Failing Market

I think that the market for single people is one of the most egregious market failures in Western society.

Identifiable Victim Effect

But why, at the end of the day, did Baby Jessica garner more CNN coverage than the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, during which 800,000 people—including many babies—were brutally murdered in a hundred days? And why did our hearts go out to the little girl in Texas so much more readily than to the victims of mass killings and starvation in Darfur, Zimbabwe, and Congo? To broaden the question a bit, why do we jump out of our chairs and write checks to help one person, while we often feel no great compulsion to act in the face of other tragedies that are in fact more atrocious and involve many more people?

It’s a complex topic and one that has daunted philosophers, religious thinkers, writers, and social scientists since time immemorial. Many forces contribute to a general apathy toward large tragedies. They include a lack of information as the event is unfolding, racism, and the fact that pain on the other side of the world doesn’t register as readily as, say, our neighbors’. Another big factor, it seems, has to do with the sheer size of the tragedy—a concept expressed by none other than Joseph Stalin when he said, “One man’s death is a tragedy, but a million deaths is a statistic.” Stalin’s polar opposite, Mother Teresa, expressed the same sentiment when she said, “If I look at the mass, I will never act. If I look at one, I will.” If Stalin and Mother Teresa not only agreed (albeit for vastly different reasons) but were also correct on this score, it means that though we may possess incredible sensitivity to the suffering of one individual, we are generally (and disturbingly) apathetic to the suffering of many.

Can it really be that we care less about a tragedy as the number of sufferers increases?

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This is the essence of what social scientists call “the identifiable victim effect”: once we have a face, a picture, and details about a person, we feel for them, and our actions—and money—follow. However, when the information is not individualized, we simply don’t feel as much empathy and, as a consequence, fail to act.

The identifiable victim effect has not escaped the notice of many charities, including Save the Children, March of Dimes, Children International, the Humane Society, and hundreds of others. They know that the key to our wallets is to arouse our empathy and that examples of individual suffering are one of the best ways to ignite our emotions (individual examples >>emotions >> wallets).

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We are willing to spend money, time, and effort to help identifiable victims yet fail to act when confronted with statistical victims (say, hundreds of thousands of Rwandans).

**

It is not that you are hard-hearted, it is just that you are human—and when a tragedy is faraway, large, and involves many people, we take it in from a more distant, less emotional, perspective. When we can’t see the small details, suffering is less vivid, less emotional, and we feel less compelled to act.

IF YOU STOP to think about it, millions of people around the world are essentially drowning every day from starvation, war, and disease. And despite the fact that we could achieve a lot at a relatively small cost, thanks to a combination of closeness, vividness, and the drop-in-the-bucket effect, most of us don’t do much to help.

Thomas Schelling, the Nobel laureate in economics, did a good job describing the distinction between an individual life and a statistical life when he wrote:

“Let a 6-year-old girl with brown hair need thousands of dollars for an operation that will prolong her life until Christmas, and the post office will be swamped with nickels and dimes to save her. But let it be reported that without a sales tax the hospital facilities of Massachusetts will deteriorate and cause a barely perceptible increase in preventable deaths—not many will drop a tear or reach for their checkbooks.”

Break

You may think that taking a break during an irritating or boring experience will be good for you, but a break actually decreases your ability to adapt, making the experience seem worse when you have to return to it. When cleaning your house or doing your taxes, the trick is to stick with it until you are done.

Hedonic Treadmill

By failing to anticipate the extent of our hedonic adaptation, as consumers we routinely escalate our purchases, hoping that new stuff will make us happier. Indeed, a new car feels wonderful, but sadly, the feeling lasts for only a few months. We get used to driving the car, and the buzz wears off. So we look for something else to make us happy: maybe new sunglasses, a computer, or another new car. This cycle, which is what drives us to keep up with the Joneses, is also known as the hedonic treadmill. We look forward to the things that will make us happy, but we don’t realize how short-lived this happiness will be, and when adaptation hits we look for the next new thing. “This time,” we tell ourselves, “this thing will really make me happy for a long time.”

A Negative Current

Now, you might ask, “Aren’t there areas—like scientific research—where the all-too-human preference for one’s own ideas takes a backseat? Where an idea is judged on its objective merits?”

