A few years ago, my university introduced a new procedure: every research center would submit a quarterly report. I knew what this was. Anyone who has spent time inside a large institution knows what this is. It was a document that would exist so that someone could say a document existed.

But I decided to treat it differently. I gathered the whole lab and made the case that if we had to write this thing anyway, we might as well write it well, and that describing everything we were doing, with real depth, might teach us something about ourselves as a lab. People bought in. We worked hard. The report was long, well reasoned, carefully documented, and submitted on time.

What came back, almost six months later, was a note about serial numbers. Someone had checked each of our research protocols against another list and found that a few numbers didn’t match. That was the only focus of the review process. Nothing about what we were studying, or why, or what we had found.

I want to be precise about what happened, because it isn’t quite the usual story. Our report wasn’t thrown away, and it wasn’t ignored. Somebody read it. They just read it for the one thing that didn’t matter and passed over everything that did. I remember the feeling in the lab afterward: not anger, exactly, but deflation, and a quiet collective decision that next quarter we would not try so hard.

That feeling is the subject of this essay. How much does it cost when the work we do disappears into a drawer or a shredder? And how little would it take to prevent it?

Legos

In 2008, Emir Kamenica, Drazen Prelec and I tried to put a number on this. We paid people to build Lego Bionicle figures. The pay started at two dollars and dropped by a few cents with each figure, so that at some point everyone would decide the next one wasn’t worth it and stop.

The only difference between our two conditions was what happened to the figures afterward. In one, each finished Bionicle went under the table, to be taken apart at the end of the session. In the other, the experimenter dismantled it right in front of the participant, while they were starting the next one, and put the pieces back in the box to be rebuilt. We called this the Sisyphean condition.

Same pay, same task, same Legos. People in the first condition built about eleven figures. People in the Sisyphean condition built about seven. And a smaller finding that I still think about: in the first condition, people who loved Legos built more, as you’d expect. In the Sisyphean condition, that relationship vanished. Watching your work get destroyed severed the link between enjoying something and doing it.

We then ran a version with a task nobody could love: finding pairs of identical adjacent letters on sheets of random text, again for declining pay. In one condition the experimenter glanced at each finished sheet, nodded, and put it on a pile. In another, the sheet went on the pile unread. In the third, it went into a shredder. The acknowledged group kept working until the pay dropped to about fifteen cents a sheet. The shredded group quit at about twenty-nine cents. The ignored group quit at about twenty-eight.

Hold on to that. Being ignored was as bad as being shredded, and a glance and a nod were worth almost half the pay. When we asked a separate group to predict these results, they got the direction right and the size badly wrong. They assumed meaning would matter a little. It mattered a lot. We titled the paper, with a wink at Viktor Frankl (1959), “Man’s Search for Meaning: The Case of Legos” (Ariely, Kamenica & Prelec, 2008).

What we didn’t know

The study had limits. Our participants were adults in a single session, and meaning took one form: your work survives for an hour. Three questions stayed open. How small a dose of meaning is enough? Is this need something we absorb from years of jobs and performance reviews, or is it there earlier? And does meaning change what people choose to do, not just how long they persist?

The traditional view in developmental psychology was that the need for significance arrives in adolescence or later (Damon, Menon & Bronk, 2003). Erikson (1968) placed concerns about legacy in mid-life; Maslow (1971) put meaning near the top of his pyramid, a mark of the self-actualized. On that view, a four-year-old shouldn’t care whether her drawing gets kept.

Meaning at age four

This summer, Yilin Liu and Fan Yang (2026) published a paper in Psychological Science that adapted our task for children between four and nine, with adults tested alongside them. The setup was even more minimal than ours. Children could build a heart out of puzzle pieces, and the heart would either go in a box or be taken apart. Nothing was said about how long the box would be kept, whether they’d see the heart again, or what it was for. It would simply exist, or not.

About eighty percent of the children chose the box game, and said building the heart mattered more there. So did about eighty percent of the adults. Then the researchers asked whether people would pay for this. One game cost a sticker, the other was free. When both games saved the heart, eighty-five percent of the children took the free one. When only the costly game saved the heart, half of them gave up the sticker. And this happened only when they had made the heart themselves; when the choice was about watching pieces move on their own and be saved or not, nobody paid. We don’t want objects to survive. We want our own work to survive.

