Hidden Brain - Me, Myself, and IKEA

Episode Date: June 11, 2019

Are women named Virginia more likely to move to Virginia? Are people with the last name of Carpenter more likely to be carpenters? This week on Hidden Brain, we bring you a favorite 2017 episode about our preference for things that remind us of ourselves, and why this tendency can have larger implications than we might at first imagine.

This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam. People in romantic relationships often share things in common. A love with the same sports team, maybe the same religion, sometimes a common profession. But for some couples, the similarities go further. The girl that I am dating now, we have a same birthday. This is kind of cool. My fiance, Israel and I have the same birthday,

which is something we discovered on our second date. You could say this isn't so surprising. There are lots of people in the world, and soon or a later, some people are going to get together with others who happen to have the same birthday. But there's evidence this may be more than just a coincidence. Having a common birthday seems to actually draw people closer to one another. When I first went to a new hairstyles, we found out that we had the same birthday and we called each other birthday twins. And I wound up going to that hairstyles for years, even after she switched to runs, even after we moved.

I would drive 40 minutes to go get my hair cut by her. Some people see so much significance in shared birthdays or even shared numbers in two birthdays that they select dates for important events based on those patterns. My birthday is August 2nd and my husband Blake's birthday is August 9th and we got married on August 29th. My wife and I share the same birthday to life six and we are also married on that day. My birthday is October 27th and with my first husband, his birthday was September 27th and we had the opportunity to get married on August 27th.

It was a no-brainer. We decided to do that. The woman you just heard, genetic cravings from Oklahoma City, says her love for people with the same birthday extends beyond her love life. On October 27th, is also Teddy Roosevelt birthday and so I've always felt a little affinity for him and for his leadership.

Shared birthdays, in fact, aren't the only thing that draw people closer to one another. Janetta also finds herself drawn to people who happen to have the same name. When I meet another geneta, there's an automatic, like, oh my gosh, I can't believe we have the same name. And then it happens to be that we have the same spelling.

And I'll tell you, you've only met two people who have the same spelling of me, but I can tell you who they are, and I I felt an automatic kinship. These unexpected connections with strangers can be lovely moments, but there's something else at work to, something we may not be aware of, something that affects all of us. In Greek mythology, the hunter Narcissus was so enamored of his own beauty that he fell in love with the reflection of himself. Modern psychology shows that we all have a little bit of Narcissus in us, most of us like people who remind us of ourselves, whether that someone else with the same name or someone with the same birthday. Most of the time, such self-love is amusing and harmless, maybe even beneficial, a sign of good

self-esteem. But there are times when falling in love with ourselves or with people who remind us of ourselves, can be a real problem. This week on Hidden Brain, what we are calling the Narcissus Effect. Researcher of Long Observed Attendancy for People to be drawn to others who I like them in some way. When we hear someone else has the same birthday or the same name, we feel a little tug of kinship. Some of us might even be drawn to move to states that sound familiar. There's at least a modest tendency for women named Georgia to gravitate toward Georgia,

women named Virginia, to gravitate toward Virginia, and the more closely the name resembles a state the bigger the effect appears to be. This is Brett Pellam. He's a professor of psychology at Montgomery College in Maryland. He studied something called implicit egotism, which is the idea that many biases are unconscious and one very well studied bias was egotism, valuing the self favorably, protecting the self and so forth. And so we simply got the idea that there are several different things that at least some degree reflect a preference for the self and an attraction to things that resemble the self. Like having an affinity for someone with the same birthday or someone with the same name.

Or even going into a profession that sounds like an echo of your name. So we originally looked at whether people named Dennis or Denise gravitate toward dentistry, but we learned pretty quickly that it's really hard to get data on those things. So, you know, there aren't great directories of medical professionals. There is a guy named Abel who was able to document, and I was a reviewer on this paper. So, now every time you see this, I'm gonna jump in and say a guy named Abel who was able to do something. He was able to do a lot of things. He showed that people whose last name is Doctor, or whose last name is the word lawyer, the name lawyer,

gravitated toward those two professions. There are lots of other examples. Brett looked at a massive database of millions of Americans, names from the recently released 1940 census, to examine if they were brought patterns. Like Carpenter's working in Carpentry, Bakers working as Bakers, butchers working as butchers. Miners working as minor mason's working as mason So we looked at every surname there is Currently the top 2000 surnames that happens to be a career name And we looked at all of them. They're 11 of them that are pretty common

