Here's Where It Gets Interesting - Why We Love the Things We Love with Aaron Ahuvia

Episode Date: June 13, 2022

In this episode, Sharon spends time speaking with Dr. Aaron Ahuvia, who is an expert on a specific kind of love: our love of things–things like places, objects, brands, and activities. The things we love tend to be part of our own identity: perhaps a part of our childhood, or something we spend a lot of time with. Aaron advocates for using our particular loves–poker, PEZ dispensers, sneakers, water sports–in leading us to others who share our common interests, and can be a catalyst in forging interpersonal relationships. But what makes us really love something? There’s a difference between finding value in an object or activity and really loving it. Ahuvia says one of three things needs to happen for us to feel a connection with a thing: the thing itself is anthropomorphic, or it connects us to another person, or it’s a part of our own identity. This fascinating discussion will have you wondering just why you love the things you love! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Whether you're helping that special person take their content up a notch or adding that extra quality to your own shoots, Canon's got you covered. Shop the Level up sales event today at canon.ca. Hello, friends. Welcome. Always happy to have you. Today, I am sharing a conversation with Professor Aaron Ahuvia. And let me tell you the reason I wanted to have him on the show. He has a new book coming out called The Things We Love, How Our Passions Connect Us and Make Us Who We Are. And you guys know that I have a passion for a variety of different kinds of animals, whales, owls, eagles, etc. And it really piqued my

curiosity about how the things we love connect us and make us who we are. This is just a fascinating conversation and I can't wait to share it with you. Let's dive in. I'm Sharon McMahon and welcome to the Sharon Says So podcast. I am really excited to chat today with Professor Erin Ahuvia who has written a very interesting book that I think a lot of you are going to find really interesting too. Thank you so much for coming. It's my pleasure. Thanks so much for the opportunity. Oh, tell everybody a little bit more about your background. And I would love to hear the origin story of your book. So I'm a professor of marketing at the University of Michigan Dearborn campus. And the book is about the psychology of love,

but a very particular type of love, which is when people love objects or activities or brands or places or all that stuff except people. And I've been working on this for a long time. I started doing this research when I was a PhD student, which was back right around 1990. And at that time, I took a course from a very famous marketing professor at Northwestern, where I was getting my PhD, a man named Philip Kotler. He was explaining to us that, you know, marketing, marketing is everything, right?

If you're, you know, a religious congregation is sort of marketing itself when it gets adherence and charities market themselves when they want donations. And even people who are dating market themselves when they're trying to find the person that they want to be with. And I was single at the time and I just thought dating, wow, that's so much more interesting than actual marketing. And so I asked him if I could do my term paper on dating. And he was very open to that and said, not only can you do your term paper on it, why don't you go meet with this Professor Mara Adelman? And she has a bunch of data on a dating service.

And this is when dating services were really just getting going. There were some matchmakers for ethnic communities in America, but this was just the start is before the internet. And they were getting going, singles ads and video dating and things of this sort. So I went and found her. We ended up having a really productive collaboration. We wrote five major papers together and we were for a time, the world's leading academic experts on dating services, which is, I can say without being too arrogant because we were the only academic experts. I guess we were also the world's least respected as well as most respected. You were in the top 1% of academics.

Right, because nobody else doing this. And we got a lot of attention. I actually went on the Oprah Winfrey show, and it was a lot of fun. And to do that work, I had to learn a lot about the psychology of love. So then a little while later, I needed to pick something for my dissertation. And there was no way that a good business school was going to give a job to the guy who was the dating service professor. So I needed to do something else. And I'd done all this work on the psychology of love. And so I said, well, what can I do? I know I can look at

things people love. And this was the, turned out to can I do? I know I can look at things people love. And this was the turned out to my good fortune to be the first study to really look at this. A lot of people have talked about it, but nobody had really taken a hard look from a scientific perspective at what's going on. And that was some time ago. And I've continued working on it for the past almost 30 years. And so I finally had the opportunity to pull it all together in this book, which is called The Things We Love, How Our Passions Connect Us and Make Us Who We Are. One of the reasons I wanted to chat with you is because I have a lot of quirky things that I love, and I happen to have a large platform on which to share said quirky things. I really like whales and bald eagles. I don't like chickens. I certainly eat them, but it's not all birds. It's really a very specific subset of raptors that I'm interested in.

You have rapture for the raptors? Do you like all sea creatures? No, I don't like fish. I don't want anything to do with fish. I hate sharks. I don't care about stingrays. I could keep going. But there are a lot of things that I have a quirky fondness for.

