The IKEA Effect : Why Building Your Own Furniture (or Anything) Makes You Love It More

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!”

Local Motors, Inc., a more manly company, takes the IKEA 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.

Initial experiments suggest that once we build something, we do, in fact, view it with more loving eyes. Experiments suggest that the effort involved in the building process is a crucial ingredient in the process of falling in love with our own creations. And though tailoring is an additional force that can further cause us to overvalue what we have built, we’ll overvalue it even without tailoring.

Assuming that you are like most parents, you think very highly of your own kids (at least until they enter the monster adolescent years). 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.

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 love. If you put an obstacle in the way of someone you like and they keep on working at it, you’re bound to make that person value you even more. On the other hand, if you drive that person to extremes and persist in rejecting them, don’t count on staying “just friends.”)

The simple economic model of labor states that we are like rats in a maze; any effort we put into doing something removes us from our comfort zone, creating undesirable effort, frustration, and stress. If we buy into this model, it means that our paths to maximize our enjoyment in life should focus on trying to avoid work and increase our immediate relaxation. That’s probably why many people think that the ideal vacation involves lying lazily on an exotic beach and being served mojitos.

We think we will not enjoy assembling furniture, so we buy the ready-made version. We want to enjoy movies in surround sound, but we imagine the stress involved in trying to connect a four-speaker stereo system to a television, so we hire somebody else to do it for us. We like sitting in a garden but don’t want to get sweaty and dirty digging up a garden space or mowing the lawn, so we pay a gardener to cut the grass and plant some flowers. We want to enjoy a nice meal, but shopping and cooking are too much trouble, so we eat out or just pop something into the microwave.

If you understand the sense of ownership and pride that stems from investing time and energy in projects and ideas, you can inspire yourself and others to be more committed to and interested in the tasks at hand. It doesn’t take much to increase a sense of ownership.

Source – The Upside of Irrationality: The Unexpected Benefits of Defying Logic at Work and at Home by Dan Ariely

Goodreads – https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7815744-the-upside-of-irrationality