer, procedures (depending on the incentives) without improving the quality of medical care. Custodians just "do their jobs," leaving unhappy, uncomfortable patients in their wake. As economist Fred Hirsch said forty years ago, "the more that is written in contracts, the less can be expected without them; the more you write it down, the less is taken, or expected, on trust." The solution to incomplete contracts is not more complete ones; it is a nurturing of workplace relationships in which people want to do right by the clients, patients, students, and customers they serve.
♥ When done right, all of science is an ongoing conversation between theory and data. The point of theories in science is to organize and explain the facts. Facts without organizing theories are close to useless. But theories must ultimately be accountable to, and conform to, the facts. And new facts force us to modify or discard inadequate theories.
That's the ideal. But in real life, things don't always work out this way. At least in the social sciences, proposing theories, rather than being beholden to facts, can shape facts in a way that strengthen the theories. You build that path and then force people to walk on it, perhaps by roping off the grass.
♥ We are all accustomed to the difficulties surrounding discussion of these issues in modern society, and we may all have fairly strong opinions about the "cater/create" debate. Questions of just this sort are all around us, and finding the right answer to them can have profound consequences for the future of society.
In a sense, the distinction I'm making is between discovery and invention. Discoveries tell us things about how the world works. Inventions use those discoveries to create objects or processes that make the world work differently. The discovery of pathogens leads to the invention of antibiotics. The discovery of nuclear energy leads to bombs, power plants, and medical procedures. The discovery of the genome leads, or will lead, to untold changes in almost every part of our lives. Of course, discoveries also change the world, by changing how we understand it and live in it, but they rarely change the world by themselves.
♥ The courts had long held that natural products, natural phenomena, and laws of nature could not be patented, unless some kind of "inventive" step gave them "markedly different characteristics from any found in nature." Thus, discoveries cannot be patented, but inventions can.
♥ So is a theory about human nature a discovery, or is it an invention? I believe that often, it is more invention than discovery. I think that ideas, like Adam Smith's, about what motivates people to work have shaped the nature of the workplace. I think they have shaped the workplace in directions that are unfortunate. What this means is that instead of walking around thinking that "well, work just is what it is, and we have to deal with it," we should be asking whether the way work is is the way it should be. My answer to that question is an unequivocal no.
We've seen how potentially good work situations, in education, medicine, or law, can easily turn into bad ones, either from excessive oversight and regulation or from excessive reliance on material incentives. Why do things like this happen? Given what people want from their work, and what makes customers, clients, patients, and students satisfied, why is so much work so impoverished? The answer, I think, is illustrated by the Keynes quote with which the book began:
The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.
The ideas that Keynes is talking about are ideas about human nature-about what people care about, and what they aspire to. And like fish that don't know they live in water, we live with such ideas about human nature that are so pervasive that we don't even realize there's another way to look at ourselves.
Where do our ideas about human nature come from? When once they may have come from our parents, our community leaders, and our religious texts, these days, they come mostly from science-specifically from social science. Social science has created a "technology" of ideas about human nature. To grasp fully how the majority of our work became so impoverished, it is essential to understand this "ideal technology"-what it is, how it works, and how it changes us.
♥ But what people do about their lack of food depends a great deal on how they understand it. Ideas have much to do with whether massive food shortages yield resignation or revolution.
♥ Now, wait a minute, you might say. Why aren't ideas just like things? The hallmark of science is that it operates in the world of testable hypotheses. That is, if you have an idea, you test it, and if it fails the test, it also disappears, just like bad things technology. So there's no need to worry about a technology of false ideas. False ideas will just die of "natural causes." Right?
Alas, no. Ideology bears a large measure of the responsibility for the nature of our work. Look at another quote from Adam Smith:
The man whose life is spent in a few simple operations... has no occasion to exert his understanding, or to exercise this invention in finding out expedients for difficulties which never occur. He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to be.
