I'm sure that many of your are familiar with IKEA.
It's a store for kind of semi-assembled furniture.
You buy it and you get to assemble the rest of it yourself.
And quite a few years ago, I bought the piece of furniture from Ikea.
It was a particular, a chest for toys. Nothing high quality, nothing particularly
great. And I also have to admit that I'm really
bad at assembling things. My hands are not that good to start with.
I never exactly understand the instructions.
And as a consequence, I spend the whole afternoon, maybe even the whole Afternoon
into the evening assembling these things. I made lots of mistakes, I put things in
the wrong pieces, I had to take things apart and there were some screws I could
never find the right size according to the instructions.
Anyway, it wasn't it wasn't a good afternoon But what I found later is that I
kind of fell in love with a particular chest of toys.
And I kept on carrying it with me, I have been moving a lot of round.
And I kept on moving it and I kind of fond of it.
And last night I looked at it again fondly thinking about the hours that I spent
working on it. Now, it's not that I'm mis-remembering the
agony of building it but I do like it more.
And I started to think about what are cases in which putting effort into
something makes you love it to a higher degree.
Now, this actually reflects an old story. And it's a story that when people started
creating cake mixes there was this idea that housewives would love this thing.
And they were already selling mixers for all kinds of things.
They were selling mixers for pie crust, and for muffins, and for all kinds of
other things. Why not cakes?
But the reality was that, people did not like the cake mixes.
They were just not desirable. And the first thought that was, maybe the
taste was not good. But no, the taste was great.
And then they came up with something they called the egg theory.
And the egg theory was if you take powder, and you mix it with water, and you pour it
into a pan and you bake it, you cannot really take credit for it.
It is not yours in any way. Now, pie crust if you make a pie with
pre-made pie crust or from a mix, you still made the pie.
If you make biscuits or muffins, its still just part of the breakfast.
But a cake is a whole dish, its the final dish of the meal.
And all of a sudden, you basically are saying, this is not mine.
I just poured it in and serve it to you. Maybe it feels a bit like opening a can of
something. Pouring it in, and serving it to your
guest. So what would happen, they thought, if
they took the egg out of the mix, and took the milk powder out of the mix.
And people had to add those things together.
All of a sudden, it became much more popular.
Which ironically means that we can make something more effort full and less,
nevertheless people would like it to a higher degree.
So, think about this idea that our liking for something is determined not by, just
by what it is but also how much effort we put into it.
And the most effort we put into something, the more we like it.
So that was the basic idea and here is what we try to do, we try to test it
empirically. So we gave people a sheet of instructions
of how to do origami, how to do this Japanese folding ah[COUGH] little animals.
And people could create a crane, or they could create a frog and we gave them some
time to do it. And the reality is that what people
created was not that good, right? These were amateurs in origami.
They created some stuff. It looked more like crumpled piece of
paper than a beautiful crane or frog, but nevertheless they created it.
So we had these people who created these frogs or crane.
And then we took other people who did not create those frogs or crane.
And we asked them to evaluate them. So we asked everybody who was a builder to
basically say how much money they would be willing to pay to get this crane or frog.
Because they work for us, so we are officially we own the frogs and the
cranes. But we told them we would be willing to
sell it to them for the right price. And we create a little auction mechanism.
So what happened? The first thing that happened was that the
builders thought that these were going to be great and they were willing to pay a
lot of money for them. The evaluators, not so much.
The value it is that don't think that those were great cranes.
So the moment you invested and you created the crane or frog, you thought your crane
or frog was really fantastic. When it wasn't you, you didn't think that
this was so such a, such a hot thing. Now, here's a second question.
If you created a crane or a frog, you might say to yourself, you know what?
I love this crane and frog, but other people would not.
So you might be able to intuit correctly that they are valuable for you
specifically, but not to other people. You might say, well, you know, I like the
particular version of this tail, or I like the particular version of how this is done
and it could have some interesting critic value for you.
But you could recognize that other people who did not build it would not love it as
much. Or you might be wrong, you might think to
yourself I love this and everybody else would love it as well in the same way.
Which one of those was the case? They felt that everybody would love it.
So the people who build the origamis thought they were more lovely and
wonderful, but they thought that other people would recognize how wonderful and
lovely they were. But people who were not involved in the
building did not have this sense of appreciation.
In the next version of the experiment, we contrasted two things.
Some people got the easy instructions. The same as they got before.
