by Dan Ariely
Reflecting on these lessons, I decided to try to bring a sense of meaning to Jay’s work by contextualizing it. I started spending some time every week explaining to him the research we were doing, why we were carrying out the experiments, and what we were learning from them. I found that Jay was generally excited to learn about and discuss the research, but a few months later he left MIT to get a master’s degree in journalism, so I don’t know if my efforts were successful or not. Regardless of my success with Jay, I keep on using the same approach with the people who currently work with me, including my current amazing right hand, Megan Hogerty.
In the end, our results show that even a small amount of meaning can take us a long way. Ultimately, managers (as well as spouses, teachers, and parents) may not need to increase meaning at work as much as ensure that they don’t sabotage the process of labor. Perhaps the words of Hippocrates, the ancient Greek physician, to “make a habit of two things—to help, or at least do no harm” are as important in the workplace as they are in medicine.
Chapter 3
The IKEA Effect
Why We Overvalue What We Make
Every time I walk into IKEA, my mind overflows with home improvement ideas. The gigantic discount build-it-yourself home furnishings store is like a huge play castle for grown-ups. I walk through the various display rooms and imagine how that stylish desk or lamp or bookcase might look in my house. I love to inspect the inexpensive sleek dressers in the bedroom displays and check out all the utensils and plates in the shiny kitchens full of self-assembly cabinets. I feel an urge to buy a truckload of do-it-yourself furniture and fill my house with everything from cheap, colorful watering cans to towering armoires.
I don’t indulge the IKEA urge very often, but I do make a trip when necessity calls. On one of these trips, I purchased an übermodern Swedish solution to the problem of the toys that lay scattered throughout our family room. I bought a self-assembly toy chest, took it home, opened the boxes, read the instructions, and started screwing the various pieces into place. (I should be clear that I’m not exactly talented in the domain of physical assembly, but I do find pleasure in the process of building—perhaps a remnant of playing with Legos as a child.) Unfortunately, the pieces were not as clearly marked as I would have hoped and the instructions were sketchy, especially during some crucial steps. Like many experiences in life, the assembly process impishly followed Murphy’s Law: every time I was forced to guess the placement of a piece of wood or screw, I guessed incorrectly. Sometimes I realized my mistake right away. Other times I didn’t realize I’d goofed until I was three or four steps into the process, which required me to backtrack and start over.
Still, I like puzzles, so I tried to view the process of reconstituting my IKEA furniture as doing a large jigsaw puzzle. But screwing the same bolts in and out made this mind-set difficult to keep, and the whole process took longer than I’d expected. Finally, I found myself looking at a fully assembled toy chest. I gathered my kids’ toys and placed them carefully inside. I was very proud of my work, and for weeks afterward I smiled proudly at my creation each time I passed it. From an objective point of view, I am quite sure that it was not the highest-quality piece of furniture I could have purchased. Nor had I designed anything, measured anything, cut wood, or hammered any nails. But I suspect that the few hours I struggled with the toy chest brought us closer together. I felt more attached to it than any other piece of furniture in our house. And I imagined that it, too, was fonder of me than my other furniture was.
Something from the Oven
Pride of creation and ownership runs deep in human beings. When we make a meal from scratch or build a bookshelf, we smile and say to ourselves, “I am so proud of what I just made!” The question is: why do we take ownership in some cases and not others? At what point do we feel justified in taking pride in something we’ve worked on?
At the low end of the creation scale are things such as instant macaroni and cheese which, personally, I can’t regard as an act of artistry. No unique skill is required to make it, and the effort involved is minimal: pick up a package, pay for it, take it home, open the box, boil the water, cook and drain the noodles, stir them together with butter, milk, and orange-colored flavoring, and serve. Accordingly, it is very hard to take any pride of ownership in such a creation. At the other end of the scale, there’s a meal made from scratch, such as your grandmother’s lovingly made chicken noodle soup, stuffed bell peppers, and Pippin apple pie. In those (rare) cases, we justifiably feel ownership and pride in our creation.