Smith says of the man who works on the assembly lines that "He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to be." The key things to notice about this statement are the words "loses" and "becomes." Here is Smith, the father of the assumption that people are basically lazy and work only for pay, saying that work in a factory will cause people to "lose" something, and "become" something. So what is it that they had before entering the factory that they "lost"? And what is it that they were before entering the factory that was different from what they "became"? Right here in this quote we see evidence that Smith believed that what people were like as workers depended on the conditions of their work. And yet, over the years, this nuanced understanding of human nature as the product of the human environment got lost. As a result of this lost subtlety, creating the soulless, dehumanizing workplaces that most people faced needed no justification except for economic efficiency. It wasn't changing people. It wasn't depriving people of anything. It was simply taking people as they were and using their labor with maximum efficiency.
We now know that it was changing people. A classic article by Melvin Kohn and Carmi Schooler, published thirty years ago, showed as much: They showed that work over which people exercise some discretion and control leads to cognitive flexibility and to an engaged orientation to self and society; in contrast, excessively monitored, oppressively supervised working conditions lead to distress. More recently, in a similar vein, Stanford DeVoe abd Jeffrey Pfeffer have shown that the way in which people are compensated changes them. Professionals who bill by the hour, like lawyers and consultants, start putting a price on their time, even when they aren't at work. An evening spent with friends watching a ball game has "costs" in legal fees and consulting fees forgone. So a person who bills by the hour becomes a different person than she was before she started working in that way.
Also striking is a series of studies by Chip Heath that show that even when people don't think of themselves as primarily motivated by material incentives, they think that pretty much everyone else is. Heath surveyed students taking the Law School Admissions Test (LSAT). They were asked to describe their own motives for pursuing a legal career, and then to speculate about the motives of their peers. Sixty-four percent said tat they were pursuing a legal career because it was intellectually appealing or because they had always been interested in the law, but only 12 percent thought that was true of their peers. Instead, 62 percent speculated that their peers were pursuing a legal career because of financial rewards. So we may tell ourselves that we are exceptional in caring about things beside money, which in turn makes it easier for us to organize the work of others entirely based on monetary incentives.
Along similar lines, Heath reports results from the General Social Survey (GSS). For more than twenty-five years, the GSS has asked a sample of adults to rank the importance of five different aspects of their jobs: pay, security, free time, chances for advancement, and "important work" that "gives a feeling of accomplishment." Year after year, "important work" is, on average, ranked first by more than 50 percent of the individual respondents. Pay typically ranks third. Yet, in the late 1980s, when the GSS asked respondents about the role of material incentives for others, people generally believed that pay was quite important.
So ideas change people.
♥ Psychologists have made much progress over the years in understanding perception, memory, thinking, language use and comprehension, cognitive and social development, learning, and various types of emotional and cognitive disorders in exactly the same way that natural sciences make progress in their domains. Good data drive out bad theories. But there's a crucial difference between theories about planets, atoms, genes, and diseases and theories about at least some aspects of human nature. Planets don't care what scientists say about their behavior. They move around the sun with complete indifference to how physicists and astronomers theorize about them. Genes are indifferent to our theories about them also. But this is not true of people. Theories about human nature can actually produce changes in how people behave. What this mean is that a theory that is false can become true simply by people believing it's true. The result is that, instead of good data driving out bad data and theories, bad data change social practices until the data become good data, and the theories are validated.
How does ideology become true in this way? There are three basic dynamics. The first way ideology becomes true is by changing how people think about their own actions. For example, someone who volunteered every week in a homeless shelter might one day read a book that tells him it is human nature to be selfish. He might ten say to himself, "I thought I was acting altruistically. Now social scientists are telling me that I work in a homeless shelter for ego gratification." Or someone on her way to work might say, "I thought I was acting altruistically. Now social scientists are telling me it's all about the money." If this kind of reconstrual takes place, nothing outside the person necessarily changes. The person simply understands her actions differently. But of course, how we understand our past actions is likely to affect our future actions. It isn't hard to imagine, for example, that hospital custodians like Luke, Ben, Carlotta, and Corey-already a rare breed-will disappear entirely as the ideology that people work only for pay penetrates our culture even more than it already has.