I just listed a few and for every single surname in the 1940s census with something like a I think it was 130 million people. We were able to show that for every single surname there was at least a weak tendency for people to gravitate toward careers that perfectly matched their last names. So the obvious thing to say of course is that the reason you have a slightly larger number of carpenters, B carpenters is that the name Carpenter probably originated from families who were in carpentry. And so there is some kind of ancestral connection to the profession that is driving both the

names and the choices. Quite possibly, but if you do the math, you pretty quickly see it gets to be a pretty tiny percentage of people. So if you assume that even over 10 generations, there's a 50% chance that you did what your dad did and a 50% chance that you did what your dad did and a 50% chance that he did what his grandfather did, which is probably higher than reality. You're talking about a probability of less than one in a thousand already over 10 generations. In other words, surnames are so old and they change hands.

You know, when a woman named Carpenter, Mary's account name, Farmer, for example, that that's really, it really just can't account for an effect anywhere near this magnitude. Brett Palem is looked at large data sets and public records like the Social Security Death Index or State Marriage Records, databases with information about millions of Americans, and he and his fellow researchers have seen all kinds of funny effects. Like for example, one listener called in to say she and her husband were both born on the 25th day of different months.

This isn't as uncommon as you might think. Beyond what you might expect by your chance, there's about a 7% bias in that direction, so if you should have a thousand people doing that, you have a thousand seventy people doing that. If that doesn't sound like a lot, you're right. You should think of implicit ecotism as a tiny invisible nudge. It won't shape what everyone does all the time, but it does shape what some people do, some of the time.

It's when you multiply these small effects over hundreds of millions of people that you start to see lots of examples. Brett says that if you really love your birthday, the effect gets even larger. Our operational definition of really loving your birthday was getting married on your birthday number. So if you got married on the 13th of the month, you were quite a bit more likely to marry another person who also had the number 13 s's birthday number. Again, Brett calls this an implicit bias for a reason. You may not be consciously choosing things as important as your spouse or your profession or the place you call home based on arbitrary factors like your name or your birthday. He thinks the bias comes about simply because

we like our names in our birthdays and have positive associations with them. And so you just associate your name with all the wonderful things that come along with that. And the best bit of evidence I have that I've never bothered to publish is there's one part of people's names they don't like that much and that's their middle names. You know, the joke about that is the sole purpose of a child's middle name is to know when he's really in trouble. And my additional comment is to know if he might be a serial killer someday, right? So the middle name is not nearly as loved as the first or the last name. People feel very ambivalent about their middle name. They can be other reasons for ambivalence.

Sometimes we dislike it when another person has the same birthday. If you were born on April 20th, you might hate the fact Hitler was born on that day too. Brett finds that if a consumer product happens to have your name on it, but is poorly built, you are more likely to hate that product. People dislike seeing something inferior in the world that has their name on it. As Brett and I were talking, I realized something a little uncomfortable, that I myself had fallen prey to implicit ecotism. You know, as you're talking right now, I'm realizing something about myself for the very

first time, there was a philosopher in India whose name was Shankara, my name, and he actually taught a philosophy that is known as Vedanta. And I've always been drawn to the fact that I find the philosophy of Vedanta to be very interesting and the fact that Shankara taught that philosophy, I thought was just charming. But now as I'm listening to you say this, I'm realizing that this could just be implicit equities. I've read his work very well and it truly is wonderful. It's brilliant. So I think in this case you make the objectively good decision. Yeah, at the same time it does make you think though.

Absolutely, yes. Has this ever happened to you, Brett? Do you ever think about yourself and how implicit ecotism is affecting you? We're getting a little personal here, but I can't resist being a little bit personal. I would say that probably the most dramatic example is that my son Matthew, his last thing is Poland. His mother's that my son Matthew, his last name is Poland, his mother's last name was Poland, my last name is Pelham, and I entered a relationship with her before I developed this theory, not after I developed the theory to validate the theory.

So, you're a Pelham, and you got into a relationship with the woman named Poland. Poland, and we are very different in most other ways. That's about as much as I'll say about that. Are you saying that the names played some kind of a role? I have to think it did. I have to think. And we were from different backgrounds, different religions. I mean, we come from very different worlds. And yet I was very attracted to her. So, where she actually was attracted to me, right? Yeah. So, I understand why you would sort of call this charming. And I think if you do this work for a while, there is a certain smile that comes to your face as you sort of look at these connections and you sort of see, you understand sort of the choices that human beings make.

