In philosophy, religion, work and play, human beings tend to seek for meaning in their lives. We enjoy occupations that have meaning, and we can become quickly frustrated if we sense the pointlessness of a task. In the psychological literature, meaning is sometimes viewed as one of the strongest motivating factors in human behavior; a concept that fits well also with common intuitions of what drives human behavior.
Despite the seemingly obvious importance of meaning in determining occupational choices, only few economic studies appear to consider the role that a job's "meaning" may have on the behavior of labor market participants. Because of this, I figured it might be worthwhile re-posting on a prominent exception in the labor economics literature which appeared last year in the Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization.
In the study, entitled " Man's Search for Meaning: The Case of legos", Dan Ariely, Emir Kamenica, and Drazen Prelec investigate whether manipulations of meaning (or purpose) and recognition affect people's reservation wage (i.e. the minimum wage one would be willing to work for). They find that the meaning (or rather the absence thereof) as well as recognition (whether someone acknowledges your work), have substantial significant effects on people's revealed reservation wages.
The experiment features around the task of constructing Lego toys for a fixed, decreasing wage. Participants in the experiment were asked to build Lego toys at a decreasing piece-rate until they no longer wanted to; i.e. until they thought that the current piece-rate no longer justified their building efforts.
Meaning, or purpose, in the task was manipulated by what the MIT and University of Chicago experimenters did with Lego toys after a participant had put them together: For one group of participants - the group with the meaningful task - the constructed Lego toys were piled up on a table for the participant to see, and new Lego pieces were provided to build further toys. For the meaning-deprived group, each constructed toy was immediately disassembled (for the participant to see), and the parts given back to be reused for subsequent building efforts.
Maybe not surprisingly to you, but possibly surprising for economic theorists, the average amount of toys each person was willing to build significantly differed between the two groups.
"Despite the fact that the physical task requirements and the wage schedule were identical in the two conditions, the subjects in the Meaningful condition built significantly more [Lego toys] than those in the Sisyphus condition. In the Meaningful condition, subjects built an average of 10.6 [Lego toys] and received an average of $14.40, while those in the Sisyphus condition built an average of 7.2 [Lego toys] and earned an average of $11.52."
Integrating concepts such as "meaning", "recognition" (recognition is treated in a separate experiment, reported in the same JEBO publication), as well as the "embedding of labor market decisions into social networks" all seem exciting directions for modern research in labor economics, and will help economists better understand how people make such fundamental decisions.
Main Reference:
Ariely, D., Kamenica, E., & Prelec, D. (2008). Man's search for meaning: The case of Legos Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 67 (3-4), 671-677 DOI: 10.1016/j.jebo.2008.01.004