And when I was reading your book, that I have a quirky fondness for. And when I was reading your book, it just was so delightful to read about how, what we love, the things we love, make us who we are and connect us to other people. Now, if it's not too personal, not too prying, I could put you on the couch a little bit as we go. I would love that. I think other people would find that interesting. Everyone has quirky things that they love. Yeah. That's very normal. In fact, I did this survey some time ago that asked just about 714 people to just name some brands that they love. And what we found is that there were a few brands, perhaps no big surprise, Apple is right up, it was number one, Nike, Samsung, a few others, that a lot of people

love those brands. But what was really interesting is that there weren't very many of those. And there were hundreds and hundreds of brands that only one person out of this whole survey said they loved. So for every brand that was loved by 50 people, there were 250 brands that were loved by just one person. So people love all kinds. It's like what people love is very idiosyncratic. And it tends to be when it comes to possessions, sometimes people love things from the moment they got them. But a lot of times, people develop a love for something afterwards, because you have a certain experience with the object, or it takes on a certain meaning to you. And so it's very individual. But one thing that I noticed, so you talked about whales,

you talked about bald eagles, you got wolves. No, owls. Owls? Owls, not wolves. Oh, not wolves. Not wolves. Owls. I like dogs, but only certain kinds of dogs. Right. These are what biologists call charismatic megafauna, meaning charismatic big animals. And what do they mean to you? What do they connect to in your life? I have a very vivid memory of having a book that had whales in it as a child that I read a lot. I read that book a lot. And there was something about it that was just fascinating to me.

I grew up in Minnesota, so I don't have any like direct experiences like, and then a whale came to the boat and let me pet it. You know what I mean? Like, I don't have any of those. I just thought they were fascinating. Right. So part of it does go back into your childhood. And that's one of the main themes that we find with things people love, whether it's

products or animals or whatever, is the things we love tend to be part of our own identity. And part of that is we spend a lot of time with them. They go back to our history, right? So it's not true for everything. Sometimes you fall in love with something brand new that you've never seen before, but there is this sort of overall pattern that more often than you'd think, the things we love have this sort of connection to someone's history and experiences that way. I can see that. But then there's also the issue with the birds. When did you start falling in love with these birds? How old were you and

what was the meaning to you at that point? Well, I had a pet bird when I was growing up, certainly not a bald eagle. We had a cockatiel. She was also very quirky and we had a series of cockatiels. So I had a fondness perhaps that developed for certain types of birds. Maybe they had certain characteristics, but I also live in a place in Northern Minnesota that is one of the largest raptor migratory patterns is along the shores of Lake Superior as birds travel from Canada to the South to breed, and then back and forth in the spring and fall. So I grew up seeing a lot of raptors. I wouldn't say that I was obsessed with them as a child. I was just more aware of like, oh, that's cool. Right. So if the owl of a magic wizard came along and transformed the owl into a person,

and the magic wizard is going to do this for the cockatiel also. What kind of people would they be? Owls to me have a very sort of ancient wisdom kind of vibe to them. So to me, an owl, if it were to transform into a human, would be almost that sort of like a Gandalf wizard archetype. Oh, interesting. I can totally see that. There are certain things I get from you already. And one is that you're not a person who has a very hard time expressing themselves. You're not a person who can't find the words for things, right? Right. But I think the reason people listen to you, you don't present yourself as like, oh, I'm the big expert on everything,

listen to me, et cetera, et cetera. But there is sort of lurking in the background, a kind of wisdom to your perspective. And I think that's what your listeners look for and find in your podcast. And so I think the owl kind of fits with you in a certain way. And one of the things that connects people, like makes people love certain things, is that they reflect the person's identity. And of course, our identity always has two parts. We have the person that we are right now, and the person that we want to be in the future that we aspire to. And things that we love can connect with either one, but it's great if they connect with both. And I think that there's something about the owl for you that sort of connects both with the person that you are, the person that you were in childhood because you saw these, but also a

person that you aspire to, that you admire, who has this wisdom that you would like to cultivate. to, that you admire, who has this wisdom that you would like to cultivate. I'll tell you that this general tendency that people have, if you ask them to personify the things that they love, they very frequently will pick a person who is like themselves. So, you know, I have examples in the book about a guy who loved his computer. And I said, if it was a person, who would it be? And he'd say, I think it would be sort of Edwardian English gentleman. Right. And then he says, you know, I think I would have made a good Edwardian English gentleman.

