The IKEA effect: why we like the things we make and own

A quick note before we begin! As I often end up saying in these blogs, most psychology research has been done on white, wealthy, educated, politically democratic people in Western countries, which means that a lot of what we think we know about human behaviour could well be wrong. The answers that I give to the question above are probably not applicable to people who don’t live in a culture like mine – the United Kingdom – which is focused on individual rights and goals rather than collective rights and goals [i]. In fact, even the question may not be meaningful in some cultures. So, while I’ve focused on my own experiences for this blog, I don’t want you to get the false impression that those experiences and ways of thinking are common to all humans. Now, onto the science!

Asking why we like the things we own might seem like a strange question. An obvious answer to the question is that we’ve made some effort to acquire those items like paying for them, bartering for them or creating them. We wouldn’t have made the effort to get them if we didn’t like them!

Now think about your favourite stuffed toy from when you were a child. Imagine I’ve got another toy here that’s absolutely identical in every respect to your childhood toy, except it’s new.

Person with their hand apparently full of fire

I paid this wizard to make it for me.

OK – will you swap your existing toy for this brand new, objectively better toy? I certainly wouldn’t swap my childhood teddy bear, Barrington, for an identical bear. If you belong to an individualistic culture like mine, I bet you wouldn’t swap your childhood stuffed toy either. Though perhaps to a lesser extent, this is likely also true of other objects you own. Let’s look at why.

Teddy bear psychoeconomics

The technical name for valuing the things you own more than identical things you don’t own is the endowment effect. There are lots of theories about why this might happen [ii], including:

Loss aversion: we feel more loss at losing an object we own than we feel gain at gaining an object we don’t own. In teddy bear terms, that means gaining a new Barrington wouldn’t make up for losing the existing Barrington.
Motivated taste change: we tend to think positively about ourselves, and we may also extend that positive bias to things we own. I like existing Barrington more than new Barrington because existing Barrington belongs to me, and I like me.
Query theory: owners focus on the loss incurred by giving up an item, while sellers focus on the loss incurred by buying an item. That’s a double-whammy – I don’t want to lose existing Barrington both because that’s a loss in itself and because I would lose him by ‘buying’ the new Barrington.
Attachment: being near a thing or thinking about a thing causes us to become more attached to it. I’ve spent a lot of time playing with and near existing Barrington, so I feel a lot of affection for him. Conversely, I’ve not spent any time with new Barrington, so I don’t feel any affection for him.

No-one’s quite sure exactly which explanation is correct, if any, which partly explains why there are lots of theories. However, it seems like the current best explanation is to do with whether the options of keeping the existing item or acquiring the new item are presented as losses or gains, something called the framing effect. When we own an item, we tend to focus on the good things about it, which means that we view exchanging it for another item as a loss [iii].

But we don’t like all the things we own the same amount, right? If I absolutely had to, I could probably rank the things I own in some vague order from “will never part with” to “who cares”. Some of what determines these ranks is rational, and some is not – my laptop is high up on the list of things I’d keep because it is a good fit for what I need in terms of weight, battery life, and processing speed, but it’s also something that my partner gave to me so I am attached to it for sentimental reasons, too.

Picture of a flyer that says “Housje boompje beestje”

A more inexplicable possession which I’ve kept for about 15 years is this flyer from an Amsterdam club I probably never went to. It’s a pun about house music and it makes me laugh, but still…

I’d like to think the reasons for me to prefer one possession over the other are clear to me, but honestly, that’s probably not the case. Let’s have a look at one of the reasons that was lurking in my subconscious until I started reading about why I like the things I own…

The IKEA effect

I imagine quite a lot of people around the world have a flat-pack furniture item in their home which they have constructed themselves. I also imagine a lot of people did not enjoy the process of building the item.

Instruction book and assorted fixings for IKEA’s BILLY bookcase

This picture fills me with joy, because I like building flat-pack furniture. I am aware this is unusual.

Despite the toil involved in building a BILLY or a KALLAX or a TROFAST, IKEA is very successful. Amazingly, part of that success is because people like things more if they’ve had a hand in making them. This liking applies to items ranging from storage boxes [iv] to Lego kits [v] to loom bands [vi].

It’s not about the time you spend making the item, because the IKEA effect disappears if you build and then unbuild an item. It’s not about being able to customise the item (though that does help [vii]), because the IKEA effect is there even if no customisation has happened. Rather, it’s the combination of the effort and the successful completion of the task that makes us like objects we’ve helped to make [iv].

We’ve also learned over our lifetimes that high effort might lead to high rewards (I say ‘might’ because we do not live in a meritocracy, or an effort-ocracy, but it does happen for at least some people). This accumulated experience eventually means the feeling of making an effort can itself be rewarding. Some people also genuinely enjoy effort for its own sake, regardless whether the effort leads to success [viii]. Lastly, since we like some handmade items more than machine-made items because they ‘contain love’ [ix], this feeling could also be playing a role.

Disrupting the IKEA effect

If you’re like me, you might be mad at the idea that a company can trick you into liking something more by giving you a hand in building it and then charging you a premium – I’m looking at you, Build-a-Bear. Let’s think about how we can give ourselves the option of not experiencing the IKEA effect!

When we successfully make something, we often feel a sense of pride in our achievement, whether we keep that to ourselves or show the whole world what we’ve done. This feeling of pride is involved in the IKEA effect – specifically, the feeling of competence rather than the good mood we tend to be in after successfully doing something. Amazingly, this link means that if someone gives us the impression that we’re incompetent at maths, we’re more likely to want to assemble a bookshelf [v]! Fortunately, the same research also showed it’s possible to lessen the IKEA effect through a simple exercise of thinking about what values you hold most strongly (like kindness, honesty, justice…) and then writing about a time when your most strongly-held value was important to you.

Now we now how to disrupt it, let’s think about how to use it to our benefit…

Using the IKEA effect

Having spent some time around small children, I know it’s often a struggle to get them to eat a varied diet. If this is a problem you’re facing at the moment, then the IKEA effect could be of help to you. Ask a child to help you prepare something you want them to eat, and they will probably eat more of it than they will of an identical thing that someone else has helped them prepare [x]!

Hey kid, help me flambé these bananas!

However, some warnings apply here. Kids don’t seem to like the food any more if they’ve made it, they’ll just eat more of it. This trick seems to work with all different kinds of foods, so think carefully about what you want them to eat more of before you try it. Lastly, several researchers have tried this but they haven’t all found that it works [xi], so you might find it doesn’t work on your child, especially as kids don’t show the IKEA effect till they’re about 5 years old [xii]. Before then you might find that they don’t want to eat a food even if they’ve prepared it themselves.

Finally, here’s a possibly-useful thing for everyone! It’s still in the testing stage, but the theory is sound. You know those apps you get that prompt you to do something that’s good for your health, like drinking water, stretching, or taking the stairs instead of the lift? Well, researchers are starting to look at whether they work better if people are able to assemble the reminders themselves rather than pick from a pre-existing list [xiii] – a kind of digital IKEA effect. I’m really excited to see whether it works!

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