This trimester at JWU I have the privilege of teaching "The Working Life," an interdisciplinary course blending literature, sociology, and history. I’ll be leading this course at JWU’s “downcity” Providence campus in a part of the city peppered with 19th- and early 20th-century brick industrial buildings and overlooking the historic jewelry district.
This week we start by examining what work means to us and introduce the relationship between our work and our identities. To help us think about this relationship, I’ll introduce research on how we find satisfaction in our work by playing a TedEd talk from Dan Ariely, “What Makes Us Feel Good About Our Work?”. Ariely covers the answers to this question as they are borne out in his research in behavioral economics and I think students will find it interesting. Ariely and his fellow researchers found that people will continue a menial task for sequentially reduced pay up to a certain point if it feels meaningful to them. In their experiment they asked participants to build a Lego Bionicle (action figure), for $3.00, but the next at $2.70, and so on. When people stopped it was because the "work" no longer felt worth it for the pay. However, in a second stage of the experiment, researchers took apart the last Bionicle built as participants constructed the next one. They found that people were likely to find less satisfaction, stop sooner, and build fewer of the action figures under these conditions. The ever-reducing pay continued just as before, but this time there occurred a more rapid loss of satisfaction in the “work.” They called this the “Sisyphic condition.” (Obviously named for Sisyphus.) In his talk, Ariely says, “you can think about this as the essence of doing futile work. You can imagine that if [Sisyphus] pushed the rock on different hills, at least he would have some sense of progress…There's something about this cyclical version of doing something over and over and over that seems to be particularly demotivating…this was an endless cycle of them building, and us destroying in front of their eyes…we basically crushed any joy that they could get out of this activity.” Obviously destroying someone’s work as they complete it is a very clear cut example, but what about other work we do that turns out to be futile? If a project is not successful—perhaps a rejected proposal or a plan that gets scrapped because things move in a different direction—how can we still maintain satisfaction with the work we did? One answer, Ariely says, is in the sense of ownership that comes of hard work, effort, and pride. That, I think, will be a very good thought for the start of the trimester. K
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November 2017
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