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by
Dan Ariely
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February 13 - February 18, 2018
how much effort must we expend in order to be able to view our own creations with pride?
To understand the basic recipe for ownership and pride, let’s take a historical look at semi-preprepared food.
However, not all mixes were greeted with equal enthusiasm. Housewives were peculiarly reticent about using instant cake mixes, which required simply adding water.
no one could explain why the mixes used to make piecrusts and biscuits—made up of pretty much the same basic ingredients—were so popular, while cake mixes didn’t sell.
biscuits and piecrusts are important, but they are not a self-contained course. A housewife could happily receive a compliment on a dish that included a purchased component without feeling that it was inappropriately earned. A cake, on the other hand, is often served by itself and represents a complete course.
A would-be baker would hardly be willing to consider herself (or publicly admit to being) someone who makes birthday cakes from “just a mix.” Not only would she feel humiliated or guilty; she might also disappoint her guests, who would feel that they were not being treated to something special.
once Pillsbury left out the dried eggs and required women to add fresh ones, along with milk and oil, to the mix, sales took off.
This basic drive for ownership in the kitchen, coupled with the desire for convenience, is why the Betty Crocker slogan “You and Betty Crocker can bake someone happy” is so clever. The work is still yours, with a little time- and laborsaving help from a domestic icon. There’s no shame in that, right?
Local Motors, Inc.,
The small firm allows you to design and then physically build your own car over a period of roughly four days.
Mike, Daniel, and I decided that the notion of attachment to the things we make was worth testing, and in particular we wanted to understand the process by which labor begets love.
But simply documenting the IKEA effect was not what we were after. We wanted to find out whether the greater perceived value resulting from the IKEA effect might be based on sentimental attachment (“It’s crooked and barely strong enough to hold my books, but it’s my bookshelf!”) or on self-delusion
These results showed us that the creators had a substantial bias when evaluating their own work. Noncreators viewed the amateurish art as useless and the professional versions as much, much more exciting. In contrast, the creators saw their own work as almost as good as the experts’ origami. It seemed that the difference between creators and noncreators was not in how they viewed the art of origami in general but in the way that the creators came to love and overvalue their own creations. In summary, these initial experiments suggest that once we build something, we do, in fact, view it with
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IN OUR NEXT experiment, we wanted to test whether the overvaluation
by creators would persist if we removed all possibility of individual customization. So we had our participants construct a bird, duck, dog, or helicopter from prepackaged Lego sets. Using Lego sets achieved our no-tailoring objective because the participants were required to follow the instructions with no room for variation. That way, all the creations ended up looking exactly the same. As you probably expected, the creators were still willing to pay much more for their own work, despite the fact that their work was identical to the work made by the other creators. The results of this
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Our next question was whether we are aware or unaware of our tendency to ascribe increased value to our beloved creations.
For example, think about your children.
If you are unaware that you overvalue your own children, this will lead you to erroneously (and perhaps precariously) believe that other people share your opinion of your adorable, smart, and talented kids. On the other hand, if you were aware that you overvalue them, you would realize, with some pain, that other people don’t see them in the same glowing light as you do.
You’ve just finished creating your paper crane or frog, and it is now up for auction. You decide how much to bid on it and offer a decidedly high amount. Are you aware that you are overbidding and that other people will not see your creation as you do?
So did the origami builders understand that others didn’t see their creations as they did? We found that creators bid the same amount when they considered only their own evaluation for the product (second-price auction) as when they also considered what noncreators would bid for it (first-price auction). The lack of difference between the two bidding approaches suggested not only that we overvalue our own creations but also that we are largely unaware of this tendency; we mistakenly think that others love our work as much as we do.
in order to enjoy the IKEA effect, is it necessary for our efforts to result in success, even if that success simply means that the project was finished?
But what if just investing effort is not enough? What if completion is also a crucial ingredient for attachment?
We found that those who successfully completed their origami in the difficult condition valued their work the most, much more than those in the easy condition. In contrast, those in the difficult condition who did not manage to finish their work valued their results the least, much less than those in the easy condition. These results imply that investing more effort does, indeed, increase our affection, but only when the effort leads to completion. When the effort is unfruitful, affection for one’s work plummets. (This is also why playing hard to get can be a successful strategy in the game of
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The effort that we put into something does not just change the object. It changes us and the way we evaluate that object. • Greater labor leads to greater love. • Our overvaluation of the things we make runs so deep that we assume that others share our biased perspective. • When we cannot complete something into which we have put great effort, we don’t feel so attached to it.
Sadly, in surrendering our effort in these activities, we gain relaxation, but we may actually give up a lot of deep enjoyment because, in fact, it’s often effort that ultimately creates long-term satisfaction. Of course, it might be that others can do better wiring work or gardening (in my case, this is certainly true), but you might ask yourself, “How much more will I enjoy my new television/stereo setup/garden/meal after I work on it?” If you suspect you would enjoy it more, maybe those are cases where investing more effort will pay off.
