Speaking of Psychology - What our possessions mean to us, with Russell Belk, PhD

Episode Date: January 4, 2023

The things that we own can be central to our identity, part of how we see ourselves and how other people see us. Russell Belk, PhD, of York University, talks about the role our possessions play in our lives; what drives collectors to collect items as disparate as stamps, art and Pez dispensers; how the word “possessions” can encompass physical, digital and even completely intangible items; and how has the rise of the sharing economy is changing the way people think about the importance of ownership. Links Russell Belk, PhD Speaking of Psychology Home Page Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Many of you may have spent the past few weeks exchanging gifts with family and friends, and maybe you're now enjoying some new possessions, or returning those that didn't fit or weren't quite what you wanted. Perhaps you're going through your old stuff, following through on a New Year's resolution to declutter. So it seems like a good time of year to talk about possessions and what possessions mean to us. The things we own can be central to our identity, according to some researchers, part of how we see ourselves and how other people see us.

So what role do possessions play in our lives? Why are many people driven to acquire things, especially to systematically collect items such as stamps, art, antique cars, or even matchbooks or PEZ dispensers? What does it mean to own something? To possessions have to be physical objects, or can they be digital or completely intangible? What happens when we have to give,

things up, when we downsize or declutter or lose a treasured possession? And how has the rise of the digital age and the sharing economy change the way people think about the importance of possessions? Welcome to Speaking of Psychology, the flagship podcast of the American Psychological Association that examines the links between psychological science and everyday life. I'm Kim Mills. My guest today is Dr. Russell Belk, a distinguished research professor and Craft Foods Canada chair in marketing at the Shulik School of Business at York University in Ontario. Dr. Belk studies the meaning of possessions collecting gift-giving, sharing, and materialism. His research interests include understanding what our possessions mean to us, how different cultures

regard consumption, and how we relate to each other through possessions. Dr. Belk is the author of more than 650 journal articles and books. He is a past president of the Association for Consumer Research and has received numerous awards for his work, including being elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. Dr. Belk, thank you for joining us today. Thank you for having me. It's pleasure. One of your most influential research papers is called Possessions and the Extended Self. So let's start with that. What does it mean to think of our possessions as extensions of our self? Well, if you look at something like a musical instrument or a mechanical aid like a hammer or a screwdriver, these literally extend the body.

They allow us to do things that we can't do with just our voice or with just our hands. But when we get into symbolic possessions, these are things that represent us. I'm in a household where we just got a new puppy. And the puppy is being trained. and sometimes it does well and sometimes it doesn't do well. And rather like our children, if they do something wonderful, we're related. If they do something terrible, we are sort of shame that it's our fault in a sense because these children, these companion animals are extensions of ourselves.

And so in that sense, we wax and we wane depending upon how our possessions prosper. Imagine, for example, that you just got a new piece of clothing and you spill tomato soup all over it. Or you just get a new automobile and you have a little fender scraper. It's almost like your body is being scraped or damaged or soiled. And so in that sense, in a nutshell or in a capsule, these are possessions that not only extend what we can do, but they represent us. they have symbolic meaning. Many people think of possessions as things that we own in a physical or a legal sense, but your definition is broader than that.

How far can the definition of possession stretch? Well, that's a good question. And it's one that has more salience, as you pointed out in your introduction, because of the sharing economy that we have gotten into and because of the digital economy that we're all a part of. And so we can own things that we do not possess and we can feel that we own something that is intangible. So students in a classroom, for example, that come and sit in the same non-assigned seat every day or every week, come to think about it as their seat. And if someone else is in it, they may be perturbed enough to actually ask the person to move.

or they may slink off and sit in another seat. So they're assuming that they own that possession, even though they don't own it. Or to take another example, children in the home, unless it's a very unusual home, don't have to knock on the door and ask if they can come in or whether they can sit down on the sofa. Even though these are possessions that are legally not theirs, they are de facto shared possessions. The family shares them. And unless it was a very unusual family, when you left home, you did not receive an itemized bill of everything your parents had spent on you, which they expected you to repay. And so this is sharing within the family, which is where the greatest amount of sharing takes place.