As an academic, I wish I could tell you that the tendency to fall in love with our own ideas never happens in the clean, objective world of science. After all, we like to think that scientists care most about evidence and data and that they all work collectively, without pride or prejudice, toward a joint goal of advancing knowledge. This would be nice, but the reality is that science is carried out by human beings. As such, scientists are constrained by the same 20-watt-per-hour computing device (the brain) and the same biases (such as a preference for our own creations) as other mortals. In the scientific world, the Not-Invented-Here bias is fondly called the “toothbrush theory.” The idea is that everyone wants a toothbrush, everyone needs one, everyone has one, but no one wants to use anyone else’s.

“Wait,” you might argue. “It is very good for scientists to be overattached to their own theories. After all, this could motivate them to spend weeks and months in small laboratories and basements laboring over boring, tedious tasks.” Indeed, the Not-Invented-Here bias can create a higher level of commitment and cause people to follow  through on ideas that are their own (or that they think are their own).

But as you’ve probably guessed, the Not-Invented-Here bias can also have a dark side. Consider a famous example of someone who fell too deeply in love with his own ideas and the cost associated with this fixation. In his book Blunder, Zachary Shore describes how Thomas Edison, the inventor of the lightbulb, fell hard for direct current (DC) electricity. A Serbian inventor named Nikola Tesla came to work for Edison and developed alternating current electricity (AC) under Edison’s supervision. Tesla argued that unlike direct current, alternating current could not only illuminate lightbulbs over greater distances, it could also power gigantic industrial machines using the same electrical grid. In short, Tesla claimed that the modern world required AC—and he was right. Only AC could provide the scale and scope needed for extensive use of electricity.

Edison, however, was so protective of his creation that he dismissed Tesla’s ideas as “splendid, but utterly impractical.” Edison could have had the patent for AC since Tesla had worked for him when he invented it, but his love for DC was too strong.

Edison set out to discredit AC as dangerous, which indeed at the time it was. The worst that could happen to anyone who touched a live DC wire would be a powerful shock—jolting, but not lethal. Touching a live wire running AC, on the other hand, could kill instantly. The early AC systems of the late nineteenth century in New York City were made up of crisscrossed, overhanging, exposed wires. Repair workers had to cut through dead lines and reconnect faulty ones without adequate safeguards (which modern systems now have). Occasionally, people were electrocuted by alternating current.

One especially horrific case occurred on the afternoon of October 11, 1889. Above a crowded intersection in midtown Manhattan, a repairman named John Feeks was cutting through dead wires when he accidentally touched a live one. The shock was so intense that it cast him into a net of cables. The conjunction of charges ignited his body, sending streaks of blue light from his feet, mouth, and nose. Blood dripped down to the street below as onlookers gaped in horrified wonder. The case was precisely what Edison needed to bolster his charges about AC’s danger and thereby the superiority of his beloved DC.

As a competitive inventor, Edison was not about to let the future of direct current be dictated by chance, so he started a big public relations campaign against alternating current, attempting to generate public fear about the competing technology. He initially demonstrated the dangers of AC by directing his technicians to electrocute stray cats and dogs, and used this to show the potential risks of alternating current. As his next step, he secretly funded the development of an electric chair based on alternating current for the purposes of capital punishment. The first person ever to be executed in the electric chair, William Kemmler, was slowly cooked alive. Not Edison’s finest moment, to be sure, but it was a very effective and rather frightening demonstration of the dangers of alternating current. But despite all of Edison’s attempts to foil it, alternating current eventually prevailed.

Edison’s folly is also a demonstration of how badly things can go when we become too attached to our own ideas because, despite the dangers of AC, it also had a much higher potential to power the world. Fortunately for most of us, our irrational attachments to our ideas rarely end as badly as Edison’s.

**

The experiments we carried out to test the IKEA effect showed that when we make things ourselves, we value them more. Our experiments testing the Not-Invented-Here bias demonstrated that the same thing happens with our ideas. Regardless of what we create—a toy box, a new source of electricity, a new mathematical theorem—much of what really matters to us is that it is our creation. As long as we create it, we tend to feel rather certain that it’s more useful and important than similar ideas that other people come up with.