But what about the meals that fall somewhere between those two extremes? What if we “doctor” a jar of off-the-shelf pasta sauce with fresh herbs from our garden and a few elegant shavings of Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese? What if we add a few roasted peppers? And would it make a difference if the peppers were store-bought or grown in our garden? In short, 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. From the moment instant baking mixes of all kinds (for piecrusts, biscuits, and so on) were introduced in the late 1940s, they had a strong presence in American grocery carts and pantries, and ultimately at the dinner table. However, not all mixes were greeted with equal enthusiasm. Housewives were peculiarly reticent about using instant cake mixes, which required simply adding water. Some marketers wondered whether the cake mixes were too sweet or artificial-tasting. But 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. Why did hardworking housewives not particularly care if the piecrusts they used came out of a box? Why were they more sensitive about cakes?
One theory was that the cake mixes simplified the process to such an extent that the women did not feel as though the cakes they made were “theirs.” As the food writer Laura Shapiro points out in her book Something from the Oven,3 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. On top of that, cakes often carry great emotional significance, symbolizing a special occasion.* 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.
At the time, a psychologist and marketing expert by the name of Ernest Dichter speculated that leaving out some of the ingredients and allowing women to add them to the mix might resolve the issue.•* This idea became known as the “egg theory.” Sure enough, 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. For housewives in the 1950s, adding eggs and one or two other ingredients was apparently enough to elevate cake mixes from the realm of store-bought to servable, even if the dessert was only slightly doctored. 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?
IN MY MIND, one person who understands, better than anyone else, the delicate balance between the desire to feel pride of ownership and the wish to not spend too much time in the kitchen is Sandra Lee of “Semi-Homemade” fame. Lee has literally patented a precise equation delineating the point at which this crossover occurs: the “70/30 Semi-Homemade® Philosophy.” According to Lee, overextended cooks can feel the joy of creation while saving time by using ready-made products for 70 percent of the process (think cake mix, store-bought minced garlic, a jar of mari
nara sauce) and 30 percent “fresh creative touches” (a bit of honey and vanilla in the cake mix, fresh basil in the marinara sauce). To the delight of viewers and the frustration of gourmets and foodies, she combines off-the-shelf products with just the right amount of personalization.
For example, here is Sandra Lee’s recipe for “Sensuous Chocolate Truffles”:4
Prep Time: 15 min
Level: Easy
Yield: about 36 truffles
Ingredients:
1 (16-ounce) container chocolate frosting
¾ cup powdered sugar, sifted
1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
½ cup unsweetened cocoa powder
Directions:
Line 2 cookie sheets with parchment paper. With a hand mixer, beat frosting, powdered sugar, and vanilla in large bowl until smooth. Using a tablespoon . . . form into balls and place on cookie sheet. Dust truffles with cocoa powder. Cover and refrigerate truffles until ready to serve.
In essence, Sandra Lee has perfected the egg theory, demonstrating to her ebullient followers the minimum effort it takes to be able to own an otherwise impersonal dish. Her television show, magazine, and numerous cookbooks offer evidence that a spoonful of ownership is a crucial ingredient in the psychological exercise that is cooking.
Pride of ownership is hardly confined to women and kitchens, of course. Local Motors, Inc., a more manly company, takes the egg theory even further. The small firm allows you to design and then physically build your own car over a period of roughly four days. You can choose a basic design and then customize the final product to taste, keeping regional and climatic considerations in mind. Of course, you don’t build it by yourself; a group of experts helps you. The clever idea behind Local Motors is to allow customers to experience the “birth” of their car and a deep connection to something personal and precious. (How many men refer to their car as “my baby”?) Really, it’s a remarkably creative strategy; the energy and time that you invest in building your car ensures that you will love it almost as you love your precious kids.
Of course, sometimes things that we value transform us from pleasurable attachment to complete fixation, as was the case with Gollum’s precious ring in J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy. Whether it’s a magical ring, a lovingly constructed car, or a new throw rug, a precious object can come to consume certain kinds of people. (If you suffer from overweening love for such an object, repeat after me: “It’s just a [fill in the blank: car, rug, book, toy box . . . ].”)
I Love My Origami
Of course, the notion that an investment of labor results in attachment is not a new one. Over the last few decades, many studies have shown that an increase in effort can result in an increase in value across many different domains.* For example, as the effort people invest in getting initiated into a social group, such as a fraternity or tenured faculty, becomes more wearisome, painful, and humiliating, the more its members value their group. Another example might be a Local Motors customer who, after spending $50,000 and several days to design and construct his car, might say to himself, “Having just gone through all of this incredible effort, I really, really love this car. I will take good care of it and cherish it forever.”