Now, when we go to the so-called sharing economy with Airbnb and Uber and other forms of sharing, we're not really sharing. We're doing something closer to short-term rental. And so it's not at all the feeling of ours rather than mine in yours. There's still a mine in yours. And people don't take care of possessions that they're renting on a short-term basis the same way they would the possession that they actually owned. So they may drive the car faster or they may leave the house or the home in less of a pristine condition than they might their own if they owned it.

And so we feel differently depending upon whether something is truly ours or whether it's shared. Now, when we get to the digital economy, it's also tricky. We used to, if you can see behind me, this I know it was going out just with audio, but if you can see behind me, there's a bookcase full of books. And as an academic, I have for many years now hung on to tangible physical books. but now part of my library is digital, and so I can just call it up on my computer. But there's a difference. When I shut my computer, I no longer have access to that book unless I can call it up on my smartphone, perhaps.

And also, I don't know that, well, it's the red book over there on the third shelf, and I know if I open it to a certain page, I'm going to find something. So we access that information in a different way. We search for it and we sort of see it in a decontextualized way. And we've gotten farther than that. We have now streaming music, for example, in streaming movies. And so in place of the library of cassettes or even tapes before that, we have these things that we don't really have any tangible proof of.

And so people can't see our libraries and see how big or well-ordered or meaning. meaningful they are. They can't look at our music collection and say, I can see how you've ordered that and that's really interesting. And we can't prepare a mixed tape for someone or I suppose it was a mixed CD and mixed DVD after that. We maybe rather send them a playlist. And so people, and by people, especially referring to Generation Z, or we would say Z here in Canada, or millennials, are more used to having access rather than ownership. And so they don't feel the loss that some of us older people do when we have streaming access to something

rather than being able to go to our library and pull it out and know that it's ours. And for that matter, if we have avatars in an online world or an online gaming platform, and the gaming platform shuts down for some reason, our avatar is no longer there. Now, supposedly that's going to be different in the metaverse where we have interoperability and we're able to take our avatar from one world to another.

But I don't know if we would want our Assassin's Creed or World of Warcraft avatar in Candyland or Animal Crossing or something of that sort. So there's a series of problems when we get into that realm. And let me just mention one more digital aspect. And then now we can come back to some of these things. if you'd like. If you look at some of the digital assets that have been marketed in the last five years, we come to things like NFTs, non-fundable tokens. And these are digital representations of something that don't even give us the access that we have to streaming books or streaming music

or streaming movies. Rather, we get an image of an artwork or an image of an avatar and we don't own the original, and we don't have the same sort of ownership rights that we would have if we do have, or did have, or own the original. There's another aspect to that, and that is that the artist can get some residual rights when our digital token is sold at a higher price, and they can get a claim, often 10% of that increase in value. And this goes back to an old 1972 auction of the skull collection in New York. And this was a collection of expressionist and pop art. And it was one where the auction was filmed. And there were also discussions between the artists and the collectors and some of the buyers.

And so Robert Rochenberg had one of his pieces. of art sold for something like $85,000, a small amount in today's world, but a large amount then. And he went to Skull, who sold it, and said, I sold you this thing for $400, something like that. And you've made this tremendous profit. I've worked my ass off for you, and I'm not getting anything out of it. And Skull said to him, well, I'm working my ass off for you. I'm increasing the value of your future artwork by escalating the prices and collecting your artwork. And so I guess that gets into another realm of collecting that maybe we can talk about later that you also brought up in your introduction.

But I'm skimming over things here. So please, if you'd like to come back to any of these things, feel free. Sure. And we may do that. But speaking of collecting, I know you've done a lot of research in that area. And I'm just wondering, what motivates people to collect things? Where does that drive come from? Well, I guess as children, we're sort of natural collectors that we see interesting things, and we bring them home.