Pride of Creation and Ownership

Pride of creation and ownership runs deep in human beings. When we make a meal from scratch or build a bookshelf, we smile and say to ourselves, “I am so proud of what I just made!” The question is: why do we take ownership in some cases and not others? At what point do we feel justified in taking pride in something we’ve worked on?

**

The origami and Legos experiments taught us that we become attached to things that we invest effort in creating, and, once that happens, we start overvaluing these objects.

Seeking for "Meaning"

“Contrafreeloading,” a term coined by the animal psychologist Glen Jensen, refers to the finding that many animals prefer to earn food rather than simply eating identical but freely accessible food.

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Jensen discovered (and many subsequent experiments confirmed) that many animals—including fish, birds, gerbils, rats, mice, monkeys, and chimpanzees—tend to prefer a longer, more indirect route to food than a shorter, more direct one. That is, as long as fish, birds, gerbils, rats, mice, monkeys, and chimpanzees don’t have to work too hard, they frequently prefer to earn their food. In fact, among all the animals tested so far the only species that prefers the lazy route is—you guessed it—the commendably rational cat.

This brings us back to Jean Paul. If she were an economically rational bird and interested only in expending as little effort as possible to get her food, she would simply have eaten from the tray in her cage and ignored the SeekaTreat. Instead, she played with her SeekaTreat (and other toys) for hours because it provided her with a more meaningful way to earn her food and spend her time. She was not merely existing but mastering something and, in a sense, “earning” her living.

**
... if you take people who love something (after all, the students who took part in this experiment signed up for an experiment to build Legos) and you place them in meaningful working conditions, the joy they derive from the activity is going to be a major driver in dictating their level of effort. However, if you take the same people with the same initial passion and desire and place them in meaningless working conditions, you can very easily kill any internal joy they might derive from the activity.

**
If you’re a manager who really wants to demotivate your employees, destroy their work in front of their eyes. Or, if you want to be a little subtler about it, just ignore them and their efforts. On the other hand, if you want to motivate people working with you and for you, it would be useful to pay attention to them, their effort, and the fruits of their labor.

**
Division of labor, in my mind, is one of the dangers of work-based technology. Modern IT infrastructure allows us to break projects into very small, discrete parts and assign each person to do only one of the many parts. In so doing, companies run the risk of taking away employees’ sense of the big picture, purpose, and sense of completion. Highly divisible labor might be efficient if people were automatons, but, given the importance of internal motivation and meaning to our drive and productivity, this approach might backfire. In the absence of meaning, knowledge workers may feel like Charlie Chaplin’s character in Modern Times, pulled through the gears and cogs of a machine in a factory, and as a consequence they have little desire to put their heart and soul into their labor.

**
If we look at the labor market through this lens, it is easy to see the multiple ways in which companies, however unintentionally, choke the motivation out of their employees. Just think about your own workplace for a minute, and I am sure you will be able to come up with more than a few examples.

This can be a rather depressing perspective, but there is also space for optimism. Since work is a central part of our lives, it’s only natural for people to want to find meaning—even the simplest and smallest kind—in it. The findings of the Legos and the letter-pairs experiments point to real opportunities for increasing motivation and to the dangers of crushing the feeling of contribution. If companies really want their workers to produce, they should try to impart a sense of meaning—not just through vision statements but by allowing employees to feel a sense of completion and ensuring that a job well done is acknowledged. At the end of the day, such factors can exert a huge influence on satisfaction and productivity.

**
ON AN INTUITIVE level, most of us understand the deep interconnection between identity and labor. Children think of their potential future occupations in terms of what they will be (firemen, teachers, doctors, behavioral economists, or what have you), not about the amount of money they will earn. Among adult Americans, “What do you do?” has become as common a component of an introduction as the anachronistic “How do you do?” once was—suggesting that our jobs are an integral part of our identity, not merely a way to make money in order to keep a roof over our heads and food in our mouths. It seems that many people find pride and meaning in their jobs.

**
The need to complete goals runs deep in human nature—perhaps just as deep as in fish, gerbils, rats, mice, monkeys, chimpanzees, and parrots playing with SeekaTreats.

**
In the end, our results show that even a small amount of meaning can take us a long way. Ultimately, managers (as well as spouses, teachers, and parents) may not need to increase meaning at work as much as ensure that they don’t sabotage the process of labor. Perhaps the words of Hippocrates, the ancient Greek physician, to “make a habit of two things—to help, or at least do no harm” are as important in the workplace as they are in medicine.

