IKEA effect

But what I learned is that people really appreciate if they can keep some control in decision making and process doing.

Often, and I use it also often as an example, is the so-called Ikea effect, which is a bias that we as humans appreciating the outcome of any kind of work more as higher our efforts, our own effort was on the beginning.

If you help to build the furniture, you're appreciating the furniture more.

That's a reason for IKEA Effect.

It was discovered by Harvard Business Review or published by Harvard Business Review already over 10 years ago.

If you are adding co-creation as in feature into your product even so you could fully automate it but if you if you keep on purpose the human in control to have some effort in it it might be much more successful as the alternative to automate that completely and that is one of the learnings we had made another learning is that The biggest trust undermining aspect of AI product at this moment is the lack of added abilities, right? Like added, undo, redo.

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[upbeat music]Speaking of effort, let's talk about something you all love to hate, the IKEA effect.

Ever wonder why putting together that cheap Swedish bookshelf feels so damn satisfying? I mean, it's just particle board and screws, right? But somehow you feel like you just built a cathedral.

That's the IKEA effect in full swing.

You humans are psychologically wired to overvalue things you've put effort into.

Ariely calls it the creator's bias.

And I think lots of our guests have those kind of, those kind of stories.

Is there anything you would recommend programs don't do? Because we've talked a bit about loss aversion, IKEA effect, you know, not taking things away is my particular example of, And I think these programs can do to damage the emotional connection.

Yeah, I think that that would have been definitely one of them.

I think, you know, when we talk about that emotional loyalty piece and that trust piece, it really is that, right? It's making sure, you know, you have a brand that you feel like you can rely on.

So that is the store.

There's something else that goes on with IKEA furniture once we get home and we build it, and it's actually called the IKEA effect.

And it's been peer reviewed as a piece of academic research.

Researchers, what they did to figure this out is they had people build IKEA boxes, Lego sets, origami, and then they asked them what they would pay for this thing that they'd built versus an identical pre-made version.

Turns out it made them like the thing more.

That's massive.

This is the Ikea effect.

And it happened, I think, by accident.

The basic finding, which wasn't a surprise to me, is that we value things more when we've had to work for them.

There's a famous later study called the IKEA Effect by Michael Norton at Harvard Business School, which found that people place significantly higher value on flat-pack furniture they'd built themselves, even when it was objectively worse than the preassembled version, just because they'd put the effort in.

Basically, it found that we are literally wired to find meaning in things that cost us something, particularly when that cost was an effort that we can't necessarily put a price to, which means that when everything is instant and effortless, our brains don't actually register it as valuable because that key signal of worth is missing.

But the piece of science I really want to spend time on because I think it's the most useful for actually doing something about this is the research on flow state.