In a recent talk, Google CEO Larry Page raised a radical notion: We all might be working much harder than is necessary.
"The idea that everyone needs to work frantically to meet people's needs is just not true," he said, pointing to recent advances in technology that have made meeting humanity's basic needs much easier.
Some people work hard to pay rent, to put food on the table, because they enjoy it, or — in rare cases — because the job really demands it. But what about everyone else, those who earn more than they need and still run themselves ragged, often working to the point of misery?
Christopher K. Hsee, a professor at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, has looked at this very question. The basic hypothesis is that people work until they are beat, instead of working until they have "enough." That means it's the highest white-collar earners who are likeliest to work far more than is really necessary.
He calls this phenomenon overearning: when people "forego leisure to work and earn beyond their needs."
In a study published last year in the journal Psychological Science, Hsee and his collaborators found that the student participants in a series of laboratory experiments did just that — even when the researchers eliminated what they called the "normative reasons for overearning, such as enjoyment of work, uncertainty about the future, and desires to bequeath wealth to others."
Those reasons can be real and rational motivators of overworking in the real world, but the results of Hsee's study suggests there's something else going on, something a bit more depressing.
The Experiment
Here's the creative paradigm they set up in the lab, which was designed to be minimalistic and controlled, not absolutely realistic:
In Phase I, the participant can relax and listen to music (mimicking leisure) or press a key to disrupt the music and listen to a noise (mimicking work). For every certain number of times the participant listens to the noise (e.g., 20 times), he or she earns 1 chocolate… The participant can only earn (not eat) the chocolates in Phase I and can only eat (and not earn more of) the chocolates in Phase II.
The computer shows the partipant a running tally of their chocolate earnings in Phase I. In Phase II, they can eat as much as they want on the spot; everything else must be left behind. Those who opt to disrupt their leisurely music-listening with button-pressing and noises so frequently that they end up with more chocolates than they can actually eat are considered "overearners."