Man's search for meaning: The case of Legos

By Dan Ariely, Emir Kamenica, Drazen Prelec. 2008

283 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We investigate how perceived meaning influences labor supply. In a laboratory setting, we manipulate the perceived meaning of simple, repetitive tasks and find a strong influence on subjects’ labor supply. Despite the fact that the wage and the task are identical across the conditions in each experiment, subjects in the less meaningful conditions exhibit reservation wages that are consistently much higher than the subjects in the more meaningful conditions. The result replicates across different types of tasks. Moreover, in the more meaningful conditions, subjects’ productivity influences labor supply more strongly.

Subfields: Demography, General Decision Sciences, Safety Research

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1317f7e464b2420809cc5d485deb02ec98614e82

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Demography

1. Dana Chandler
2. Adam Kapelner
3. F. Cnossen
4. Dan Ariely
5. Milena Nikolova
6. Michael I. Norton

In General Decision Sciences

1. Dana Chandler
2. Adam Kapelner
3. Dan Ariely
4. Milena Nikolova
5. Michael I. Norton
6. Daniel Mochon

In Safety Research

1. Dana Chandler
2. Adam Kapelner
3. F. Cnossen
4. Dan Ariely
5. Milena Nikolova
6. Michael I. Norton
7. Francesca Gino
8. Gabriele Paolacci

Citations in the corpus

• The 'IKEA Effect': When Labor Leads to Love (2012, background): “Ariely, Kamenica, and Prelec (2008) demonstrated the demotivating effects of seeing one’s labor undone by others; in Experiment 2 we examine the value-destroying effects of undoing one’s labor oneself.”
• What makes work meaningful and why economists should care about it (2020, background): “Specifically, previous research shows that meaningful work is associated with higher productivity and lower turnover (Ariely et al., 2008; Rosso et al., 2010).”
• Breaking Monotony with Meaning: Motivation in Crowdsourcing Markets (2012, methodology): “Ariely et al. (2008) use a laboratory experiment with undergraduates to vary the meaningfulness of two separate tasks: (1) assembling Legos and (2) finding 10 instances of consecutive letters from a sheet of random letters.”
• Corporate Purpose and Financial Performance (2019, unknown): “could have a positive influence by motivating employees beyond their formal employment contracts (Ariely et al. 2008; Grant 2008; Gibbons and Henderson 2012), thereby decentralizing decision-making (Bartlett and Ghoshal 1994), or alternatively affecting other stakeholder groups such as customers (El”