The IKEA effect is not just limited to physical things and kids.
It also, works for ideas. So imagine what happens when you have your
own idea versus other people have their own idea.
Are you more committed to your idea just because.
It's your own. You've all probably been in committee
meetings or group meetings when somebody comes up with some, what seems to be like
a random, stupid idea but the moment they've said it, all of a sudden they're
committed to it and they insist that everybody would spend time and energy on
that idea. Nobody is able nobody else is able to see
the value but because they've created that idea they came up with all of a sudden
they think it's fantastic. Turns out it's not just those people, it's
all of us. So imagine what would happen if you had
write your own ideas versus look at my ideas.
So together with some colleagues, we did this experiment.
We gave people that read the New York Times a few big world problems, how to
deal with global warming and water and pollution and so on.
And we asked them to do one of two things. We asked them to write solutions for those
ideas, how would you solve those problems in different ways, and then tell us how
much they like their solutions and also how much they like our solutions.
And what happened? People loved their solution much, much
better than they loved our solution. But there could be all kinds of reasons
for that. First of all, they might have been able to
come up with better solution than ours. Maybe they're smarter than us the second
thing could be idiosyncratic fit. There could be some people that, for
example, think that the right solution to deal with world hunger is for everybody to
be vegetarian. And some people think that the world, the
way to deal with world hunger is to change the economic incentives in Africa.
Some people might think that the way to increase happiness is to everybody become
religious and some people might think that the way to get more happiness is for us to
eliminate all religions. So, it could be that it's not that their
ideas are better but each person has their own version of the idea that they believe
to higher degree or it could be the third thing which is the IKEA effect which is
the pride of creation, so to look at this more carefully, we change the set-up.
Instead of just giving them problem and allowing them to write whatever they
wanted, we give them a list of 50 words. And we said here is the problem, but now
you have this list of 50 words and you have to use those 50 words to come up with
a solution. Use any words you want, but your solution
can be one sentence and only come with those 50 words, and we see that those 50
words were the words we thought are the solution.
In fact our idea was just jumbled up in a different order in the first line of those
50 words, and because of that most people came up with our idea, they basically
looked at all the words, and basic, oh, one more thing.
And the rest of the words were just, eh, a synonym of those words.
So in fact, the 50 words were basically all going, people were going to come up
with our ideas sometimes with a word change here and there, but basically all
of them came with our ideas. What happened?
Now there was our idea that we asked them to evaluate.
And there was our idea that we asked them to evaluate but they came up with it from
a list of 50 words. What happened?
They still thought that their idea was much, much better.
Suggesting that it's not that their ideas, that in the original experiment that it's
not just that their ideas were objectively better.
It's not just they were idiosyncratically fit better than they thought that they
were better. There is something about the pride of
creation. We pushed that idea even further.
We compared our idea, and then for other people we gave them this idea, 7 words
idea. We gave it to them, but in a different
order. And we asked them to reorder the words to
make a sentence, and there was only 1 sentence they could make from it which was
our idea and once they had these 7 ideas prearranged.
And how much did they like their solution now?
Even now they liked it more. Which means that the moment you get people
to invest even a little bit of energy all of a sudden they think that, that solution
is much, much better. In the history of ideas there's lots of
very, very notable people. One of them of course is Edison.
The amazing inventor who came up with lots of things, and we owe him much of our
progress. But there's an interesting story about
Edison and Tesla. And as you remember Edison basically
invented the direct current, what we have in batteries.
And he basically was trying to get direct current to be the thing that would fuel
the world or electrify the world. And one of the people who worked for
Edison was Tesla. Tesla was a young engineer, and he argued
that direct current is going to have strong limitations, and instead wanted to
use alternating current. And he actually invented alternating
current in Edison's lab. Now, Edison, officially it could have the
rights for alternating current because it was developed in his lab.
It was part of his team of inventors but he hated alternating current.
In fact, he hated it so much that he basically got a fight with Tesla and Tesla
left and took alternating current with him.
And not only that, Edison then went to great lengths to try and defame and bash
alternating current. And this was actually funded.
The development of the first electrical chair using alternating current to show
how dangerous it is. Every time somebody got electrified by
alternating current, Edison paid a PR company to go and make a big story out of
that. Eh, they would electrify animals, cats and
dogs to show how dangerous it is and by the way in some sense he was right because
in the early days, alternating current was very dangerous.
But the reality is that direct current is incredibly limited and if we every wanted
to electrify the world current to go far distances and so on alternating current
is, is the answer. But the interesting thing is, here is
Edison, one of the most brilliant people to have ever lived, one of the most
important inventors. Nevertheless, I think that his love for
direct current was so strong that he couldn't see the benefit of alternating
current, and not only couldn't see the benefit.
He was fighting them in order to defame them and try to win in this current war.
In academic life, by the way, we have something similar we call the toothbrush
theory. The toothbrush theory is the idea that we
all need a toothbrush. We all want the toothbrush, but nobody
wanted to use anybody else's toothbrush. And the same thing goes for academic
theory. We all want theories, we all like
theories, we all think it's important, but nobody wants to use somebody else's
theory. We all just want our own.
And I think it's kind of a fair and important aspect to think about how much
do we really fall in love In what we're doing and how much time we're willing
spend and effort and so on. Now in the academic setting I think it's
really easy to see while falling in love with our own ideas has pluses and minuses.
After all if you don't fall in love with your idea, why would you ever work hard on
it whether you're a startup or an academic.
And if you fall in love with your idea you would work hours and days in trying to
promote it and spend more time on it and think about it and figure it out.
And really, really, really work very, very hard to figure it out.
If you don't like it so much, you wouldn't do it.
That's the plus side. The plus side is we tend to fall in love
and therefore we're willing to spend more time, energy, effort and so on.
The down side is that sometimes, we don't recognize when things are failing.
Sometimes, we're so much in love with our ideas, like with Thomas Edison or you can
think about other theories and economics and so on.
That people fall in love with their theories that they're not willing to
accept other things that might be better. This, of course, happens in business all
the time. This idea of "not invented here" that we
over-value what we are created and not value what other people are creating, are
causing many companies to just look inside for ideas and spend way too much time on
ideas they created And not look externally for that.
One of the most sad and interesting and famous cases of this, of course, is Sony.
Sony was an incredibly innovative company but at some point they started sitting on
their laurels. They thought that they were innovating.
They thought that everything they do is fantastic and what other people are not.
And because of that, they missed quite a few revolutions in technology.
They missed a revolution in digital cameras for a whole; they missed a
revolution in memory technology; they missed a revolution in TV technology, all
kinds of things, because they just looked inside, and anything that did not come
from Sony was not value for them to the nth degree.
So It's a mix. We should love what we do but not too
much. Somebody told me that the secret to a
happy marriage is to have life insurance but not too much of it.
Maybe the same lesson is here as well: We want to love what we're doing but maybe
just not too much.