But I do think there's something disturbing about it because I think there is a very strong sense that I think most of us have. I have the sense, even though I've been covering the world of the unconscious mind for the last 10 years, I have the sense that my choices are deliberate choices, that I've thought about them, I've actually making them intentional. I'm making them intentionally.

And the idea that you're coming in and telling me that they're these hidden factors that come in and change how I think about myself, it is a disturbing idea. It is a little bit disturbing. And of course, most people do what you and I do, I do which is say well of course that applies to the rest of the world but I in particular would never fall prey to implicit racial bias from implicit egotism. So most of us do tend to sort of separate ourselves from even our own findings

but I've become in the past decade or so comfortable enough with the study that I have to admit that I really never know for sure exactly why I did something. I mean sometimes I have a pretty good idea, but I certainly don't kid myself anymore to say that I even usually know why I do what I do. I mean there's just too much research, much of which you documented and reported on that shows that biases were completely unaware of, not just sometimes powerfully drive us in very particular direction.

So I think I've just kind of let go of it. It was disturbing to me when I first began to study it, disturbing as well as delightful, and now it's become more delightful and less disturbing. So perhaps you're wondering, how does any of this matter? Who cares if people born on the 23rd of September marry those born on the 23rd of July? Who cares if someone named Betsy Carpenter gravitates towards Carpentry? Why does it matter if I prefer a philosopher whose name is similar to my own? It at least raises tough questions about the degree to which we have free will.

So I think some people who have pretty negative reactions to this work are very threatened by it in the sense that it suggests that very important decisions have at least a little nudging influence based on things that you're completely unaware of. So if people are more likely than they should be by chance to marry another person who happens to share their birthday number, that's not an objectively great reason to get married. You should get married because you share values. You're both Republicans.

You're both rabid Marxists. But learning that these subtle little influences can affect what you do, apparently to some people is I find it delightful, but some people find it pretty threatening. I don't think that it proves that there's no such thing as free will, but it, to me, it does suggest that we don't always have free will. Sometimes we make a decision for one reason that we told ourselves when really the more powerful underlying reason is something we could have never put our fingers on.

And this isn't just a matter of being drawn to someone who shares your birthday. In general, we tend to prefer things and people who have something to do with us. And that can be a big problem. Absolutely. I do a little bit of research on social justice, and that's one of the things that concerns we know is that we tend to focus on people who are more like us, who speak our language, who speak our idiom, who look like us, who worship like us, and we pay much less attention sadly to the problems of people who don't.

On the other hand, I think this finding, like any finding in psychology or behavioral economics can be used for good or evil, and the way it works in the world can be used for good or bad. And so a great example that I perceive as at least a cousin of implicit negatism is a study I think was done by Elliot Smith and colleagues about 10 years ago. He looked at implicit racial bias, and he looked at implicit racial bias as a function of whether a person from a different ethnic group I think he had whites in African-Americans for example had simply given you a gentle friendly touch on the shoulder.

And if they had given you a friendly gentle, hello, how are you touch? That reduced their implicit racial bias. So to me, when another person becomes a part of you, in a very tiny way, you play in Chimiel basketball with this person, and you didn't like his group, but now that you meet him, and he's on your team, suddenly he becomes a part of you,

his group becomes a part of you, and your stereotypes get softened and diminished a little bit. When we come back, we're going to look at how the Narcissus effect shapes another important part of your life. If you can fall in love with your name or your birthday, can't you also fall in love with your own ideas, your own work? Of course you can.

Researchers call this the IKEA effect. We come to overvalue the things that we have created ourselves. We'll also look at the implications this can have for things much bigger and much more complicated than Swedish furniture. Stay with us. This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam. The actress Amy Polar once said, IKEA is Swedish for argument. Research a Daniel Mochon has one explanation for why build it yourself furniture can cause

so much friction between partners. Imagine that you built a table, maybe came out a little bit crooked. Probably your wife or your neighbor would see it for what it is, you know, probably a shoddy piece of workmanship. But to you that table might seem really great. Because you're the one who created it. It is the fruit of your labor. And that is really the idea behind the A key effect. It is that we come to overvalue the things that we have created ourselves. Brett Palem's research about our preference for people and places that are associated with us made me think about a related idea. The narcissus effect also shows up in

our preference for things that we make ourselves. The way people usually think about IKEA is that IKEA gives you good furniture for low cost because they offload lots of the costs onto their consumers, the assembly costs. But in fact, we were in a sense challenging that idea and saying that this is actually psychological benefit behind this, that actually people might end up liking their furniture more because they built it. And so it's not so much a cost, but a benefit that they get to build their own furniture.

