Speaker 1:	It's really great to be able to talk to you. I'm particularly pleased to be talking to an audience that includes staff since I think that what I want to talk to you about today will be more relevant to your life experience than to the life experience of people like me. It's actually not ... it is a little bit new work, but what's striking about this topic is that I have been ... this is stuff I've been thinking about since my first year at Swarthmore. I have been obsessed with this topic for 40 years. 
	It is new work, but I guess it says something about how little progress we make that I still think I am puzzled by the stuff I'm going to talk to you about after 40 years of thinking about it. I may just not be smart enough. Maybe you guys will help me. The question that I want to organize this around is a simple one. Why do we work? Why do people work? Why do you drag yourself out of bed every morning instead of gardening, hiking, tweeting, watching football?
	Given that most of us spend at least half of our waking lives working, it would really be nice to have a good answer to the question why. Yes? I think so. Now the answer seems obvious: people work to make a living. I think there's no doubt that if you didn't get paid, you wouldn't work. You'd have to do something that paid you since very few of us were lucky enough to have our parents born before us. 
	We work for a living, but is that it? Is that the answer to the question "Why do people work?" I think for many of us, no, that's not the answer to the question "Why do people work?" We want work that's challenging, we want work that's engaging, we want work that enables us to interact with other people. We want work that has some meaning and maybe even if we're lucky, we want work that might be important.
	Now we wouldn't work if we didn't get paid, but we don't work just in order to get paid. I think in general, material rewards are a pretty bad reason for doing the work that people do. When we say of someone, not us of course, but some other person, when we say of someone "He's in it for the money", we are not merely being descriptive. I think that's we're passing judgment and I think that's testimony to the notion that most of us aspire to something from our work in addition to the paycheck that we bring home.
	I've been interested in this question, as I say, "Why do we work?" for my entire career. I was trained in the psychology of a guy named B.F. Skinner, thankfully a man who was incredibly influential for 30 or 40 years in the middle of the last century and is now mostly forgotten, which I never thought would happen. His view was that the reason all creatures do anything is for rewards. You do things to get good things and to not get bad things. 
	He studied rats and pigeons working for food or water. If you're a rat or a pigeon, what you do, everything you do is to get food and water. If you're a person, you also do it to get food and water in the form of money which you can then cash in for food and water, but also praise, advancement, and stuff like that. If you want to understand behavior, understand the incentives that govern it. If you want to understand behavior, understand the system of rewards and punishments that govern it.
	I learned later in my career after having been educated here at Swarthmore and I just as a parenthetical want to point out that my education actually began at Swarthmore, although I didn't know that I hadn't yet been educated. Thanks to people like Richard Schuldenfrei and Hugh Lacey and Ken Sharpe who enabled me to see that Skinner's view of the world was not restricted to Skinner, I very much broadened my ... the scope of what I was interested in. It led me to an economist named Adam Smith known to some of you, no doubt. 
	He wrote in 'The Wealth of Nations' his classic invention of the free market. He said, "It's in the inherent interest of every man to live as much at his ease as he can if his emoluments", which is a fancy word for goods, "are to be precisely the same, whether he does or does not perform some very laborious duty, to perform it in as careless and slovenly a manner that authority will permit." It is in our nature to do nothing. If we had an ideal life, we would lie on a couch eating chips and bonbons and watching the eagles. The only reason we ever move our asses is that we need to get something that will enable us to sustain ourselves.
Speaker 2:	[inaudible 00:05:30] I've changed my mind about this. (laughter).
Speaker 1:	Too late. You reach a certain age and your opinions no longer matter. (laughter). 
Speaker 2:	I have noticed. 
Speaker 1:	So have I. This idea of Smith's and of Skinner's always seemed wrong to me. It didn't seem to capture my own work, it didn't seem to capture the experiences of most of the people I knew. I figured that these guys were probably smarter than I was and I would eventually see the truth in what they said. I just needed to be educated to see the world as they did. But then research started to appear that gave me a little bit more confidence that maybe I and lots of other people had insights about the world that Skinner and Adam Smith didn't. 
