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IKEA Effect
- greggman 9y agoWow, never heard of this. My experience has been the exact opposite. Even though I've built tons of Ikea furniture I've always considered it disposable. Most of it is not made to last a single move. Some of them might survive if you disassemble them before hand. I've been proud to have built it but that pride never translated to any attachment.
- gonvaled 9y agoThey are disposable because of the low price, but they are sturdy. I own several Ikea furniture for nearly two decades, and they have done just fine even after being abused. Most pieces survive moving, with or without dissassembly. I do not remember losing any piece if not for getting tired of it, and giving it away or selling it. Bigger pieces like big cupboards can be more fragile, but nearly any other brand would also be fragile - except maybe massive wood pieces, very heavy and not able to be dissassembled, and very expensive by comparisson.
- lloeki 9y agoSome very cheap ones in the lowest price brackets would definitely have a hard time surviving moving (hell a sofa I had barely survived being used), but climb up the price ladder and there's very sturdy stuff to be had. Also, over here at least, when you move up the price range you notice that other furniture increasingly becomes competitive and that IKEA == cheap doesn't come up as automatically true.
- jclardy 9y agoI agree, I think there is a level where this is true, and it is at the absolute bottom (like $15 nightstand level), but if you move slightly up from those "lines" the build is a bit better. No, you aren't going to hand them down to your kids, but I have some fairly cheap ikea furniture in my bedroom that survived two moving trucks just fine. And one thing about them...they are generally much lighter than solid wood "real" furniture - so the actual process of moving them is easier and generally less prone to damage in the first place.
- lloeki 9y ago> at the absolute bottom It was the lowest priced sofa at the time (~100€), and my elbow went right through the armrest on the third day. It felt like it was made of cardboard. Helpful as a temporary consumable, and probably extremely recyclable. > And one thing about them...they are generally much lighter than solid wood "real" furniture - so the actual process of moving them is easier and generally less prone to damage in the first place. Both weight and (dis)assembly are a great thing indeed: I mostly have IKEA furniture, mainly because the staircase leading to my apartment is crazy steep and tight!
- jotm 9y ago> It felt like it was made of cardboard. Helpful as a temporary consumable, and probably extremely recyclable. It might've been, some of their desks are made like this: http://www.ikea.com/gb/en/images/gb-img-fy15/ikea-board-on-frame__1364308975181-s21.jpg http://www.ikea.com/gb/en/images/gb-img-fy15/ikea-board-on-f...
- Gravityloss 9y agoCheck out Lundia bookshelf system. Totally assemblable and customizable by yourself. Wood frame, steel stringers. Very light. Selection of components is large. You can have different widths, heights, colors. Doors, clothes drawers etc. Practically eternal functionally.
- 2muchcoffeeman 9y agoThe customisable system looks a lot like the IKEA Ivar system.
- Gravityloss 9y agoYeah, Ivar is a bad copy of the Lundia system.
- PhasmaFelis 9y agoIKEA seems to cover a range from "shitty and disposable" to "surprisingly sturdy," and opinions of the brand understandably vary depending on which end you've mostly encountered.
- tonyedgecombe 9y agoYes, if you buy a side table for $8 then perhaps you shouldn't expect too much from it.
- dahauns 9y agoIronically, the Lack tables are actually insanely sturdy for their price and weight.
- geezerjay 9y ago>Most of it is not made to last a single move. I don't believe they are supposed to, in spite of the romantic marketing spin around the whole "he saw the legs off the table" shtick. They are, however, designed to be easily transported throughout the whole logistic chain up to the customer's home and to be easily assembled by everyone without specialized tools. However, some pieces of furniture require destructive build steps that aren't supposed to ever be undone, such as driving nails onto cardboard parts or driving wood screws onto particle board components, and the end result isn't exactly ready to be shipped across town in the back of a moving truck.
- kazinator 9y agoI have a few pieces of circal 1984 IKEA furniture that underwent numerous moves, including a several thousand mile trip in a U-Haul trailer in 1986.
- eknkc 9y agoAlmost all of our furniture is from IKEA and I built all myself. I enjoyed the "building" part very much. I hate the furniture though. Generic shitty stuff.
- agumonkey 9y agoI'd add another reason: the pleasure of crafting and learning. LEGO for adults.