And for some people we basically eliminated the legends.
We made it hard for them to understand what are all the little rules on the
Origami instruction sheet, look like. What is the little arrow?
What is the dotted lines, and so on. Now it was harder for them to understand
how to build origami. And because of that, the origami they
built was even uglier. Right?
So what would happen? Again, the builder, who build easy origami
loved it more than the people who are not involved in the building.
And what about the people who build the difficult origami?
They loved it even more. Although objectively it was worse, and the
people who are evaluating it thought it was worse, the people who built it thought
it was much better. So it means that not only does effort
increase love, more effort creates more love.
Now there's one important issue, which is you created an origami, but at the end of
the day, it looked like nothing, right. You basically made nothing, like, you
know, you work for a long time and at the end of the day you couldn't really think
of it as an origami. That did not create more love.
But to the extent that you build something, more effort does create more,
more love. I think the same thing happens with kids,
right? Imagine the following.
Imagine that you go to a, a park. And you come with your kids and I say, oh
you know, these are, these are great kids. Would you sell them to me?
And don't worry. They'll have a good life and I'll buy the
kids and I'll, let's say, erase all your memories from your experience and thoughts
and wishes about these kids. And you will be the same as you are now
just with no memory of the kids and more money.
How much money would I need to pay you for that?
And most people say, oh that would be a lot of money.
I love my kids so much. To compensate me for me, you would need to
pay me lots and lots and lots of money. Now, think about the second case.
Imagine you have no kids and you come to a park and you meet two kids.
These kids by the way are my particular kids, the ones you see on the screen.
And you come to play in the park with the kids and you play with them for a few
hours and you learn everything about them. And as you're ready to go the parent of
these kids say hey, by the way before you say goodbye if you're interested they are
for sale. Are you interested, and how much would you
pay? And they're exactly like your kids.
Under those conditions, most people seem not that interested.
Not that interested because we recognize actually that our love to our kids is
partly due to them but it's partly due to us.
It's partly due to the effort we invest in them.
And if you think about kids this way, kids are actually the ultimate IKEA effect.
They don't come with instructions. The instructions are actually very hard.
The amount of effort we invest in them is dramatic.
It's tremendous, more than, probably, anything else that we do in our lives.
And as a consequence, our evaluation of them changes very, very dramatically.
And not only that. But we can't see that other people don't
see our kids in the same way that we do. When I go to the park and my kids are
playing, I can't imagine that everybody else is not interested in just sitting
there watching my kids. I mean, I can't imagine that they'd watch
their own kids. I mean, why would they, when my kids are
so wonderful and exciting and so on. So basically we have both of these, love
is increased with effort. But it also blinds us to the perspective
of other people. And we don't see it as well.
By the way, you can think about lots of implications for that.
Think about lots of places that allow you to have tailor-made shoes.
And allow people to design their T-shirts and so on.
Usually when we think about people designing their own stuff.
We think about it as being something that is good for individual fit.
I like red, somebody likes blue. I like red, and you know whatever yellow,
somebody else likes red and something else.
And usually, the idea of allowing people to tailor something is to say people have
very different levels of preference. Let's allow people to pick whatever they
want and this way their preferences will be satisfied to a higher degree.
But these results about the IKEA effect suggest that it's not just about
individual preferences, it's also about investing effort.
And this is actually important because if you are creating something that allow
people to design it. If you don't think that effort is
important, then you want to read people's minds if you could and just offer them the
thing that would be their best fit. Or maybe you want to make it as easy as
possible for them to get something that fits their preferences.
But if you believe in a, in labor leading to love.
If you believe that people need to put their own self into something and work on
it, you know to like something more, maybe that product needs to play hard to get.
Maybe the product needs to require some effort.
Maybe the more effort that would be created is actually quite important
because all of a sudden, it would lead to higher level of love and higher commitment
to the product. Now, of course, when we create something
we have to balance multiple things. On one hand more effort could lead to more
love, on the other hand more effort could lead to people abandoning this choice.
And the real question is what is the sweet spot?
What is the amount of effort that would get people to love what they're doing to a
higher degree without turning them off? And I'm not sure there is an ultimate
solution for that because it depends on how much you love.
The particular domain. How much part of your personality it is.
How important it is for you. So there are probably all kinds of things
in the mix. But it's important to think about both of
those things. How do we get people to invest.
To care about it. But not to require them to invest too
much, that they will decide to just give up.