TED@DestinationCanada 2023

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Imagine, for a second, that your job was made redundant by an advanced piece of software that could do the work—at the same level of quality—for free. BUT you happen to have three years left on a guaranteed contract, so your employer gives you two choices: either you can keep getting paid as per your contract, but stay at home as the software does your job; or you can continue going in and doing the work—that could have been automated—and make the same money.

Think about it–what would you do in this situation? Most, I’m sure, would just take the money. But there are always some who would still do the work. What do you think of those people? What does it say about their character?

We gave this scenario—involving a hypothetical medical scribe named Geoff—to our study participants. For half the participants, the story ends with Geoff choosing to stay at home, whereas for the other half, it ends with him choosing to go in and do the work. And then we asked each group what they thought of Geoff.

The people who heard that Geoff just kept working found him to be less competent—he does sound like a bit of a chump. But they also saw him as warmer, and more moral. Someone you can trust to do the right thing. They saw him as a good person. Even though Geoff creates no extra value if he does the work himself, people just saw Geoff as more virtuous for plugging away.

Why is it that we see mere effort as moral?

I’m a psychology professor at the University of British Columbia where I study morality. I’ve worked on religion and morality, I’ve worked on driverless cars and morality, but recently my collaborators and I have been working on work itself. In study after study, we’ve found that people attach moral worth to hard work, regardless of what the work produces.

In another study we asked about two widget makers. They make the same number and the same quality in the same amount of time, but for one of them it takes them a lot more effort to do so. We find that that harder working person is seen as, yes, less competent, but, again, more moral. And if you were to cooperate with just one of them, you would choose the one who struggles.

We call this “effort moralization.” And it doesn’t appear to be just a North American phenomenon. Work norms differ across the world, but we replicated our original American effect, in South Korea—one of the hardest working countries in the OECD, and in France—which is a country…with other strengths. In each of these places the harder worker is consistently seen as more moral, and a better cooperation partner, even if they produce nothing of value.

This seems like something broader than, say, the protestant work ethic. Even the Hadza people—hunter gatherers in Tanzania—show something like it. When asked what traits contribute to good character, they didn’t really agree on much, but there was consistent agreement on two things: generosity and hard work. So this intuitive connection between morality and effort may not be the quirk of any one culture, but something very deep indeed.

Now, effort moralization makes sense at the individual level. Someone who is willing to put effort into even meaningless tasks (perhaps especially in meaningless tasks) is more likely to put effort into helping you out. I have a friend from work—Paul. Paul is an uncommonly charismatic person. Paul wears stylish pairs of vintage selvedge jeans. Paul owns expensive bars of soap. And Paul is one of those types who wakes up every morning and goes running. When I first learned that he did this, I sort of rolled my eyes at this as one of those annoying “Mr. Perfect” things. Dr. Perfect, in this case. But one morning I saw him on one of his morning runs, and instead of seeing a sleek Type A personality, confidently striding through life, I saw Paul struggling, in an inelegant hobble, with a grotesque grimace of something between annoyance and agony on his face. Running was hard for him. Every morning was effort. The person who wakes up for that is the person you want in your corner. And Paul is in mine. He is not just the inspiration behind some of the studies in this work, but a collaborator on them as well. And he’s a good man.

The truth is that we are all in a market for finding the best people to collaborate with. And we’re trying to show others that we are that person too. The evolutionary psychologists call this “partner choice”. Just as people compete to be and select the best romantic partners, we also compete to be and select the best cooperation partners. We are all—me, you, Paul—trying to find others who are more likely to share fairly, who won’t slack off, and who will lend a hand in a pinch. Any quality that is likely to make somebody a better cooperation partner, like generosity or self-control or hard work, is seen as a moral quality. And so we have this sensible heuristic: people who work hard are good. It’s why it feels better to donate to the friend who pledges to run a marathon for cancer research rather than the one who pledges to watch a Sex and the City marathon on HBO.