So there's this sort of connection there. How can humans use objects to better connect with other people? That's such a good question. It does happen sometimes. I mean, most of the time when we love things, they do provide some sort of an emotional bridge to another person. And that's usually a good thing. There are times when things might start out that way, but then the person gets so obsessed with the objects that instead of connecting them to other people, they become an impediment to their relations with other people, sort of like a Frankenstein's monster, right? You create this thing hoping it will, maybe unconsciously, hoping it'll connect you to other people, but instead it becomes almost like a substitute for other people. And that's tough. One of the

things that I'm interested in are groups that meet on a regular basis. Poker night is a perfect example of this, or a book group or a knitting circle. And a lot of times people who play poker are in a book group or whatever it is. This is a really good way to keep relationships going because you don't have to recreate the relationship. You don't have to find a new appointment all the time. It's just going to happen. And then over time, those people really become a close part of your life. And so this is one of the things that I really advocate for people is if you love something, see if you can find other people who share that interest and use that as a basis for some sort of an ongoing group. I'm Jenna Fisher. And I'm Angela Kinsey. We are best friends.

And together we have the podcast Office Ladies, where we rewatched every single episode of The Office. With insane behind the scenes stories, hilarious guests, and lots of laughs. Guess who's sitting next to me? Steve! It's Steve Carell in the studio! It's my girl in the studio. Every Wednesday, we'll be sharing even more exclusive stories from the office and our friendship with brand new guests. And we'll be digging into our mailbag to answer your questions and comments.

So join us for brand new Office Lady 6.0 episodes every Wednesday. Plus, on Mondays, we are taking a second drink. You can revisit all the Office Ladies rewatch episodes every Monday with new bonus tidbits before every episode. Well, we can't wait to see you there. Follow and listen to Office Ladies on the free Odyssey app and wherever you get your podcasts. Do you feel like the internet has been a useful tool in connecting us with other people who love the same objects, love the same things that we do, or has that been to the detriment of humanity? It's really hard to say. I know because it has such strong positives and strong negatives associated with it. I do know, I will say that for people who love quirky things, there's a lot of people,

the internet has allowed them to connect in ways they probably would never have before. I have a friend who collects PEZ dispensers, and she can find thousands of other people around the world who collect PEZ dispensers. can find thousands of other people around the world who collect PEZ dispensers. And there would be no way in her normal life aside from that, that she could have made that type of a connection in a practical way. And you can develop, people do develop real relationships through these sort of connections, even if the relationship happens online. However, there is some research-backed evidence that connecting to people online isn't a full substitute for connecting face-to-face. And to the extent that people, it's so easy to get sucked in to online that it can take away

just the time and energy we need. And also, I think the motivation we need sometimes to make the face-to-face relationships work, even though they're the most rewarding. One of the things I've noticed as a marketing professor that's a little bit scary is there's a lot of times where people might say, OK, like home-cooked food tastes better than fast food, and it's far more nutritious, and it's often less expensive than fast food. But it's not as convenient as fast food. And for human beings, mediocre but convenient beats excellent but inconvenient a lot of the time. And we don't want that to happen to our lives. You don't want that

to happen to your social lives. You don't want sort of mediocre but convenient relationships to eclipse the deeper but less convenient relationships in your life. I can't give you a global judgment, but I can tell people that, yes, go on the internet and connect with people who share your obscure little passion. That's fabulous. But there is a caveat there that you still need to make sure you're getting your emotional nutrition from face-to-face relationships. That's such a great illustration because human, I've read that many times that for most people, good enough is good enough. Right. That most people are not like, listen, it's caviar or nothing for dinner. Right. You know, most people are just like pizza is good enough.

And so good enough is good enough for a lot of people. And so that is such a great way of putting that, that we cannot let our default of like, it's fine. You know, the relationships we have online, that's fine. We can't let that eclipse the more inconvenient, but very necessary interpersonal relationships we have in real connections. Right. And there's a whole junk food issue that is really relevant here. So we evolved that in such an environment, human beings evolved, that the food that tasted the best to us was often the most nutritious. That's why it tastes good to us. We evolved to like things that provided us the calories and the nutrition we needed. need it. Of late, we have started doing something where we strip out a lot of nutrition from food and it tastes good, but it's like junk food. It doesn't have the nutritional value. However,

when you eat it, you still feel full. So you're going to eat this stuff. You feel full, you feel satisfied, but you start over time to feel crummy and to be unhealthy because the nutrition isn't coming along with it. And what happens, I think, in relationships is the kind of deeper relationships that you have with more intimate friends on a face-to-face basis, they provide you with a kind of emotional nutrition that other more superficial relationships do not. And you don't necessarily notice immediately after spending time that you've either got this nutrition or haven't got this nutrition, but it creeps up on you. And if your relationship diet is sort of junk food all the time with relationships that feel rewarding for a moment, but don't

have the depth of connection that you need, then you end up emotionally malnourished. And one of the things that shows up is loneliness. And we have a huge amount of loneliness in our society. I feel like that's a great way of just perfectly illustrating that point that we need. I feel like that's a great way of just perfectly illustrating that point that we need. It's great to have junk food sometimes. And sometimes it's even a little better than junk food. Sometimes it has some nutrition, but we still need that. We still need those servings of vegetables.

