The IKEA effect

The IKEA effect named after the furniture giant hailing from Sweden, describes how people tend to value and object or a project they create or put together.

"Labor alone can be sufficient to induce greater liking for the fruits of one's labor: even constructing a standardized bureau, an arduous, solitary task, can lead people to overvalue their (often poorly constructed) creations." is what the researcher published when they first coined the term.

So how does this cognitive bias affect aspects of our lives?

Thanks to the IKEA effect we are often willing to spend a little extra money of compromise a little on the quality of the product for an experience that requires us to put it extra effort such as assembling furniture. It can also result in a skewed picture of how good of a job we did even thought there are some minor errors or makes us overvalue that piece of furniture just because we assembled it.

Companies such as the one that gives the name of this phenomenon might exploit this to increase profits by either increasing the price of compromising the quality.

This can also be seen in recent trends with how fast AI is being developed. Chat - GPT for instance when the released to the public they had 100 million users in just 2 months (fastest ever on a online platform) most people were keen on breaking it (including me). Most users started giving it trick questions or extremely difficult tasks. And when it could not deliver the request we would tell our friends that we are smarter than AI and ask them to try it too. Which resulted in it being trained through the general population and increase it’s capabilities exponentially. Had OpenAI just let it’s QA’s try to break and train it we would have not seen the AI boom we are currently going through.

So why does this happen?

One of out primary psychological need is to feel competent, that we know what we are doing. Nobody wants to feel foolish.

People who believe in their self efficacy are more likely to cope with challenges, recover from setbacks just with their confidence behind them.

In one experiment, researchers started out by giving participants four math problems to solve. One group got very easy problems (e.g. “How likely is it that a fair coin that is tossed once will come up heads?”), while the other received very difficult ones (e.g. “You have 4 coins. Three of the coins are normal, but one of them has heads on both sides. You pick a coin at random without looking. The coin you pick has heads on one side. What are the odds that if you flip the coin over, the other side will be tails?”). The goal of this part of the experiment was to manipulate people’s sense of competence: the group that got the hard problems was likely to feel stressed out and incapable, while the easy problem group didn’t have their confidence shaken at all.

After the math problems, participants were shown a picture of a bookcase from IKEA and asked whether they would prefer to buy it pre-assembled or to build it themselves. The results showed that people who had had their sense of competence challenged were more likely to say they’d prefer to assemble the bookcase on their own.

If you want to avoid being tricked by companies who bet on you buying based on the IKEA effect you should research before you buy, consider the cost of the product and value your time.