	It started with a study that was done by three psychologists at Stanford where they took three-year-old nursery school kids at a very ritzy nursery school. It was the Bing Nursery School on the Stanford campus. They had these magic markers that they played with, these kids. Some of them were given awards after they drew pictures with the magic markers and some of them weren't. 
	A few weeks later, the markers were reintroduced to the setting and they were unusual markers, not run-of-the-mill markers, whatever the hell that means. The markers were reintroduced to the setting and the question was were the kids going to play with the markers again? The result that they found was if the kids had gotten good player awards the last time, they were less likely to play with the markers this time. If they did play with the markers, they drew less interesting pictures.
	Now this is a stunning result because why do kids draw with markers in the first place? It's fun. It's engaging. They produce a product that they might be proud of, right? Now if I give you an award, you've now got two reasons to play with the markers. It's fun, it's engaging, it's creative, and you get an award. Surely two reasons for doing something are better than one reason for doing that thing. Isn't that right? Well, it wasn't right in this instance.
	Somehow the introduction of the awards, to use a catchphrase that was used at the time, somehow that turned play into work. The question is why and the question is how general is this? It's bizarre that two reasons for doing something are not better than one reason. This led to a series of articles, years and years and years of research, lots of controversy about a distinction between what's called 'intrinsic motivation' and 'extrinsic motivation'. 
	I think these are terrible terms, but they have become the standard terms for making the distinction. Intrinsic motivation is motivation that is intrinsic to what? That's what makes it such a crappy term. Intrinsic where the consequence you are working for is intrinsic to the work you are doing. The only way to produce an interesting picture with magic markers is by drawing with magic markers. You can't hire someone else to draw the picture for you.
	Intrinsic is meant to capture the intimate connection between the activity and the consequence that you aspire to. Extrinsic is meant to capture that the relation between the activity and the consequence is completely arbitrary. Somebody is making rules that say, "If you do X, then you get Y." The artist wants to produce challenging and beautiful paintings. He doesn't want to have them, he wants to produce them, or she.
	There's only one way to do that and that's by painting. You can't hire someone else to do the paintings for you. There are many ways to get status, prestige, and money, one of which is by being a famous painter. That is probably the worst way you could try, but I don't know, maybe a gamelan player is even worse. There are many ways to acquire the extrinsic consequences of successful art. There's only one way to acquire the intrinsic consequence and that's by being a painter.
	The intrinsic aims of scientific activity are presumably the discovery of the truth about something. There's only one way to do that and that's by doing the science. Tenure, promotion, status, salary increases, Nobel prizes, those are achievable in a variety of ways. There's only one way to get the truth and that's by doing science. That's what this intrinsic and extrinsic distinction is meant to capture.
	The reason it's not a good distinction is that sometimes it's used to refer to ... intrinsic is internal to the person. It ignores the critical intimate relation between the activity on the one hand and the consequence on the other hand. Anyway, this was my first contact with this idea that gave me some confidence that this was an important thing to be pursuing, so I did my own experiment. It was an unusual experiment. 
	The participants in the study for 40 Swarthmore College undergraduates and IRB, close your ears. They didn't know that they were participating in an experiment. (laughter). Here was the experiment. I was teaching a class in, oddly enough, the psychology of motivation. There were 40 of them. The first day of the class, I held up the grade sheet and next to each of their names was a nice big letter B. 
	I said, "This is your grade in the class. Everyone in the class gets a B. There will be a midterm. There will be a final. There will be a term paper. I will grade the midterm, I will grade the final, and I will grade the term paper, but your grade in the class is B." The star of the basketball team, I swear to God, got up, walked to the front of the room. He's like, "You serious?" I said yes. Shook my hand. "Thank you very much." (laughter).
	I'm sure it's just completely incidental that he was the star of the basketball team. What happened was why did I do this? I did this because we pride ourselves on attracting people who are ... have a burning desire to learn. The students are very much attracted to the idea that that's the kind of people they are. Well, here was their chance.