Yeah. And they can taste really good. And your relationships with people can feel really good. It's not necessarily a bad thing, but it's a higher effort thing. Yeah, I see that. It is a lot more effort, frankly, to be like, what are you doing? Oh, no, you're busy tomorrow? Okay, what about Thursday? The amount of work it requires to get together with people in real life is much more than it is to just drive by some comments on

the interwebs. Yeah, absolutely. I would love to know what you think the future looks like when it comes to the things we love. How is that going to change in your estimation? It's really interesting. So there's three main things that allow us to love objects or activities. So first off, before I even get to those three, right, there's sort of quality, right? So we value things. If something's really useful to us, if it's really good quality, we place a very high value on it. But valuing something is not the same as loving that thing. So the question is, if something's really good, that'll get you to value it. But what takes you to the next step? What makes people actually love something? And to take that

next step, you need at least one of three things. And that is either the thing itself looks or feels like a person. It's anthropomorphic. The second thing is that, as we were talking about, it connects you to another person. So you love that thing and your brain is like, well, it's kind of like a person because it's really connected to this other person. And so your brain is really kind of loving that other person along with the thing. And the third is that it's a part of your own identity. And if it's a part of you and you're a person, then yeah, fine.

Your brain is going to treat it sort of like a person. So you need one of these three ways of sort of humanizing in some way, the object or the activity. And all three of those are going to change due to technology in the future. So the one that I think is easy to understand, maybe we'll focus on this and get together if you want later, is just anthropomorphism. People frequently love objects if the object looks or sounds or acts like a person in some way. person in some way. And in the future, that is going to get way, way better than it is. So even now, with our really not very good impersonations of people, people can really fall in love with objects and really feel connected to objects that talk to them.

and really feel connected to objects that talk to them. In the future, which is not that far away, not only will your phone talk to you, but your phone will actually say smart and insightful things. Your phone will become a good conversationalist. And the odds on a person sort of connecting with that in a deep way are going to go way, way up. So right now, it's extremely rare. But in the future, when the alternatives of objects through technology are much more appetizing, there is a scary possibility that people will want to do that. And these things are going to be tempting because they're going to be convenient and they're going to be easy, right? If you want to be in a

relationship with a friend and you want the friend to listen to your boring stories, you have to listen to their boring stories. But that cell phone friend is just going to listen to your boring stories and tell you how wonderful you are. It's never going to ask anything of you. It's going to look at all your vacation pictures. Absolutely. And just every single one is going to be fabulous. And I worry about first the substituting for human relationships. And I also worry about it degrading our relationships.

What if we come to expect other people to be like that? It's very unrealistic. Yeah. I mean, the future of AI, we could talk about that all day long. AI is fascinating and also terrifying. Super useful. It's going to be one of those things that's like an airplane. Incredible tool, but you can also use it to fly it into a building, you know, and kill people with it. So the same is likely true of AI, which we won't get too into, but super useful tool. They probably have incredible medical uses in terms of things like diagnostics and being able to help us avoid mistakes and things along those lines.

But it also has some terrifying prospects of what it will be capable of in the future. Yeah, absolutely. And already people are, you know, they have these programs they've had for quite a while. There's one that was created to be sort of like a psychologist. And it just, it's a fairly simple program. And it'll say like, tell me about your day. And you'll say, well, I went to work. And it'll say, tell me about work. How was work, right? It just picks like the words out of your sentence and repeats them back to you. People really get attached to this. and repeats them back to you. People really get attached to this. And it's not doing anything very complicated, but people get very involved in this sort of thing. And so it is a little scary to think about what might happen when it gets good. I know people are going to be curious.

What are some things that you love? I should be better prepared for this question. It's sort of an obvious question. I love music. And I'll tell you, I love music and I love my stereo system. I've always been a bit of an audiophile. But there is a tension there that I know I have to manage because sometimes people who are into stereos, we can get so into the stereo that we stop listening to the music and we just start listening to the stereo. You put on, instead of thinking about what's happening in the music, you're wondering like, how does that sound? Is that, you know, is that really clear or what have you? It can be very distracting. And so it is something that I work on. And I made a point a number of years ago to stop in my leisure time reading. I'll like to read while listening to music. I make a point now of reading

articles about music and avoiding articles about stereos so that I can sort of keep my focus on what I really find the most rewarding there. And if your stereo was a person, I'm just kidding. We could talk about the psychology of music too that's that's a whole other topic but music obviously does something very unique in the human brain that causes us to feel emotions way more than a lot of other experiences do but it's one of the things i loved about the book is i got to go into the psychology of why people enjoy certain things. Because things that we love are pleasurable to us.