The second mechanism by which ideology becomes true is via what is called the "self-fulfilling prophecy." Here, ideology changes how other people respond to the actor, which, in turn, changes what the actor does in the future. A classic demonstration of this self-fulfilling mechanism in action was reported by Mark Snyder and Elizabeth Tanke in 1977. In this study, groups of men were shown a photo of either an attractive or an unattractive woman. They then had a ten-minute phone conversation with a woman they were led to believe was the woman in the photo (she was not). After the conversation, those who thought they were talking to the attractive woman rated her as more likeable than those who thought they were talking to the unattractive woman. No surprise here. The surprise came next. Tapes of conversations were played for other participants who had not seen photographs of the woman or been told anything about her attractiveness. They, too, judged the "attractive" woman as more likeable, friendly, and sociable than the unattractive one.
Think about this result. Somehow, thinking their interview subject was attractive led interviewers to conduct their interviews in a way that led third parties who listened to the interview to come to the same conclusion. In effect, the interviewers collected "data" in a way that was biased by their initial beliefs.
The phrase "self-fulfilling prophecy" was coined by sociologist Robert Meron in 1948. He discussed examples of how theories that initially do not describe the world accurately can become descriptive if they are acted upon. In essence a "self-fulfilling prophecy" is "a false definition of the situation evoking a new behavior that makes the originally false conception come true."
..The parallel of this kind of process in the workplace is clear. You start out believing that people are basically lazy, don't want to work, and care only about their pay when they do. Based on this belief, you create a workplace that is focused only on efficiency, with jobs that are mindlessly repetitive, counting on the paycheck to motivate the workers. Lo and behold, in an environment like that, all that matters to workers is the pay.
Another notable example of this process is the teacher who pays more attention and works harder with children identified as "smart" than children identified as "slow," thereby making the "smart" ones smarter. Thus, being labeled as "smart" or "slow" does not in itself make kids smarter or slower. The teacher's behavior must also change accordingly. Perhaps the best-known demonstration of the self-fulfilling prophecy in education is shown in the research conducted by Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson on the effects of teacher expectations on student performance. Unbeknownst to the teachers in the study, the researchers randomly assigned certain students in an elementary school classroom to the "spurter" condition. These students supposedly had taken a diagnostic test at the end of the preceding school year that identified them as having the potential for impressive academic gains. No such test had actually been administered. Nonetheless, the students who'd been labeled as spurters did manifest more impressive gains than average by the end of the school year. High expectations from the teacher somehow resulted in high student achievement, which the authors termed the "Pygmalion Effect." In short, Rosenthal and Jacobson argued, the labeling of certain students as promising became a self-fulfilling prophecy by changing the way teachers taught. This finding has been highly influential in both the fields of psychology and education.
..This brings us to the final mechanism by which ideology can have an influence. This mechanism-the one that I believe has the most profound effects on our working environments and beyond-operates to change institutional structures in a way that is consistent with the ideology. The industrialist believes that workers are only motivated to work by wages and then constructs an assembly line that reduces work to such meaningless bits that there is no reason to work aside from the wages. The politician believes that self-interest motivates all behavior, that people are entitled to keep the spoils of their labors, and that people deserve what they get and get what they deserve. Said politician helps enact policies that erode or destroy the social safety net. As a result, people start acting exclusively as self-interested individuals. "If it's up to me to put a roof over our heads, put food on the table, and make sure there's money to pay the doctor and the kids' college tuition bills, then I'd better make sure I take care of myself." When social structures are shaped by ideology, ideology can change the world, sometimes in devastating, far-reaching ways.
We must be especially vigilant about ideology embedded in social structures. It is much harder to changer social structures than it is to change how people think about themselves, which psychotherapy may effectively address, or how they think about others, which education may effectively address. Moreover, because social structures affect multitudes rather than individuals, when these structures embody ideology, the effects of that ideology can be pervasive.
