Duke University Study Shows Why People Prefer Dead End Jobs

When I was a child growing up in Maryland, we visited relatives in New York and Philadelphia often. Back in the eighties, the toll booth operator job on the New Jersey turnpike was the national symbol of boredom. I remember sitting at the booth longer than we had to just so that the poor operator could have some human conversation.

Albert Camus might have been thinking of the toll booth operator when he wrote The Myth of Sisyphus. The famous essay refers to the ancient Greek story about a man who’s condemned by the gods to roll a boulder up a hill, watch it roll down, and then repeat the cycle for all eternity. In Camus’ view, the more modern worker is much like Sisyphus, working every day of his life at the exact same tasks.

In the enlightened twenty-first century, we often talk about work being meaningful, and about engaging in careers about which we feel passionate. But it turns out that at the end of the day, most people will still pick a Sisyphus-like job over an engaging one if they aren’t getting paid for the extra effort required by the latter. And in a recovering economy where salaries still have not come up to post-recession levels, this means that millions of disillusioned job seekers are selecting dead end jobs.

Duke University Fuqua School of Business marketing professor Peter Ubel and David Comerford, an assistant professor at Stirling University, explored the idea of “effort aversion,” or why people choose to put forth less effort even if it means less personal satisfaction. The results of their studies, “Effort Aversion: Job Choice and Compensation Decisions Overweigh Effort,” were recently published in the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization. The researchers found that even when an effort-filled job would be more interesting and enjoyable than a boring one, people tend to price themselves out of the job market because they feel their efforts need to be rewarded.

For more on the Duke study, check out the full post on Intuit's Fast Track blog.

Comments

[Jef]

Great post and interesting study on this.. It make sense people want to be able to leave work at work and may not be as ambitious as you or I..

I admit it is tempting occasionally, what are your ways to overcome this?