Pay is the first thing most employers reach for when they want more effort, and one of the more surprising results in behavioral economics suggests it may not be the strongest lever. In a peer-reviewed study from 2008, Dan Ariely, Emir Kamenica and Drazen Prelec asked people to build plastic Lego figures and then changed one thing: what happened to the finished product.
Why Dan Ariely Used Legos
The setup was simple. Participants built Lego Bionicle figures and were paid a little less for each additional one, so they could stop whenever the money no longer seemed worth it. In one group, finished figures were stored away. In the other, participants watched their figures being taken apart, so that the same pieces could be built again.
The pay was identical. The meaning was not. Participants whose work was preserved built about 11 figures on average. Those who watched their work dismantled built about seven. What changed was how the work felt: in the plainest possible way, one group could see that its effort did not accumulate into anything.
When Liking the Task Stopped Mattering
A second detail in the results is easy to miss. In the preserved group, people who said they enjoyed Legos built more figures, which is what you would expect. In the dismantled group, that link disappeared. Enjoyment of the activity no longer predicted how much people were willing to do.
That finding is part of why Ariely treats meaning as something distinct from fun. His recent writing, including an October essay called “The Shredder Problem,” returns to the Lego work as evidence that people will give up a surprising amount of effort when they conclude their output is going nowhere. A recent 2026 study in Psychological Science by Yilin Liu and Fan Yang points the same way: when adults could skip a puzzle-building task, 83 percent chose to build a heart when it would be kept, compared with 34 percent when it would be taken apart.
Ariely has spent years carrying findings like these beyond academic journals. Readers can find Ariely’s Goodreads author page alongside the books that brought his ideas to a general audience.
He has also taken the work to live audiences, including in his TED talks.
What Employers Can Take From It
The Lego study is easy to dismiss as a lab curiosity, but its lesson translates directly. Work that is shelved, archived without being read, or replaced before anyone engages with it can look to the people who did it a lot like a Bionicle figure being pulled apart.
The remedy Ariely proposes is modest. Keep work where you can instead of discarding it, and tell people you have seen what they sent. He argues that managers consistently underestimate how much these small signals matter, which is why they so often go unused.
Ariely also maintains a profile on Medium for readers who want to follow his writing beyond the lab results. The takeaway the research offers is less about Legos than about leadership: before asking people for more, check whether anything they have already done has been allowed to count.