- wanda 9y agoWhen I was a kid, the only thing I liked about LEGO was the fact that I didn't have to follow the instructions. So I could turn the boring police station into a spaceship. And the fire station into another spaceship. And the indigo tropical island set into an alien world. Then medical building, the random pirate lair, the galleon and the random 18th century fort into a pirate spaceship. And then I'd dismantle the lot and make a gigantic mega-spaceship, with a diverse crew of police officers, pirates, Imperial British soldiers, island tribespeople, and firemen. --------- Fast-forward to today: I assemble the IKEA furniture my partner wants, but I can't exactly get creative with it. Oh, and since I'm commenting now, I will add that I also feel no attachment to the IKEA crap I assemble and the eponymous "effect" probably does exist, but should have been named differently.
- agumonkey 9y agoI do not feel attached to it too. But I do prefer assembling kits than buying stuff preassembled. Instead of paying someone to do that, if I have time, I prefer the pleasure of doing it, at least a few times, and paying less (and probably costing less in shelf space and global economics). I often wonder if electronics and mechanics shouldn't be done the same. So much is wasted from misuse and repairshop abuse from ignorance.
- lifeformed 9y agoYou can still get creative with it by mixing other IKEA parts together! Check out the projects here: https://www.ikeahackers.net/ https://www.ikeahackers.net/
- seszett 9y ago> Oh, and since I'm commenting now, I will add that I also feel no attachment to the IKEA crap I assemble and the eponymous "effect" probably does exist, but should have been named differently. The effect doesn't really mean that you are going to attach a lot of value to a 9-dollar table you mounted yourself. It means you're going to attach more value to it than if you had bought the same table already assembled.
- baxtr 9y agoI must say that I have never experienced this effect. We own many furniture items from IKEA but I’d sell them (and have sold) on the spot. For me, the effect is somehow even reversed: I try to avoid IKEA as hard as I can because I feel assembling the items is not the worth the time.
- rdc12 9y agoIf it can be built by someone with no experience in less then an hour, then is it really building in any true sense. Or to put it differently is there a real difference between building something and assembling something out of a kit-set?
- BrandoElFollito 9y agoI hate to assemble stuff (furniture comes first) because it does not teach me anything useful to me. I would pay someone to do the gardening, if I had to have a garden (the thought only makes me shiver). OTOH I build electronic devices and program them even though I could buy something similar in a shop. So I guess it comes down to what is interesting for whom, and it will wildly depend on the individual.
- emodendroket 9y agoI have discovered that the kinds of housework I enjoy are that which is finite. Putting up towel bars or blinds? Pretty satisfying when all is said and done. Cutting the grass not so much because you just have to cut the damned grass again next week.
- namibj 9y agoLook into alternatives to a lawn, maybe. If just for yhe optics, take a look at moss, which takes some water to grow, but apart from slightly lower walkability has little downsides.
- emodendroket 9y agoI'm thinking next year I might just hire someone to cut it. Maybe having less grass would be good too. Part of my problem is my back yard is very hilly, making it grueling to do (not like you can just run across a few times and be done). I'm pretty new to home ownership.
- ghaff 9y agoEven with the fairly flat and modestly-sized parcel of property that I keep mowed around the house, it's just one of those tasks that I don't care to do and which needs to be done on a schedule. Some people find fairly mindless outdoor chores a good excuse to get out of the house but I don't generally speaking. It's not inexpensive to have your lawn cut and the quality isn't always to my liking. But I've found the tradeoff to be worthwhile.
- tehabe 9y agoI have a lot of IKEA stuff and build some of it myself or with other people, but I never had this feeling. More the feeling of annoyance. Once I had to go back because parts didn't fit. It takes awfully long time to assemble. A German TV show even made fun of the assembly instructions, when you put it the right way together the furniture would take over the world. I think I'm just too used to IKEA furniture.
- antaviana 9y agoI used to contract transport with assembly when I bought IKEA items, just to avoid the hassle of assembling myself. After three or four pieces of furniture misassembled, I decided to assemble them myself in my next purchases. It was not cost-efficient but I discovered that I liked the idea of controlling the assembly process to ensure it was done with enough care.
- clort 9y agoI don't really understand how relevant the first picture 'Building a bicycle' is, which seems to be two young men, cutting up a bicycle frame with an electric jigsaw? EDIT: I see, there has been some silliness in adding pictures here in the history
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- djsumdog 9y agoThis makes me think of one of my favorite web comics about Ikea: a prison for college kids and divorced men http://hijinksensue.com/comic/a-prison-for-college-kids-and-divorced-men/ http://hijinksensue.com/comic/a-prison-for-college-kids-and-...
