The IKEA Effect: Why We Love the Products We Build ourselves (And How to Use It)
The Wobbly Bookshelf Paradox There is a strange paradox in human psychology. We hate work, but we love the fruits of our labor. Researchers Dan Ariely, Michael Norton, and Daniel Mochon dubbed this the “IKEA Effect.” In their experiments, they found that people who built a simple LEGO set valued it significantly higher than people who were just handed the completed set. The act of creation—even a simple, guided one—creates a cognitive bias. We assume that anything we spent time on must be valuable. ...