Seeking for "Meaning"

“Contrafreeloading,” a term coined by the animal psychologist Glen Jensen, refers to the finding that many animals prefer to earn food rather than simply eating identical but freely accessible food.

**
Jensen discovered (and many subsequent experiments confirmed) that many animals—including fish, birds, gerbils, rats, mice, monkeys, and chimpanzees—tend to prefer a longer, more indirect route to food than a shorter, more direct one. That is, as long as fish, birds, gerbils, rats, mice, monkeys, and chimpanzees don’t have to work too hard, they frequently prefer to earn their food. In fact, among all the animals tested so far the only species that prefers the lazy route is—you guessed it—the commendably rational cat.

This brings us back to Jean Paul. If she were an economically rational bird and interested only in expending as little effort as possible to get her food, she would simply have eaten from the tray in her cage and ignored the SeekaTreat. Instead, she played with her SeekaTreat (and other toys) for hours because it provided her with a more meaningful way to earn her food and spend her time. She was not merely existing but mastering something and, in a sense, “earning” her living.

**
... if you take people who love something (after all, the students who took part in this experiment signed up for an experiment to build Legos) and you place them in meaningful working conditions, the joy they derive from the activity is going to be a major driver in dictating their level of effort. However, if you take the same people with the same initial passion and desire and place them in meaningless working conditions, you can very easily kill any internal joy they might derive from the activity.

**
If you’re a manager who really wants to demotivate your employees, destroy their work in front of their eyes. Or, if you want to be a little subtler about it, just ignore them and their efforts. On the other hand, if you want to motivate people working with you and for you, it would be useful to pay attention to them, their effort, and the fruits of their labor.

**
Division of labor, in my mind, is one of the dangers of work-based technology. Modern IT infrastructure allows us to break projects into very small, discrete parts and assign each person to do only one of the many parts. In so doing, companies run the risk of taking away employees’ sense of the big picture, purpose, and sense of completion. Highly divisible labor might be efficient if people were automatons, but, given the importance of internal motivation and meaning to our drive and productivity, this approach might backfire. In the absence of meaning, knowledge workers may feel like Charlie Chaplin’s character in Modern Times, pulled through the gears and cogs of a machine in a factory, and as a consequence they have little desire to put their heart and soul into their labor.

**
If we look at the labor market through this lens, it is easy to see the multiple ways in which companies, however unintentionally, choke the motivation out of their employees. Just think about your own workplace for a minute, and I am sure you will be able to come up with more than a few examples.

This can be a rather depressing perspective, but there is also space for optimism. Since work is a central part of our lives, it’s only natural for people to want to find meaning—even the simplest and smallest kind—in it. The findings of the Legos and the letter-pairs experiments point to real opportunities for increasing motivation and to the dangers of crushing the feeling of contribution. If companies really want their workers to produce, they should try to impart a sense of meaning—not just through vision statements but by allowing employees to feel a sense of completion and ensuring that a job well done is acknowledged. At the end of the day, such factors can exert a huge influence on satisfaction and productivity.

**
ON AN INTUITIVE level, most of us understand the deep interconnection between identity and labor. Children think of their potential future occupations in terms of what they will be (firemen, teachers, doctors, behavioral economists, or what have you), not about the amount of money they will earn. Among adult Americans, “What do you do?” has become as common a component of an introduction as the anachronistic “How do you do?” once was—suggesting that our jobs are an integral part of our identity, not merely a way to make money in order to keep a roof over our heads and food in our mouths. It seems that many people find pride and meaning in their jobs.

**
The need to complete goals runs deep in human nature—perhaps just as deep as in fish, gerbils, rats, mice, monkeys, chimpanzees, and parrots playing with SeekaTreats.

**
In the end, our results show that even a small amount of meaning can take us a long way. Ultimately, managers (as well as spouses, teachers, and parents) may not need to increase meaning at work as much as ensure that they don’t sabotage the process of labor. Perhaps the words of Hippocrates, the ancient Greek physician, to “make a habit of two things—to help, or at least do no harm” are as important in the workplace as they are in medicine.