	There was only one reason to do the reading. There was only one reason to study for the exams. There was only one reason to write the paper and that was that each of these things was going to help you learn. The experiment was an unmitigated catastrophe. They were zealous, enthusiastic. They came to class, the discussion was informed, and then midterm week came. 
	What they all said perfectly reasonably was, "Well, I'm going to spend this week studying the things that count. That is, the things I'm about to be examined on, and then I'll catch up on this material afterwards." Of course, at Swarthmore, you never catch up, so they just kept falling further and further behind. They got more and more embarrassed and by the end of the semester, there were maybe 10 people coming to class and I got four term papers turned in.
	I think arguably, they learned a lot more in that class than probably any other class they ever took, though they might not have liked what they learned. It was a really grotesquely unfair experiment because here I was taking kids who had spent their entire lives working for grades, though they might also have been enthusiastic and just kicked that prop out from under them and expected that there would be something there to take its place.
	Lo and behold, there wasn't anything there to take its place, so I've sent letters of apology. No, I haven't really. (laughter). In my mind, I have sent letters of apology to all of those students. This experiment was designed to see whether when you give people two reasons to do something, they have a burning curiosity and interested in the material and they have grades to get that will get them into law school, medical school, and good jobs. 
	Surely, two reasons are better than one. Apparently not. There's other research that has become famous, at least famous to me. One is a study of daycare centers where parents were coming late, so the director fined the parents for coming late roughly the price of a parking ticket, and the lateness increased. The fines kept continuing and lateness kept going up and up and up and eventually the director just abandoned the fines as a failure and then lateness increased even more. 
	The title of the paper is 'A Fine is a Price' and the point that the authors were making is that you think a fine is a sign of disapproval for transgression. The person being fined thinks it's a price for a service and it was a price well worth paying. When you eliminated the fines, it just became a better deal. (laughter). But notice here too, people have one reason for coming on time. They have an obligation to the teachers at the daycare center, a moral obligation.
	You give them a second reason. It'll cost you money. Two reasons are better than one, except when you add the second reason to the first, it seems to undermine the first. The same thing happened with a citing of nuclear waste dumps in Switzerland. 50% of Swiss citizens in a survey said they would be willing to have a nuclear waste dump in their community. If you asked that question in the United States, what percentage you think you'd get? 50? Zero?
	I think zero. 50% and you ask them why and they say, "Well, we have responsibilities as citizens. We don't want it in our community, but it has to go somewhere. I can't think why it shouldn't go here." So they really don't want it, but half of them agree. You offer them six weeks pay to have a nuclear waste dump in their community and instead of 50% of people saying yes, 25% say yes.
	They've already got one reason. Their responsibilities as a citizen. You give them a second reason that you're paying them, two reasons instead of being better than one are worse than one. In effect, what the offer of payment does is it gives them an implicit instruction. The way to think about this is entirely in terms of your own self-interest. Is it in your interest to have a nuclear waste dump in your community? Hell no. Okay. End of story.
	All of this points to the paradox that more reasons for doing something isn't necessarily better than fewer. This is the puzzle of motivation that's in my title. It brings me to a study that I'd recently completed with some colleagues that examines this very issue in West Point cadets. The study was just published. 
	Before I get to the specifics of the study though, I want to introduce a distinction that one of my collaborators, Amy [Riznuski 00:17:43], made in a paper that we published together almost 20 years ago. Amy argued that there are three fundamentally different orientations people can take to their work.
	You can see your work as a job in which case you would respond, you would agree to these kinds of characteristics. "I work for pay, it's a necessity, I'd stop in a minute. I'd do something else if given a chance. Can't wait for the weekend. Eager to retire. Wouldn't encourage my friends or kids." 
	You can view your work as a career, in which case, you might enjoy the work. You expect to move on to something better. Your goals are mostly defined in terms of the trajectory that you're on, you can't wait to get a promotion. Now until Amy did this research, this sort of exhausted the categories of people's attitudes toward work. Some people had jobs, some people had careers. Jobs were dead-end, careers were going somewhere. 