♥ ..consider the work of psychologist Carol Dweck, summarized in her book Mindset. Dweck has discovered that we can distinguish among children based on the goals that seem to be operating while they learn. Some kids have what Dweck calls performance goals. These kids want to do well on tests. They want social approval. Other kids have what she calls mastery goals. These kinds want to encounter things that they can't do and to learn from their failures. As Dweck puts it, performance-oriented children want to prove their ability while mastery-oriented children want to improve their ability.
Children with performance goals avoid challenges. Children with mastery goals seek challenges. Children with performance goals respond to failure by giving up. Children with mastery goals respond to failure by working harder. What this means is that children with mastery goals learn more, and get smarter, than children with performance goals.
Dweck has shown that what lies beneath these two orientations is a pair of quite different conceptions or "theories" children have of the nature of intelligence. Some children believe that intelligence is essentially immutable-that it is a fixed entity. These are the children who tend to be performance oriented. What's the point of seeking challenges and risking failure if you can't get any smarter? Other children believe that intelligence is not fixed-that is is incremental and people can get smarter. These children tend to be mastery oriented, seeking in their schoolwork to do what they believe is possible for everyone. So is intelligence fixed? Partly, that depends on whether you believe it's fixed. What this means is that the theory that intelligence is fixed may well be ideology.
..To a large degree, the effects of ideology on how people act will depend on how broadly, how pervasively and how saliently it is purveyed in a culture. When it lives in isolated places, its effects will likely be small and correctable. But when it's in the water supply-when it is everywhere-its effects will likely be much more profound. In support of this point, psychologist Richard Nisbett has shown that entire cultures can be differentiated from one another by the extent to which they are guided by the belief that either intelligence is fixed or that it grows. And studies of intellectual development across these different cultures show that kids living in a culture with a "growth mindset" exhibit more intellectual development than kids living in a culture with a "fixed mindset."
♥ Psychologist Dale Miller as presented evidence of the pervasiveness of what he calls the "norm of self-interest" in American society. College students assume, incorrectly, that women will have stronger views about abortion issues than men and that students under the age of twenty-one will have stronger views about the legal drinking age than those over twenty-one, because women and minors have a stake in those issues that men and older students do not. The possibility that one's views could be shaped by conceptions of justice or fairness, rather than self-interest, does not occur to most people. And yet they are. Empathy, and care and concern for the well-being of others, are routine parts of most people's character. Yet they are in danger of being crowded out by exclusive concern for self-interest-a concern that is encouraged by the incentive-based structure of the workplace.
Even Adam Smith understood that there was more to human nature than self-interest. The Wealth of Nations followed another book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, in which he suggested that a certain natural sympathy for one's fellow human beings provided needed restraints on what people would do if they were left free to "barter, truck, and exchange one thing for another." Smith's view, largely forgotten by modernity, was that efficient market transactions were parasitic on aspects of character developed through nonmarket social relations. Smith was right about the importance of "moral sentiments" but wrong about how "natural" they are. In a market-dominated society, in which every aspect of what people do is "incentivized", these "moral sentiments" may disappear so that nothing can rein in self-interest.
Economist and philosopher Amartya Sen has argued that the concern for doing the right thing originates from a source that the logic of self-interest and incentives cannot encompass. He calls that source of concern "commitment." To act out of commitment is to do what one thinks is right, regardless of whether it promotes one's own material circumstances. Acts of commitment include doing one's job to the best of one's ability-going beyond the terms of the contract-even if no one is watching and there is nothing to gain from it. They include refusing to price gouge during times of shortage, refusing to capitalize on fortuitous circumstances at the expense of others, willingness to tolerate nuclear waste dumps in one's community, and coming to pick up one's toddlers from daycare on time.
♥ In his book A Conflict of Visions, Thomas Sowell distinguishes between what he calls "constrained" and "unconstrained" visions of human nature. The constrained vision, put forth by philosopher Thomas Hobbes, focuses on the selfish, aggressive dark side of human nature, and assumes that we cannot change human nature but must instead impose constraints through an all-powerful state, the Leviathan. The unconstrained vision, perhaps best exemplified by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, sees enormous human possibility and condemns the state for subverting all that is good in human nature.