- asveikau 9y agoThat title sounds straight out of Jonathan Coulton's "Ikea" song for those unaware of the reference. https://youtube.com/watch?v=IUPu_ipbVB0 https://youtube.com/watch?v=IUPu_ipbVB0
- rootsudo 9y agoI love assembling stuff and it makes the Ikea experience fun. I don't get why so many people hate assembling things.
- conductr 9y agoI used to enjoy it. Now I dislike it. Perhaps your understanding will come with time.
- visarga 9y agoLast time I assembled IKEA furniture I didn't have an electric screwdriver and it was exhausting. Some screws were very hard to twist and got stripped. I enjoy knowing that I completed it, but it wasn't interesting or pleasant.
- stevewillows 9y agoI love building IKEA furniture. For me, there is a certain controlled fear that comes with opening the boxes. I know it'll go together, because.. well, its not difficult, but there's always that lingering fear that it won't. In regards to the egg in the instant mix (pancakes, cakes, etc), this is mentioned in Adam Curtis' 'The Century of the Self'[1], which is a fantastic documentary, and definitely worth a watch. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJ3RzGoQC4s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJ3RzGoQC4s
- JSONwebtoken 9y agoI have never felt this fear. If the furniture doesn't go together then it's IKEA's fault and I'm sending it back. They've failed in their UX design. IKEA furniture needs to be easy enough for the common denominator to assemble, it's a significant part of their brand value.
- ijidak 9y agoI've felt a different fear. I'm always afraid that a piece will be missing or not fit correctly. Nothing frustrates me more. I've never had the problem with Ikea, but I have with other furniture. You don't want to disassemble it, because if assembling it was a waste of time, disassembling it is makes my eyes bleed. And replacing the missing or I'll fitting part is always more difficult than originally buying it. Plus the whole delayed gratification thing. I do enjoy the end result though. Even though I know in reality I've done no great thing. :) But then I just sit down an write a program, and I feel better. :)
- nsgi 9y agoWhy don't you check the parts against the list before you start putting them together?
- 2muchcoffeeman 9y agoAlways be knolling!
- stevewillows 9y ago
- stedaniels 9y agoI get this with Open Source software too. This isn't a slant on the quality., but even when it would be much cheaper and lest time consuming to get the commercial option.. I stick putting the last few screws in of whatever OS solution I'm putting together. I just can't help it, I love that feeling of "I built this". (Even if sometimes it was only configuring a few settings/putting screws in.)
- Fnoord 9y agoYeah, Gentoo would be a great and obvious example of that, as well as BSD ports collection which had to be compiled by yourself back in the days. Or baking your own *.deb or adding your own APT repositories. Building your own Raspberry Pi even though its a guide. Using an iFixit guide to repair hardware even though you're just following a guide. Lego without deviating from the guides. That kind of thing.
- danieltillett 9y agoI will add a related effect - the "find" effect. I have been remarkably attached to furniture I have picked up off the side of the road or bought at some cheap second-hand store for next to nothing. The thill of finding something valuable for almost zero makes the item worth far more to me than its intrinsic value. The more upmarket version of this is buying antique (or vintage) furniture at auction. The hunt to find the "perfect" piece makes the attachment so much stronger when you actually get it.
- rubenbe 9y agoI do agree with you. I think in this case the elaborate search replaces the "ikea assembling" part. Finding the perfect second hand piece is a very rewarding feeling. Even when the item itself has some minor flaws, which you the consider part of its "charm", something you would never accept from a brand new item. Plus this second-hand hunt is much more rewarding than zombie-strolling through an Ikea store.
- xapata 9y agoAw man, if you're zombie-strolling, you're missing out on the fun. IKEA can be a grand time if you do it right. Since they lay out realistic homes, you can play house! Invent some characters and act out a scene with your friend or spouse.
- covercash 9y agoI’d say there’s a bit of this “finders feeling” when hunting for limited release electronics/sneakers on launch day (if they’re for you and not to $flip). Not quite so much anymore with all of the pre-order options available these days.
- JKCalhoun 9y agoPerhaps both of you are describing something more like the "bargain effect".