And we tell our parents or show a friend, here's my collection of stuff. And they say, well, what kind of stuff? And that's not a collection. This is just some pebbles and sticks and other objects that you found on the ground. And it's not a collection because a collection has to obey some rules. And it should be in a singular category. And you should have one of a kind. You shouldn't hoard things by having lots and lots of the same thing.

And you should have some sort of sense of order and some sort of boundaries to this collection. And anyway, we learned to make good collections. good collections follow some sort of rules so we can describe what it is that we collect. Now, interestingly, collections often don't start out in a purposeful way that I'm going to collect X or Y or Z, but rather someone gives us a duck, and we know, not a real duck, a duck that's ceramic perhaps, and we have some other ducks made of wood or plaster in our home, and we look around and I say, I must be a duck collector. There's something about ducks that have adhered to me.

Nevertheless, when we begin to collect them, we find some joy in that, joy in bringing order, joy in creating a collection that it adheres somehow. It's greater than the sum of its parts because it is a part of a collection. And so one of the joys is that we have sort of a collection of a little world that we can control. We may not have control of our careers or our behavior on our jobs, and we don't have control of much of the exterior world, but we do have control of this collection. And it brings us joy when we're able to expand it and we're able to improve upon it. And for that matter, other collectors may admire us. Now, I should point out that the type of collection I've been talking about is one that does have some sense of coherence. And we could think of an old stamp collection or coin collection.

And those were things where you could sort of fill in the boxes and you would know when it was complete. You had the entire series of coins of country A, B, or C, or you had filled up your stamp book with the stamps that were listed. But another type of, and we still have that sort of collection, but another sort of collection is one where we have a category, like we're going to be an art collector. But we're not confining ourselves to a particular genre, a particular period, a particular artist. We're just giving things that strike our eye. And, you know, someone could have, you know, a passion for yellow things, and they collect yellow things. Or they may have a passion for a particular style of painting or a particular medium in which the artist is working. And so they collect within a cat.

But within that category, anything goes. And so they're not filling in the narrow boxes that a type A collector would be. A type A collector is a little bit like we refer to someone with a type A personality. Perhaps a bit ain't already to hit those. I might say they're collecting, but they're constrained by rules rather than letting their imagination and desires rule. Well, I was just going to ask a question here. I'm sorry to interrupt you, but it got me thinking because I know you've defined two types of collecting, aesthetic and taxonomic. It seems that you're talking about the two right now. Could you

explain how those are different? Yeah, taxonomic collection has, think of it as a two-by-two matrix, and we have some dimensions that we're trying to fulfill, and we're trying to collect one thing in each of those four boxes. And when we have it complete, we've completed the collection. We don't want to put more things in one of those boxes because we'd be duplicating in that case. We'd be hoarding rather than collecting. So that's a type A taxonomic collector. The type B aesthetic collector is looking for things that please the eye

or the ear or whatever it is that we're collecting within that sensory mode. Smells could be another thing that we might collect, for example, or places that we've traveled. But once we have that category, we're not saying, well, I'm going to collect all of the European countries by visiting all of the European countries. In that case, it would be more taxonomic. We're just going to say, I'm going to go to the places that interest me in the world. And I've never been to Peru, and so I think I'll go to Peru, and I think I'll go to Machu Picchu while I'm there. And so those are some of the things that might interest us in that case.

but I also want to go to Australia. I also want to see the kangaroos. So this is just following our curiosity or our aesthetic sense rather than trying to complete and take off the boxes. Now, you've said that collecting can be beneficial for some people. How so? Well, it can be therapeutic. It can be a way of doing something that we feel is meaningful.

Even though to the outside world, it may not. appear meaningful. We once did a visit to, and this was on a project where I was with a group of others, to Mr. Ed's Elephant Museum and Roadside Attraction near Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. And we stopped because we saw this huge bag of peanuts out in front. And it turned out that Mr. Ed, like some others in the Elephant Collector Society or the collectors of Alphantiana, shared. and that was a joy in collecting anything related to elephants, and it could be a poster, it could be a piece of music, it could be an oil can that was shaped like an elephant.

