No matter what it is - a new shirt, a car or even a house - in that moment when an object becomes your property, it undergoes a transformation.
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| He loved the smell of Christmas in mid-July |
Because you chose it and you associate it with yourself, its value is immediately increased (Morewedge et al., 2009). If someone offers to buy it from you, the chances are you want to charge much more than they are prepared to pay. The standard psychological explanation is that people are reluctant to relinquish the goods they own simply because they associate those goods with themselves and not because they expect relinquishing them to be especially painful.
This is a cognitive bias called the endowment effect. It's the reason that some people have attics, garages and storage spaces full of shit they cannot bear to get rid of. Once you own something, you tend to set its financial value way higher than other people do.
When tested experimentally the endowment effect can be surprisingly strong. One study found that owners of tickets for a basketball match overvalued them by a factor of 14 (Carmon and Ariely, 2000). In other words people wanted 14 times more than others were prepared to pay.
The endowment effect is particularly strong for things that are very personal and easy to associate with the self, like a piece of jewellery from your partner. Similarly we also tend to overvalue things we've had for a long time. Sometimes, of course, the sentimental value of things is justified; but more often than not people hold on to old possessions for no good reason. So if you're surrounded by rubbish, ask yourself: do I really need all this, or is it the endowment effect?
At the end of the day it's just stuff.
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''Ours is a culture and a time immensely rich in trash as it is in treasures''
~ Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing
~ Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing
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