Why We Get Attached to Things

Oct 1

3 min read

“Mine.”

It is one of those words toddlers discover with impressive enthusiasm.

By around age two, children are beginning to understand that some things belong to them and other things belong to someone else. A toy can be mine. A cup can be yours. Remove the wrong object from the wrong two-year-old and the distinction can become very clear.

What is interesting is how much follows from that simple idea.

Once we think something belongs to us, we begin to treat it differently.

Psychologists call this the endowment effect: once something belongs to us, we tend to value it more highly.

In a classic series of experiments, researchers gave coffee mugs to some participants and then asked what they would accept to give them up. The mug owners generally wanted more than people without mugs were willing to pay to acquire one.

Nothing about the mug had changed.

Its relationship to a person had.

And sometimes that feeling begins even before we own something.

Pick up a sweater in a store. Feel the fabric. Unfold it. Hold it against yourself. For a few moments, you are no longer merely looking at the sweater. You are interacting with it.

Researchers call this psychological ownership, the feeling that something is already, in some sense, ours.

Retailers have good reason to encourage it. Stores invite shoppers to touch, try on, and test merchandise.

Online sellers cannot hand us an object, so they increasingly imitate the experience. We can enlarge a product with our fingers, rotate it, change its color or place it virtually in a room.

Research suggests that this kind of digital manipulation can also increase feelings of psychological ownership.

Sometimes a sense that something is already ours begins before the purchase does.

But ownership can become far more powerful than a shopping impulse.

A small gold heart worn as a child may still hang from the same chain many decades later. A grandparent’s watch may have stopped working years ago and still be difficult to discard.

The value of objects like these has little to do with what they would bring at auction.

Their value comes from their history.

Psychologists have described certain possessions as part of the extended self. Objects can become connected to our memories, relationships and sense of who we are.

A replacement may be newer, prettier or more useful.

It cannot have the same past.

Ownership can also be public. A designer handbag, an expensive watch, a particular pair of shoes or even the logo on a shirt can communicate taste, identity, aspiration or social standing.

People may choose these things for many reasons, including design, craftsmanship and personal enjoyment. But economists and sociologists have also long studied the way visible possessions can act as social signals.

More than a century ago, economist Thorstein Veblen gave one form of status spending a name: conspicuous consumption.

Some possessions remind us who we have been.

Others help tell the world who we want to be.

That may be why ownership is such an interesting human idea. It begins with a toddler learning that one object is mine and another is yours. Before long, that invisible connection can change what something is worth to us, what it says about us and how difficult it becomes to let it go.

And learning mine does not necessarily make us less generous.

Studies of toddlers have found that children with a better understanding of ownership can actually be more willing to share.

To share something, a child first has to grasp that it belongs to her and that she can choose to give it to someone else: This is mine. But I can give it to you.

That simple idea eventually becomes far more elaborate. Human societies have built laws, customs and entire economies around questions of who owns what, who may use it and when ownership can change hands.

We begin learning the basic rules almost as soon as we can talk.

More than a century ago, economist Thornstein Veblen examined how possessions can become signals of status. Read more about the man behind “conspicuous consumption.”