The author doesn’t take into account that there is enjoyment if you pay others to do things for you because your effort was in making the money that enabled you to do so.
In all cases, the participants rated their own solutions as much more practical, as having a greater potential for success, and so on. They also said that they would invest more of their time and money into promoting their own ideas rather than any of the ones we came up with.
But even if their ideas weren’t superior to ours overall, it could have been that our participants’ notions fit better with their own unique perspectives of the world.
It was rather clear to us that the results of this first experiment demanded further probing. We did not know how much the increase in excitement over the participants’ own ideas was due to their objective quality; how much of it was due to their idiosyncratic fit; or how much of it, if any, was rooted in the ownership of the idea. To focus our test on the ownership part of the Not-Invented-Here bias, we needed to create a situation in which neither objective quality or idiosyncratic fit could be the driving force.
Again, we found that participants appreciated their own solutions more.
At the end of the day, we concluded that once we feel that we have created something, we feel an increased sense of ownership—and we begin to overvalue the usefulness and the importance of “our” ideas.
Edison, however, was so protective of his creation that he dismissed Tesla’s ideas as “splendid, but utterly impractical.”7 Edison could have had the patent for AC since Tesla had worked for him when he invented it, but his love for DC was too strong.
The worst that could happen to anyone who
touched a live DC wire would be a powerful shock—jolting, but not lethal. Touching a live wire running AC, on the other hand, could kill instantly.
Our experiments testing the Not-Invented-Here bias demonstrated that the same thing happens with our ideas.
Chances are that if your kids grow their own lettuce, tomatoes, and cucumbers and help prepare them for a dinner salad, they will actually eat (and love) their veggies.
And, as in Edison’s case, the process of falling in love with our own ideas may lead to fixation. Once we are addicted to our own ideas, it is less likely that we will be flexible when necessary (“staying the course” is inadvisable in many cases). We run the risk of dismissing others’ ideas that might simply be better than our own.
Our task is to figure out how we can get the most good and least bad out of ourselves.
Under what circumstances do people want to take revenge? What drives us to spend our own time, money, and energy and even take risks just to make another party suffer?
The results showed increased activity in the striatum, which is a part of the brain associated with the way we experience reward. In other words, according to the PET scan, it looked as though the decision to punish others was related to a feeling of pleasure. What’s more, those who had a high level of striatum activation punished others to a greater degree.
punishing betrayal, even when it costs us something, has biological underpinnings. And this behavior is, in fact, pleasurable (or at least elicits a reaction similar to pleasure).
people are generally willing to put their faith in others, even in people they don’t know and will never meet (this means that, from a rational economics point of view, people are too trusting).
This basic element of trust is also why we get so upset when the social contract, founded on trust, is violated—and why under these circumstances we are willing to spend our own time and money, and sometimes take physical risks, to punish the offenders. Trusting societies have tremendous benefits over nontrusting societies, and we are designed to instinctively try to maintain a high level of trust in our society.
What really annoyed me was the way I was treated by the people in customer service. Their clear lack of concern and their strategy of playing a game of attrition with me angered me. I wanted the people at Audi to feel some pain as well.
“Here’s what I’d like you to do,” he would instruct each person. “Find as many adjacent Ss as possible and circle them. If you finish all the letter pairs in one sheet, move on to the next one. Once the five minutes are up, I will come back, collect the sheets, and pay you the five dollars. Do you have any questions?” Five minutes later, Daniel would return to the table, collect the sheets, and hand the participants a small stack of $1 bills, along with a prewritten receipt that read:
This was the control, the no-annoyance condition.
Another set of customers—those in the annoyance condition—experienced a slightly different Daniel. In the midst of explaining the task, he pretended that his cell phone was vibrating. He reached into his pocket, took out the phone, and said, “Hi, Mike. What’s up?” After a short pause, he would enthusiastically say, “Pizza tonight at eight thirty. My place or yours?” Then he would end his call with “Later.” The whole fake conversation took about twelve seconds.
After Daniel slipped the cell phone back into his pocket, he made no reference to the disruption and simply...
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We expected the people who experienced the phone call interruption to be more annoyed and more willing to seek revenge,
When Daniel handed all the participants the stack of bills, he told them, “Here is your five dollars. Please count it and sign the receipt.” But in fact, he always gave them too much money, as if by mistake. Sometimes he gave them $6, sometimes $7, and sometimes $9. We were interested in finding out whether the participants, thinking that they were overpaid by mistake, would exhibit strong revenge by violating a social norm (in this case, keeping the extra change) or give it back.
The amount of extra money participants received ($1, $2, or $4) had no impact on their tendency to turn a blind eye to the extra cash. Daniel’s taking the phone call in the midst of instructing them, however, made a big difference. A mere 14 percent of the participants who experienced Daniel’s rude side returned the additional money, compared to 45 percent of those in the no-annoyance condition.