I told the story of my beautiful toy chest to Mike Norton (who is currently a professor at Harvard University) and Daniel Mochon (a postdoctoral associate at the University of California at San Diego), and we discovered that we all had similar experiences. I’m sure you have, too. For instance, let’s say you’re visiting your Aunt Eva. The walls of her house are decorated with a lot of homemade art: framed drawings of oddly shaped fruit resting next to a bowl, halfhearted watercolors of trees by a lake, something resembling a fuzzy human shape, and so on. When you look at this aesthetically challenged artwork, you wonder why your aunt would hang it on her wall. On closer inspection, you notice that the fancy signature at the bottom of the paintings is Aunt Eva’s. All of a sudden it is clear to you that Aunt Eva doesn’t merely have bizarre taste; rather, she is blinded by the appeal of her own creation. “Oh, my!” you say loudly in her direction. “This is lovely. Did you paint this yourself? It’s so, um . . . intricate!” On hearing her work so praised, dear Eva reciprocates by showering you with her homemade oatmeal raisin cookies, which fortunately are a vast improvement on her artwork.
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. Our first step (as in all important research projects) was to come up with a code name for the effect. In honor of the inspiration for the study, we decided to call the overvaluation resulting from labor “the IKEA effect.” 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 (“This bookshelf is easily as nice as the $500 version at Design Within Reach!”).
IN KEEPING WITH Aunt Eva and the art theme, Mike, Daniel, and I set off to visit a local art store in search of experimental material. Figuring that clay and paint were a bit too messy, we decided to base our first experiment on the Japanese art of origami. A few days later, we set up an origami booth in the student center at Harvard and offered students the opportunity to create either an origami frog or an origami crane (which were of similar complexity). We also told the participants that their finished creations would technically belong to us but that we would give them the opportunity to bid for their origami in an auction.
We told participants that they were going to bid against a computer using a special method called the Becker-DeGroot-Marschak procedure (named after its inventors), which we then explained to them in minute detail. In short, a computer would spit out a random number after the participant made his or her bid for the item. If the participant’s bid was higher than the computer’s, they would receive the origami and pay the price set by the computer. On the other hand, if a participant’s bid was lower than the computer’s, they would not pay a thing nor receive the origami. The reason we used this procedure was to ensure that it was in the participant’s best interest to bid the highest amount that they were willing to pay for their origami—not a penny more or less.*
One of the first people to approach the booth was Scott, an eager third-year political science major. After explaining the experiment and the rules of the auction, we provided him with the instructions for creating both the frog and the crane (see the figure on the following page). If you happen to have appropriate paper handy, feel free to try it yourself.
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Origami instructions
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Scott, whom we put into the creator condition, carefully followed the instructions, making sure each fold matched the diagram. In the end, he had made a very passable origami frog. When we asked what he would bid for it (using the Becker-DeGroot-Marschak procedure), he paused and then said firmly, “Twenty-five cents.” His bid was very close to the average bid in the creator condition, which was 23 cents.
Just then another student named Jason wandered up to the table and looked at Scott’s little creation. “What would you bid for this frog?” the experimenter asked. Since Jason was just a passerby, he was in the noncreator condition; his job was simply to tell us how much he valued Scott’s creation. Jason picked up the folded paper and examined its well-formed head and uneven legs. He even pushed it on its backside to make it jump a little. Finally, his bid for the frog (again using the Becker-DeGroot-Marschak procedure) was 5 cents, which was the average for those in the noncreator condition.
There was a distinct difference in valuation between the two conditions. The noncreators, like Jason, saw amateurish crumples of paper that looked more like folded mutations created by an evil scientist in a basement laboratory. At the same time, the creators of those crumples clearly imbued them with worth. S
till, we did not know from this difference in bidding what caused the disparity in evaluations. Did the creators simply enjoy the art of origami in general, while the noncreators (who did not get a chance to make origami) were indifferent to folded sheets of paper? Or did the participants in both conditions appreciate origami to the same degree, while the creators were deeply in love with their own particular creations? Put another way, did Scott and his cohorts fall in love with origami in general or just with their own creations?
To get an initial answer to these questions, we asked two origami experts to make frogs and cranes. Then we asked another group of noncreators to bid on their objectively gorgeous work. This time, the noncreators bid an average of 27 cents. The degree to which noncreators valued the professional-looking origami was very close to the bids made by Scott and his friends on their own amateurish art (23 cents) and much higher than the bids of the noncreators on the amateurish art (5 cents).
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.