The third study is the closest to our Legos. Participants were offered an easier option: skip the heart and just move the pieces into the box. When the heart would be saved, eighty-three percent of adults built it anyway. When it would be taken apart, only thirty-four percent did. Among the children, the older they were, the more likely they were to take the easy way out when their work was doomed. Somewhere between four and nine, we learn that if it’s going to be destroyed, don’t bother.

Finally, the researchers tried the obvious fix and told one group that the point of the game was to have fun. It helped, but it did not close the gap. Enjoyment compensates for missing meaning partially, not fully.

Two things follow. The dose of meaning required is tiny: a box, with no promise attached. And the need is there before anyone has explained to us what impact or legacy is supposed to mean.

Not a lab curiosity

If this were only Legos and puzzle hearts, you could dismiss it. Adam Grant (2008) had university fundraisers spend five minutes with a student whose scholarship their calls had funded; in the following month they raised far more than colleagues who hadn’t. Dana Chandler and Adam Kapelner (2013) paid crowdworkers to label medical images; those told the images were tumor cells for cancer research labeled more of them, and more carefully, for identical pay. Economists now write review articles about work as a source of meaning (Cassar & Meier, 2018), and people reliably say they’d accept lower salaries for work that matters (Hu & Hirsh, 2017). Meaning is not a soft benefit. It behaves like a wage.

Why organizations shred without noticing

Nobody at my university set out to demoralize a lab. That is exactly the problem. Three things make shredding invisible to the people doing it.

The first is the prediction failure from our third experiment: managers know meaning matters and underestimate by how much, so they never budget for it. The second is that shredding is usually a side effect of tidiness. Reorganizations, cancelled projects, dashboards that count outputs, compliance checks on serial numbers: each is sensible housekeeping, and each quietly tells someone that the part of their work they cared about was not the part anyone looked at. The third is speed. Liu and Yang (2026) end their paper worrying about fragmented, transient engagement, and I’d extend the worry to how we now work with AI: drafts generated and discarded in seconds, nothing looked at twice. We are building environments that are very good at making things and very bad at keeping them.

The cheapest intervention in management

The lesson is not “make work meaningful,” which sounds expensive and vague. It’s narrower. Find where you are shredding, and stop. Find where you are ignoring, and look, and nod. A glance was worth almost half the pay in 2008. A box was enough for a four-year-old in 2026.

When the serial-number memo arrived, all it would have taken was one sentence at the top: “We read this; the work on X looks interesting.” It would have cost nothing. Instead my lab learned what the nine-year-olds learned: if it’s going to be shredded, don’t bother. Meaning is cheap to give and expensive to withhold, and we are remarkably bad at noticing when we withhold it.

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References

Ariely, D., Kamenica, E., & Prelec, D. (2008). Man’s search for meaning: The case of Legos. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 67(3–4), 671–677.

Liu, Y., & Yang, F. (2026). Moved by the lightest touch of meaning: Even minimal significance matters for motivation from childhood. Psychological Science, 37(8). https://doi.org/10.1177/09567976261462874

Grant, A. M. (2008). The significance of task significance: Job performance effects, relational mechanisms, and boundary conditions. Journal of Applied Psychology, 93(1), 108–124.

Chandler, D., & Kapelner, A. (2013). Breaking monotony with meaning: Motivation in crowdsourcing markets. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 90, 123–133.

Cassar, L., & Meier, S. (2018). Nonmonetary incentives and the implications of work as a source of meaning. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 32(3), 215–238.

Hu, J., & Hirsh, J. B. (2017). Accepting lower salaries for meaningful work. Frontiers in Psychology, 8, 1649.

Damon, W., Menon, J., & Bronk, K. C. (2003). The development of purpose during adolescence. Applied Developmental Science, 7(3), 119–128.

Erikson, E. H. (1968). Identity: Youth and Crisis. W. W. Norton.

Maslow, A. H. (1971). The Farther Reaches of Human Nature. Viking.

Frankl, V. E. (1959). Man’s Search for Meaning. Beacon Press.