The Ikea Effect

The IKEA Effect : Dan Ariely, James B. Duke Professor of Behavioral Economics at Duke University : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

"‘We predict that we hate making things and we all have stories about, we tried to put together a toy for Christmas, and it was terrible to put together. And we remember these things that are difficult to do. And so we buy things that are pre-assembled for us all the time. And what we tried to show in these experiments is that if you ask people whether they like to build things themselves, they usually say no, but if we actually asked them to build them themselves, they really love it, they get a lot of meaning out of it, they get a lot of joy out of it. And they’re really, in some sense, making a prediction error that robs them of meaningful experiences.’

‘Yeah. And but but there's another mistake, which is once they make it, they fall in love with it, and they think that it's, other people fall in love with it as well. Right? So they're blinded to the uniqueness of their affection to what they've created’… ‘Could it be also that restaurants are particularly prone to this? Because there's so much creation involved? So if you say, is it just any store that you would open any retail business that people get so attached to? There’s something specific about food because in food, you really get to express a lot of your individuality. It's not like a toy store. I mean, even toy store, you get to express or bookstore and, but hardware store, you just don't see people as excited about opening another hardware store, but restaurants’

‘And restaurants. In fact, you also are very involved in remodeling the interior, whereas if you open a Walgreens or CVS, it standard. That when you have a franchise you get no say in any of this stuff. So it's very likely that you feel way less invested in the thing than if you do everything yourself’

‘That's interesting where the franchise, is one of the reasons they fail less frequently is that. That you actually minimize people's investments, you minimize the love, you minimize the idiosyncratic investments that they do. You don't allow them to have any flexibility, they enjoy it less. But maybe they don't fail as much’

‘Well, because you've tested how it looks and how it tastes on a million people. And you don't let the owner have their own idiosyncratic tastes on the menu’...

'There's a very old paper from the 1950s on how the Chinese did brainwashing in World War Two. POWs. And what they would do is they'd have American POWs, they’d have essay writing contests every week. And the prize was for the best essay. You could write about whatever you wanted. And very occasionally, they would give a prize to someone who wrote a pro-US essay. But most of the time, they would get prizes if you wrote a pro-communist essay. And so what happened over time is they started writing more and more pro-communist essays without realizing it. Because it was important to signal at the beginning, no, it's fair. We're doing pro-US. And then that's how they brainwash them. So they started to feel like all I'm trying to do is win the essay contest… This is my idea that's coming right out of me. It's an early demonstration of dissonance, in some sense.'...

'‘That's the case method at Harvard Business School. I could stand up and tell you, here's the three things you need to know about this company that we're studying, and it could take 15 minutes, or I can allow the class to figure it out themselves. And then point at people and say actually, this is what we just figured out, and you get ownership... if you came back five years later and ask people, do you remember anything? It may be the case that doing it that way instead of me just saying, it would actually be better for retention’..

‘The basic ingredient of the case method, the reason the students are so happy is they have a feeling that they actually came up with it’…

‘He has couples who've been married for a long time come in to the lab, and he makes them do exciting activities together, like roll this thing across the gym together. And so they're not putting effort into their relationship, like, let's talk about all of our issues, but they're putting effort into something together. And it really increases their satisfaction with each other… one of the ideas is that we're putting effort into something together, and we're doing it together. And now we value each other more. And it doesn't have to be effort in terms of specifically figuring out something in a relationship, but just investing in each other in some sense... there's some sort of misattribution of some kind that happens, where you should attribute it to rolling the ball. But instead you say, wow, what a what a fun person this is that I'm with’"