Daniel and his co-authors did a series of experiments to test this hypothesis. They brought volunteers into the lab and gave them either a Lego car pre-assembled or gave them Legos and instructions and To all the participants to build a car themselves Then they asked the volunteers how much would you pay to keep you a Lego car? And what we fight is that the people who build their own Legos Not only are willing to pay more to keep their assembled Legos

But also when we ask them how proud they are of their own creations, they tend to be prouder of their Legos. In mind, these are Legos that are designed to 5 to 7 year olds, but nonetheless, it seems to be some competence and some pride associated with one's creation, even for basic things as building Legos. The researchers replicated the study using other products, like IKEA furniture and the effect was the same. People who spent time and effort building something felt proud of what they'd built, felt in love with it, and were willing to pay lots of money to keep the things they'd built. From the perspective of a rational economist, this doesn't make much sense. The students might be willing to pay twice as much money

to buy the exact same Lego car. If they just finished building that Lego car, then if the Lego car was given to them pre-built. So why might people value something more after building it themselves compared to buying the same product made by someone else for half the cost? Our hypothesis was that people tend to use products to signal valued identities to both themselves and to others.

We know that an identity that people really care about is showing that they're competent. This is one of the basics of human motivation. We hypothesize that people use self-made products as a way to signal competence to both themselves and to others. Having just built a table or having just built a bookcase. That bookcase has completed products in a sense of a badge of my own personal competence. I completed it, therefore I know I'm a competent person. And more I can display this product and signal that identity, this competent identity to others. And so

we hypothesized that it was these feelings of competence associated with the products that led to their increasing valuation. To test the theory that people's feelings of competence was behind the IKEA effect, the researchers had some participants think about other qualities they might value in themselves, besides competence, things like honesty or intelligence or humor. Basically, the idea was, if we make it less important for people to demonstrate competence, do they still overvalue their own creations? So we found that the key effect disappeared when we did that manipulation. So once competence

wasn't that important to people, people, our participants no longer seem to get much valid of creating their own products. Again against suggesting that the reason why we tend to like our own creations is because we use them as a way to signal competence both to ourselves and to others. Here is the flip side of that coin. You can make the IKEA effects stronger by getting people to question their competence. In one experiment, Daniel and his colleagues gave participants math problems to Saul before asking them to build an IKEA project. If the problems were difficult, lots of people failed to solve them. Now, volunteers became much more likely to want to demonstrate their competence through the IKEA building project.

The participants who at least temporarily had their sense of competence threatened who got a very difficult math questions, tended to be more willing to build their own product. So when we survey them and ask them, would you prefer to have an IKEA product that comes pre-built or the exact same product that comes unbuilt and you would build it yourself? Those who had got difficult math problems and were feeling somewhat incompetent at the time, seemed more willing. They were much more likely to want to build a product themselves. And therefore, in a sense, restore their sense of competence through this activity. I mean, give me the number, Sarah.

I mean, was this a big effect? Was this a small effect? I mean, what happens when people feel bad compared to when they don't feel bad? So, what we found is that about a third of the people wanted to build the IKEA bookshelf in the control condition when they weren't made to feel bad, and this number went up to about 60% when they were made to feel bad. So significantly larger number of people wanted to do this. The IKEA effect and implicit ecotism might seem at first first blush to be interesting and amusing, but not terribly significant. But the more I thought about this, the more I saw the potential implications. Just as we can be drawn to those who have the same birth they as us or the same name as

us, we might also be more inclined to help people who look like us, or sound like us, or live near us. Let's hear a congressperson who's drafted a particular piece of legislation, your commitment to that bill might outweigh its importance to the public. Or let's say you're a president who starts a war, after years of investing your time and effort to prosecute that war, you may find it difficult to accept evidence that you made a mistake. It's fine to gaze lovingly in the mirror and to feel invested in our own ideas, but like Narcissus discovered himself, falling in love with our own reflection can come at great peril.

This episode was produced by Maggie Penman. Our team includes Tara Boyle, Jenny Schmidt, Parts Shah, Raina Cohen, Laura Quarelle and Thomas Lu. Our unsung hero this week is Andy Huther. Andy is the audio engineer for podcasting at NPR. He is always willing to pitch into help. When we have questions about sound design or the right microphone to use or how to make voices sound good in the studio, Andy always has good advice.

Thanks so much Andy. If you liked this episode, please be sure to share it with a friend. If they don't know how to subscribe to Hidden Brain, please show them. I'm Shankar Vedantam, and this is NPR. you