- cm2187 9y agoThe only attachment I have to furniture is the aversion to the amount of effort required from me to do anything about them (moving, upgrading, disposing). Things would be different if they were small and light. So even a badly assembled ikea furniture will do, not because it is the precious fruit of my labour, just because it’s too much work to do something about it.
- cJ0th 9y agoInteresting that it's named after IKEA. I had to think of Edward Bernays while reading the description. The guy who shaped PR like no one else came up with the idea to sell ready to bake mixes that only required you to add one egg to make a cake. He argued that housewives would feel better about themselves when they don't buy a done cake.
- dpark 9y agoIt wasn’t that housewives didn’t want a completed cake. They didn’t want to use a mix that only required water because it didn’t feel like they actually made a cake. Adding the egg made it feel like more care went into it.
- geetfun 9y agoI recently bought a 3D printer and feel the same "Ikea effect" as well. My wife comments how I spent (over the holidays) a disproportionate amount of time tinkering and declogging the nozzle to make items I could have otherwise purchased at the dollar store.
- amelius 9y agoUnfortunately, this effect does not seem to work for home-built PCs, where the masses seem to prefer prebuilt (e.g. Apple).
- cm2187 9y agoI think it’s mostly laptops taking over the consumer space. Outside of gamers, you don’t see many people using a desktop at home.
- ghaff 9y agoBuilders have always been a tiny slice of the market. But even for me, who has built many systems, when I needed a new Windows system last year, I ended up buying a 17" Alienware laptop just because it was easier, self-contained, and took up less space.
- oblio 9y agoIt does work, but most people don't know how to build a PC. Unlike an IKEA set, there's no full list of parts to buy, you don't have a guide, it's not guaranteed that the parts work well together (even for someone with experience) and mis-assembly can render the whole thing useless.
- floatboth 9y agoYou have https://pcpartpicker.com https://pcpartpicker.com, tons of guides on YouTube, and how do you even screw up so badly as to render the whole thing useless?!
- oblio 9y agoYou need to know (and trust) those things. IKEA is a common brand and they deliver everything you need in 1 box or so. Biiiiiig difference for the common man.
- patja 9y agoIf all of your parts are good from the start, I agree. But if you are building a computer for the first time and get just one bad part, it can be difficult to isolate where the problem is if you don't have a box full of spare parts you know are good that you can swap out one by one until you find the bad part.
- croisillon 9y agofor me, the IKEA effect is a different one: it is how things look incredibly fun, nice, well-desgined when you're in the shop (because the IKEA shop is so well agenced) and just dumb when you bring one home
- lrdd 9y agoThe fact that there are some people who enjoy walking round the IKEA stores window shopping with no intention of buying anything is testament to how well designed their stores are.
- jackweirdy 9y agoAnd to the quality of their meatballs.
- ghaff 9y agoAnnoyingly, I had to take the longish hike to go to Ikea to pick some furniture up a week or so ago. And it was such a mob scene that I passed on the cafeteria. To the broader point, they do make the store something of an experience which works especially well because there are relatively few stores so it's a bit of an expedition for many people to go to one.
- kyberias 9y agoWhat is your favorite IKEA product? I love BILLY bookshelves. I've bought and disposed at least a dozen over two decades.
- kazinator 9y agoI don't feel this at all. As someone who is an actual "maker", I have to design something before I feel that I made it. IKEA is just rudimentary assembly. You don't have to reshape any material in IKEA assembly. You don't have to follow any blueprint to cut or drill anything out of raw stock. If you have any sort of skill and tools for that sort of thing, they lie idle. There was the one time I had to re-drill holes that were off. My already low regard for the item sank as a result.
- wellboy 9y agoThe effect is probably for the layman who doesn't usually build things, so when they finally build something (which is a human built-in dopamin effect, humans love building things), they are attached to it. However, when you're an engineer and build things daily, it's more of a nuisance than a joy.
- insickness 9y agoMost of these types of psychological effects are disconnected from logical reasoning and work even if you are aware of them and try to account for them. For example, pricing something at $9.99 instead of $10.00. Studies have shown that when people are perfectly aware of why this is done, it still has the desired effect.