I think that both Hobbes and Rousseau are wrong. "Nature" dramatically underspecifies the character of human beings. Within broad limits, we are what society expects us to be. If society asks little from us, it gets little. It is clear that, under these circumstances, we must be sure that we have arranged rules and incentives in a way that induces people to act in ways that serve the objectives of the rule makers and the incentive setters. If society asks more of us, and arranges its social institutions appropriately, it will get more. As anthropologist Clifford Geertz observed, human beings are "unfinished animals." What we can reasonably expect of people depends on how our social institutions "finish" them.
The idea technology that dominates our age is a fiction; it is ideology. But is is a powerful fiction, and it becomes less and less fictional as it increasingly pervades our institutions and crowds out other types of relations between us and our work. Because of its self-fulfilling character, we cannot expect this fiction to die of natural causes. To kill it, we must nourish the alternatives. And that will not be easy.
♥ Human beings are not scorpions. People aren't stuck being one way or another. But nor are they free to invent themselves without constraint. When we give shape to our social institutions-our schools, our communities and yes, our workplaces-we also shape human nature. Thus, human nature is to a significant degree the product of human design. If we design workplaces that permit people to do work they value, we will be designing a human nature that values work. If we design workplaces that permit people to find meaning in their work, we will be designing a human nature that values work.
♥ It places a great burden on us when we appreciate that by designing our institutions, we are also designing ourselves-the people who inhabit the institutions-at least in part. But this is a responsibility we must all accept. And the first step to taking responsibility over the structure of our workplace is to start asking questions. When it comes to the design of work, we must ask "Why?" What is the purpose of this work? Will the purpose of the work inspire people to do their jobs as Luke did his custodial job in the hospital? We must ask "What?" Is the product of our work something that will actually provide a benefit? Are the results of our transactions with customers positive sum, so that both sides leave the transaction better off? It will be much easier to inspire our workforce if the answer to this question is yes, even if we aren't saving lives or saving the earth, if we are making the lives of the people we serve at least a little bit better. And we must ask "How?" Are we giving workers the freedom to use their intelligence and discretion to help solve the problems they face every workday? Are we allowing them to work without close supervision, and trusting that since they want to do their jobs well, they will?
♥ Often, if not always, people find themselves in work situations that allow them to find meaning and engagement, if they are willing to look for it. So even in unpromising situations, each of us, as individuals, can resist the ideology that tells us we don't really care what work is like as long as we're being well paid for it. We can demand of ourselves the effort to find the ways in which other people benefit if we do our jobs with enthusiasm rather than indifference.
The world of work, and thus the world of human experience, will be a very different place if we ask ourselves these questions about the work we do, and the work we ask others to do. And human nature will be different too. We will enable the people who work for us to live richer lives, and everyone will benefit.
♥ In an interview with Rolling Stone magazine many years ago, rock superstar Bruce Springsteen said about his own stunningly successful career:
I understand that it's the music that keeps me alive... That's my lifeblood. And to give that up for, like, the TV, the cars, the houses-that's not the American dream. That's the booby prize, in the end. Those are the booby prizes. And if you fall for them-if, when you achieve them, you believe that this is the end in and of itself-then you've been suckered in. Because those are the consolation prizes, if you're not careful, for selling yourself out, or letting the best of yourself slip away. So you gotta be vigilant. You gotta carry the idea you began with further. And you gotta hope that you're headed for higher ground.
We as a society shouldn't settle for the booby prize any longer. It is time for us to demand of ourselves and of the people we work for and with that they seek higher ground. Together we can expose the ideas about human nature that have for too long shaped the workplace as nothing but ideology. The result will be better doctors, lawyers, teachers, hairdressers, and janitors, and healthier patients, better-educated students, and more satisfied clients and customers. And each of us will have had a hand in creating a human nature that is worth living up to.