But what makes sense at the individual level can still become very problematic when scaled up to the societal level. Our intuitions that effort is good—for its own sake, regardless of what it produces—has created a work environment with perverse incentives.

When we attach moral value to activity, rather than to productivity, we become more concerned with how hard someone is working, rather than what is actually being achieved by the work.

And this can come at a steep human cost. Like for Geoff, our medical scribe, who chose to throw his time into the volcano as a sacrifice to the gods of hard work. Yes, that was a contrived scenario, but how many Geoffs are out there, putting in the hours? Taking time they could have been spent on love or leisure, and using it to signal effort? How often are we Geoff—wearing workaholism as a badge of honor? A way to assure people that we are a good person? Even if the person you’re trying to reassure is just yourself.

The anthropologist David Graeber wondered about how capitalism could sustain so many of what he bluntly called Bullshit Jobs: jobs in which the work people do is pointless, accomplishing nothing of societal worth. A capitalistic system should root out these inefficiencies. But it doesn’t.

And the reason for that is that, alongside capitalism, we also operate under another system—what the journalist Derek Thompson calls workism. Workism is about your job not just being the source of your paycheck, but the source of your identity and the pathway to “self-actualization”.

What makes workism a culture is we end up forced to keep up. The partner choice market isn’t just about showing that you’re a good cooperation partner, but that you’re a better partner than the next guy. Not just hard-working, but harder working than others. This can create an arms race of workism. You can imagine two office workers both wanting to demonstrate their industriousness, both trying to be the first car in the parking lot, one-upping each other by arriving earlier and earlier in the morning. The culture punishes you when you don’t keep up. And so it requires you to put more and more in, regardless of what comes out the other side. The culture maintains the most laborious aspects of our jobs because it most appreciates us when we are seen doing that labour. And in comparison, other aspects of our jobs and life, however great, are all made just a little less important.

Now, I have to say: this is not an argument against hard work. Hard work can be extremely meaningful when it serves a purpose. Hard work built civilization. But how much of the effort we expend is done to build nothing but our reputations? To simply convince others that we are hard workers? How much of what we admire in others is just effort porn?

In one of his more candid moments, one of my graduate students told me that he noticed that I would respond to emails at all hours of the day. One AM, two AM, three AM. This was because being a professor allowed me to maintain an adolescent sleep schedule deep into my thirties. But he then used some app to schedule his own replies to come to me at one or two in the morning, so as to make it seem like he was working all hours as well! Clearly I had sent the wrong message. So much so that my student was willing to delay the product to make himself look more industrious. It was literally bullshit work. As a supervisor, I realized I had to fix my lab’s culture. I had to convince them that what mattered wasn’t the show of work but what we were producing.

It’s not necessarily a simple thing to do; the mental circuit connecting hard work to morality is a stubborn one. When I teach psychological biases to my intro psych students, I tell them that you can’t always learn to resist a bias—they can be very deeply ingrained—but you can learn to notice them so you can resist making important decisions based on them. We may not be able to fully break the circuit, but recognizing our biases allows us to make sure they don’t run our lives.

There is a story—almost certainly apocryphal—of perverse incentives from the era of British rule in India. Desperate to address the cobras overtaking colonial Delhi, a bounty was offered for every cobra skin that was brought in. The problem was, the plan backfired – as enterprising Indians began breeding cobras simply to kill them and collect the bounty. When the government abandoned the plan, as the story, the breeders released the cobras into the city, and the snake problem was worse than ever.

The plan went awry because of the distance between what they wanted—fewer cobras—and what they asked for: an imperfect signal: dead cobras. That was just a story, but I fear we’ve made a very real problem with work: we have asked for the wrong thing, incentivizing people to give us their work, rather than what we really want. 

If all we ask from each other is the amount of effort we put in, it will create a world full of effort and of hard labour and of cobras. But if what we ask from each other is to produce something meaningful, it will create a world full of meaning. And what could be more moral than that? Thank you.

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