- kazinator 9y agoHowever, I do value things I've actually made more than they are really worth. It's the sense of "this is a one of a kind item made by hand; nothing exactly like it". (Even though it could be mass produced in very good quality, perhaps even better, at lower cost). That's kind of the "IKEA effect", but I don't see how you can get it from putting together a few mass produced IKEA parts. There is just about zero room to put any "you" into it.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- the_mitsuhiko 9y ago
- drivingmenuts 9y agoI tend to think of IKEA furniture as good enough to keep without getting emotionally invested. If I have to throw a piece away because of a move or breakage, I don't feel too bad about it. That, and I like the design. Most of the stuff my parents and grandparents had, with turned legs and curves, was a real turnoff. What I want from furniture is something that does it's job without calling attention to itself.
- UK-Al05 9y agoThat's what so great about IKEA furniture. Good enough for a cheap price. Means people on modest incomes can get decent enough furniture.
- Emma_Goldman 9y agoWhat is to be had by calling this a 'cognitive bias'? That is to assume a prior and universal value-set. In matter of fact, it is perfectly natural for people to value their own creative activity. That is central to what it is to be a human.
- mgiannopoulos 9y agoThe word "bias" doesn't need to have a negative meaning in a scientific context.
- comboy 9y agoPeople are not aware that they would behave this way. > Researchers then priced the items the experimenters had assembled as well as pre-assembled IKEA furniture. The results showed that the subjects were willing to pay 63% more for the former than for the latter. And it's clearly not rational. As long as you assign positive value to your time.
- anoother 9y agoDid you mean to say 'rational' as opposed to 'not rational'? If time has positive value, then so do objects with time invested in them.
- xapata 9y agoSunk cost fallacy.
- comboy 9y agoIf your time is of any value to you, then you should be willing to pay more for furniture that is already assembled, not the opposite. I mean unless assembling it is something that you really enjoy doing. So much that you want to pay extra for that pleasure.
- ambivalents 9y agoOnly if you value time more than whatever positive value you extract from assembling (and subsequently enjoying/using) the furniture.
- jpfaraco 9y agoAbout the related cake mix story: I recently found that the reason why the Betty Crocker cake mix increased in sales is dubious, if not false. Apparently, sales went up because adding fresh eggs to the mix simply produced superior cakes — http://www.snopes.com/business/genius/cakemix.asp http://www.snopes.com/business/genius/cakemix.asp
- bbarn 9y agoI've seen this false attribution effect in software design too. "Let's use kanban instead of scrum to build this new platform with a stack that fits our business better being built by the two senior engineers we've since hired." Oh look, the new platform is coming along great, all glory to kanban.
- emodendroket 9y agoI certainly understand this in situations where you've done some significant work or build the thing from scratch, but I'm surprised to learn such a thing would take root with following the instructions to assemble furniture.
- golergka 9y agoThat's the reason why so many games have character creation screens, even in genres where it doesn't make a lot of sense.
- emodendroket 9y agoI had a blast with the custom character thing in Sonic Forces.
- jordache 9y agoreally? fall in love with our ikea creations? More like procrastinating with the pieces sitting inside the ikea box until I really need to put the thing together.
- philwelch 9y agoHmm. I usually consider my IKEA furniture even more disposable because I know for a fact it was assembled by a clumsy oaf :)
- vbezhenar 9y agoCould this be applied to software? Building Linux from Scratch was awesome experience for me, even if I didn't write a line of code and just followed instructions (actually I wrote my own init scripts). I used that Linux for a year after that. But I'm technical person, so complete noob probably won't be able to do that. Something like installing a program to a proper place by extracting and copying few files and doing few registry tweaks to make it work may be?
- dgudkov 9y agoThe effect also explains why paying users are more loyal and tolerant to bugs than non-paying.
- edraferi 9y agoI was surprised the article doesn’t mention “sweat equity” or “sunk cost.” Labor has value, even when you’re just building IKEA furniture or hunting for antiques. It makes sense that people place a higher value on their own labor than that of others, because the cost is intuitive.
- tzahola 9y agoHmmm, after reading this I thought maybe I should just buy a new macbook charger instead of creating a hand-cranked braiding machine from 3d-printed parts to replace the worn-down cable insulation on the current one.
- rdruxn 9y agoSame goes for home cooked meals
- equalunique 9y agoI am reading this from an Ikea cafeteria.
- dboreham 9y agoEnjoy your pickled herring.
- equalunique 9y agoI do enjoy picked herring, but only with plain pickling. None of those sweet or creamy preperations