A Search for Meaning in Work

We all want our work to matter in the end.

Several years ago, Dan Ariely, professor of psychology and economics at Duke, conducted an experiment. He hired students to assemble Bionicles (Lego robot toys). The first set that each student assembled earned them $2. The second set $1.89, third $1.79, etc. declining linearly. The assembled sets accumulated on the table. They could work as fast or slow as they wanted and quit whenever they wanted. 

Ariely then took a second group and repeated the study with one simple change. Instead of allowing the completed Bionicles to accumulate, there were only two Bionicle sets. The researcher simply disassembled the completed set in front of the working student as the second Bionicle was being assembled. The first Bionicle was then reused for the third round of building. (In the paper, this second group was called the “Sisyphus group.”)

The Results? The first group chose to build an average of 11 Bionicles and the second only seven. (A third collection of students was tasked with predicting the outcomes of the two groups, and though they guessed the general results correctly, they assumed the difference between the two groups would be only half of what it actually ended up being. This suggests that although we all know that finding meaning in our work is important, we underestimate just how important it actually is.) Ariely wrote:

“In our view, meaning, at least in part, derives from the connection between work and some purpose, however insignificant or irrelevant that purpose may be to the worker’s personal goals. When that connection is severed, when there is no purpose, work becomes absurd, alienating, or even demeaning. . . . The best way to show ‘who is boss’ is precisely to order someone to toil for no reason. Anecdotal evidence for this idea is evident in many movies about prison life where the guards force the prisoners to dig holes and fill them back up or to move large rocks from one part of a field to the other and back.”

What can we, as Christians, take away from the findings of this study? Ariely and his colleagues have provided a vivid illustration that human beings are designed to work with purpose and when we identify and embrace the ultimate meaning of our work in this world, we will be able to find joy and satisfaction in our individual callings. Work with meaning opens up the opportunity to experience work as joy.