They're not just good. If something is high quality, but you don't enjoy it, people very rarely love those things. It's not going to actually provide some sort of a pleasure to it. And I think part of that is that the pleasure, people are looking to understand their own identity, to understand themselves. And pleasure is a signal to us that something is an authentic part of our identity. When you listen to a song and you just like it, you're like, okay, that tells me something about who I am. I'm the kind of person who likes this music. Whereas you listen to something and you think, well, that was very carefully produced and written, but I didn't enjoy it.

That's not, it doesn't reflect you. It doesn't reflect who you are. It's not an authentic part of you. And so people love things that give them pleasure, partly because the pleasure itself is nice, and partly because that gives us a clue about who we are as people. I loved visiting your website, thethingswelove.com, because it has a bunch of amusing pictures. One of the things I also love is humor. And I love the pictures you have on your website where it's like, Marcos loves books. Betty loves her house. And then it has kind of like a funny picture. And I, I, so I have pictures on the website and these are just from people who have,

are interested in this. And I would love if your listeners, any of your listeners, if you love something, go to my website, thethingswelove.com. And you'll find a link there where you can upload a picture just of you posing with something that you love. And if I get it, I may be able to put it up on the website into rotation with the other ones. And you can see just people posing with things that they love. It's very sweet. It is. I think it's very fun. Mark J loves chai latte. Yeah. Arlene loves stuffed animals. They are very funny. And the pictures people send in are very amusing. But you also have a quiz on your website called, is it really love? Tell me a little bit

more about this quiz. So one of the things that I did with two colleagues, Rajiv Batra and Rick Bagozzi, who are both at the University of Michigan, they're at the Ross School of Business, is we did a huge, many, many year research project on things that people love and brands that people love. And one of the outcomes was this measure that's very scientifically developed and tested and verified that measures the extent to which people love things by answering a few questions about them. And so if you go to the website, you can type in something that you love and it'll get inserted into these questions and you just answer, you know, to what extent does this say something, for example, says something true and deep about who I am. So you'll answer

a bunch of questions like that. And then we'll pop out a score for you that you can then see based on the scale. Is that true love or is that sort of love or is that not love? And it's fun. It's fun to sort of, it's almost like kind of a horoscopy kind of thing, except horoscopes are a matter of faith, whereas this is very scientifically evidence-backed information. All right. If somebody were to buy The Things We Love, they can pre-order it now. It's coming out in July. If they were going to read it, what would be something that you would hope they would take away from it? I would hope that they would come to appreciate sort of the depth of our relationship with a lot of things. That there are a lot of things in our life, most things in our life, our relationship is not at all

deep with them, right? I get like the, as I said, the milk carton example. But there are some special things, and they could be objects, they could be activities. Nature is a huge one for people, but we have this kind of accidental ability to love things. People did not evolve to love things. People evolved to value things greater or lesser extent, and to love some particular people. But our ability to love things is kind of a happy evolutionary accident. It didn't come about because it's advantageous to us evolutionarily to love things, but it turns out to be really personally rewarding and a really nice thing. And what it does, it allows us to take love, which is the best thing in life and bring it into more of our life so that it's not just limited to time

that you're with people. You can love your surroundings and you can love your activities that you engage in. And it just brings more love into the world and into our lives. Makes our lives richer. Makes your life more worth living. Yeah, absolutely. I love that. Well, this was a very fascinating read and a very delightful conversation. Thank you so much for your time. And the book again is called The Things We Love. Thank you, Sharon. It's been really a pleasure. And anytime you want to talk about this or anything else, be in touch. It's been a great

activity. Thank you. Thank you so much for listening to the Sharon Says So podcast. I am truly grateful for you. And I'm wondering if you could do me a quick favor. Would you be willing to follow or subscribe to this podcast or maybe leave me a rating or a review? Or if you're feeling extra generous, would you share this episode on your Instagram stories or with a friend? All of those things help podcasters out so much. This podcast was written and researched by Sharon McMahon and Heather Jackson. It was produced by Heather Jackson, edited and mixed by our audio producer Jenny Snyder, and hosted by me, Sharon McMahon. I'll see you next time.