	She introduced a third category. She didn't invent these distinctions, but she just gathered data on them. A calling. "Work is one of the most important parts of life. I'm pleased to be doing it. It's a vital part of my identity. I take work home and on vacations. My friends are from the workplace. I would encourage my friends and my children to do this kind of work. I'm not looking forward to retirement."
	She found that people really saw their work as in falling into one of these three categories pretty much unambiguously. One set of data came from a very large sample of people who worked in an academic hospital setting and the other came from a small liberal arts college roughly 12 miles southwest of Philadelphia. (laughter). I won't name the place, but 30 administrative assistants were studied. All ostensibly doing the same work. 
	A third thought they had a job, a third thought they had a career, and a third thought they had a calling. Isn't that interesting? Did it matter? Yes, it mattered. It predicted work satisfaction, it predicted physical health, and it predicted performance evaluations. To the extent you think your work is a calling, you're healthier and you're happier and you do better work.
	Unlike the nursery school kids, these were people who are ostensibly doing the same job and getting the same pay. Somehow the motivational structure that informed the orientations that these people brought to their work were different and their employer presumably had very little to do or the structure of their work presumably had very little to do with that difference. The important point here is everybody was working. Everybody was getting paid.
	It is not the case that for everybody getting paid was the reason for their work. What this tells you, this is a very important lesson that economists often forget, not every consequence of an activity is a motive. Sometimes a consequence may be that you get paid, but that's not the motive behind what you do and you can't infer motivation simply by looking at consequences. Motivation is way too complicated for that.
	Okay, so let me tell you about the study and then I'll finish. What we did was we got access to data from 11,000 West Point cadets over a period of a decade. When they come to West Point, they answer more questionnaires than you can possibly imagine. Some of the questionnaires concern their motivation for attending West Point. These are not questionnaires that we designed.
	If we were designing them, we would have asked questions differently and it would have been clearer, more clearly addressed at what we were interested in. Nonetheless, we were able to categorize their answers to these motivational questions into a set that we regarded as instrumental: getting a good job, getting career training, it's an economic necessity, that kind of thing, and motivations that we regarded as internal: wanting to serve my country, wanting to be a leader, wanting to be an Army Officer.
	We could characterize each and every West Point cadet for a 10 year period as having both instrumental and internal motives or just one or just the other. Then, we simply kept track of how they did. We didn't keep track since it was already, they were already finished. We measured whether they graduated from West Point, we measured how likely they were to be recommended for a promotion, and we measured the likelihood that they would stay in the military after they had served their five year term.
	Here's what we found. For people who have low internal motivation, the stronger their external motivation, the better they are on all three measures. If you are not interested in serving your country, being a leader, or being an Army Officer, the more interested you are in learning a trade and developing skills and getting money for college, the better soldier you are. Duh.
	For people who have low instrumental motivation, the stronger their internal motivation, the better soldiers they are. Another duh. How could it be otherwise? People with strong internal motivation, want to be a soldier, want to serve my country are better than people with strong instrumental motivation. One last duh. Why am I telling you this? Because there were a couple of results that were not quite so dull and predictable.
	Here's one. So what you've got on the graph, it's called F4. F4 is a composite measure of internal motivation. F3 is a composite measure of instrumental motivation. F3 is going from low to high along the X axis, yes? You with me? The top curve is people who score highest on internal motivation. The middle one, I would tell you the colors but I'm colorblind, is people who score in the middle in internal motivation. The bottom one is people who score at the bottom in internal motivation.
	The thing to notice is this. Just look at the top line. Notice. People who have high internal motivation are worse and worse soldiers the higher their instrumental motivation. The optimal condition for people with high internal motivation is to have no instrumental motivation. Every little bit that you add makes them less good soldiers, less likely to make commission. For people who are highly instrumental, there isn't much difference all the way on the right between high and low internal motivation.
	Instrumental motivation seems to make hucksters of us all. For people who have low instrumental motivation, their internal motivation is decisive. This is a measure of being considered for early promotion. This result is in some ways even more striking for all three levels of internal motivation, the more instrumentally motivated you are, the worse you do.
