It’s called the IKEA effect.
Amanda Montell in The Age of Magical Overthinking: Notes on Modern Irrationality. (Which tells you a lot right there.) says, “The propensity to ascribe disproportionately high worth to items we helped create is a cognitive bias, known as the IKEA effect. Its delightful name is an homage to the Swedish furniture company whose affordable products require assembly.”
She references Harvard behavioral scientist Michael I. Norton, who concluded “Participants saw their amateurish creations… as similar in value to the creations of experts, and expected others to share their opinions,”
What we make has more value to us than what we buy. Which explains that box filled with ambitiously creative pots with no lids; the entire oeuvre from a class you took in 1998 looking to revive your creative spirit and have moved from house to house each time marveling at the survival rate of handmade pottery; our children.
We often measure value in effort. Things, ideas and meals are more valuable if we make them ourselves, and if it took a long time – it’s worth more. . Grandma knit this sweater for me, it took her all month. My partner made that coffee table, took her a year before it was perfect.
When box mixes were introduced in the 30s, the idea was to create ease and convenience: open the box and just add water. But the included dried egg mixture wasn’t quite up to consumer tastes. So General Mills and Betty Crocker both altered the box mix to require adding a couple of authentic eggs. Better tasting to be sure. But also an example of the IKEA effect. Cracking an egg dignified the effort and elevated the cake to home made. Did it also enhance the perception of better flavor? Certainly.
We value personal connection. We keep signed books, we love home made gifts, from a sweater to wine. The personal connection is often the reason we keep things long past their sell-by date. The fondue pot in storage was a wedding gift. Objects have meaning and carry memories. Yes the IKEA dresser with the blue fronted drawers splintered apart during the third move, but we carried fond memories of assembling it, realizing that we are not one of those couples who are destine to spend our remaining days embroiled in DIY projects. Every time we pulled open that IKEA dresser drawer, we fondly recalled our vow to always buy pre-assembled furniture.
Things, ideas, home. Instead of veering off into a hoarding mindset, why not apply the IKEA effect to place? River and park community clean ups work because we work. Once you’ve scrubbed a sidewalk, cleared a beach, removed graffiti, you become proprietary. Do not mess with my wall. Do not throw garbage in my river. Stop choking my planet.
We don’t need to save all those pots, maybe unearth one representative pot from the box languishing at the U-Store-it-Forever complex. Spend a few more minutes picking up trash from the downtown street. The IKEA effect is so simple to understand, we can apply it to more things, more places. If we build it – we care.
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