	Now it's interesting that in contrast to the Marines, which does its recruiting by basically appealing almost entirely to internal motivation, the proud, the strong, it's all about being a soldier and protecting your country. In the Army, the Army takes a shotgun approach. You might be interested in getting money for college. You might be interested in learning how to program computers. You might be interested in traveling. 
	The great thing about the Army is you can do all of those things. You shoot the shotgun and you hope that some pellet will hit every potential Army recruit. The result based on data like this is that you will get more recruits who will be worse soldiers. Now what's striking about this is this is not a laboratory demonstration. This is a real world demonstration. This is a demonstration of the effects of the motivation people bring with them up to 14 years after the motivation was measured.
	It is measured when they are entering first year students at West Point and the consequences in terms of promotion and staying in the Army are manifested 14 years after that. These were not ideal questions, so whatever these questions were picking up in these 17-year-olds seemed to be real enough that you could see its effects almost a lifetime later in their lifetime, in their own lives, at any rate.
	So what does this tell us? There are always going to be instrumental consequences. If we focus on instrumental consequences and ignore the internal ones, the potential internal ones, what will happen is we will be virtually guaranteed to get people who do worse work and who get much less satisfaction out of the work that they do. This it seems to me is an unmitigated disaster. We want people who want to do the work they do. 
	Why? One, because it's a shame to waste half of your waking hours doing something you really don't like or don't see the value in. Why else? Because there's every reason to believe that if you didn't have that attitude toward work, you would actually do better work and the company you worked for would be more productive, the clients you served would get more satisfaction, and the economy in general would be better off.
	Do we know how to encourage people to get this kind of satisfaction out of their work? Seek it and get it? We know a few things. If you emphasize the purpose of the work, what's it for, you increase the chances that people will approach their work with internal motivation. If you emphasize how the work people do serves others and virtually every kind of work people do serves other people, has an effect on other people, people will be more engaged by the work they do.
	If you give employees a fair degree of discretion and autonomy, people will get more satisfaction out of the work they do. If you make the work challenging, varied, and flexible, people will get more satisfaction out of the work they do. If you structure work so that there's regular mentoring from above and support from colleagues, people will get more satisfaction out of the work they do. 
	On the other hand, if you routinize work, if you insist on close micro-monitoring and supervision, if you provide little or no support and if you use rigid work rules and incentives to produce high-quality work, then you're virtually guaranteed to turn everybody who's doing the work into someone who thinks his work is a job. We want people not to think their work is a job and the question is, why is it that we have allowed so many of the jobs that people do to be so miserable and soul deadening?
	Gallup recently did a survey. It does a survey every year, but the last one gathered information from a quarter of a million full-time and part-time workers in 142 countries. They found overall 13% of workers feel engaged by their jobs. 13%. How could we collectively have allowed this to happen? Well, here I think is the answer. I'll end with Adam Smith as I began with Adam Smith. 
	He said, "A man whose life is spent in a few simple operations has no occasion to exert his understanding or to exercise his invention in finding out expedience 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 become." Now I italicize two words in this quote because I want you to contrast what he's saying here with what he said in the first quote.
	He naturally loses. What is it that he loses? What did he have before he was subjected to these working conditions? He generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become. That must mean that before you subjected him to these working conditions, he wasn't stupid and ignorant. We create working conditions that induce people to lose their desire to do work well and lose their ability to do work well.
	Then lo and behold, we put people in these working conditions and we're shocked to discover that unless we're looking over their shoulders and incentivizing the hell out of them, they basically do crappy work. Built into this quote unlike the quote that I began this talk with is the understanding that human nature is something that is not discovered so much as it is created. Human nature gets created in part by the institutions within which people live. 
	If you create institutions like most of the workplaces people find themselves in, you will create people who want to do nothing but lie on a couch eating bonbons and watching football. If you create institutions that expect and demand and value more from people, then they will give you more. It seems to me that what we have a responsibility to do is to make sure that whatever role we play in the shaping of institutions, we use to shape institutions that make work meaningful and rewarding and not soul killing and diversive. Thank you. (applause). Thanks a lot.