And he presented this to the public, and he had a shop where he also sold things, but that was entirely separate from the collections, and things would never go back and forth. But he said, in all honesty, standing in front of his roadside attraction and museum, history will someday stand in awe, of me and what I've accomplished here.

And so he felt in a vague way that he was contributing to art and or science by this objective that he had to collect all sorts of elephants. And because there were other elephant collectors that reinforced him in that belief, because other people stopped by the museum, he got some reinforcement for that idea. And who's to say that he's wrong? It may be unlikely that he's going to go down in the books of science or art as a, famous collector because this is a collection that would be regarded as trivial by many collectors who are really into their collection at the high end and hoping to profit from it.

It used to be that most collectors might say something, well, like, this is for my retirement. I'm saving up and I will cash this out once I'm retired. But that was a pipe dream because a few other people wanted to buy these collections, at least few other people that were encountered. Now that we're able to go online to eBay and other similar equivalents, it's easier to sell a collection. So there's greater truth to that promise if we're collecting especially at the high end. But collecting brings different joys to different people. And part of it is, I think, just this ability to control a small world.

So you mentioned the Internet in places like eBay where you can sell collections. So the Internet has clearly changed collecting. Has it made it more or less challenging for people, do you think? I think it's made it less challenging, in a sense, although you can refine your collection so that becomes more esoteric and equally difficult. But there are people like William Gibson who gave us the book that became the Matrix series of movies. And he said he loved watches, but he didn't want to collect because it was too much work. and would take him all over the world until eBay came along.

And that made it easy enough to collect and actually find the watches that he wanted to enter into this collection. And so, as I say, it makes it easier. But if we develop even narrower rules of what we're trying to collect, we can still present ourselves with perhaps an equal challenge to what we might have had previously. So there's a saying that he who has the most toys wins. And that got me thinking, are men more inclined to collect than women? Have you found any differences between the sexes when it comes to collecting stuff? Historically, yes.

Men have been more inclined to or more able to collect. The men historically have had more control of the wealth than women have. Also, when men collect, it's regarded as it must be a purposeful and meaningful collection. When women collect, it's just you have all of this silly stuff. Why do you have these things? It's regarded more frivolously. And that's obviously a sexist bias, but I think it still persists in society. It may be that in patriarchal societies, men have more control of the pocketbook.

They have more control of the spaces in which to exhibit their wealth. We once encountered a man and woman who both had collections. And he had a collection of fire brigade equipment from historically different eras in society. She had a collection of mice replicas. And sadly, that's sort of telling that she was collecting the miniature, delicate thing. He was collecting the rugged, masculine. They were clicking to the stereotypes of their genders, if you will. And so there is some gender bias in the sense of not only whether we collect, but what we collect as well.

Well, it sounds as if you have encountered many, many different types of collections. I'm wondering if there are any that stick out in your mind as being among the most unusual or surprising. Well, there was a woman who collected dirt, which struck us as a little bit unusual. But she said, don't you see, this was dirt from Jerusalem. And this is dirt from Peru. And she had a nomenclature which would defy the eye. We've also had encountered people that collect ineffable sorts of objects like the types of planes that they've seen or the types of trains that they have seen are ridden on. And so these are things that like bird, what do you call it, bird watchers, are collecting birds in a sense.

but they're not collecting the physical birds. They're just collecting notebooks, and perhaps in some cases, photographs of the birds. And so we can collect experiences as well as tangible sorts of things. I have to out myself as a birder and admit that I do have one of those lists. Let's go back to more on what's happening in the world around possessions and the changing ways that we're viewing them. I've heard you say in another interview that you prefer the term collaborative consumption to sharing economy.

Why is that? Okay, collaborative consumption is the term that I'm using for the so-called sharing economy. And when we engage in the sharing economy, we're not really owning things. We are collaborating and using them. And so, for example, you might subscribe to rent the runway. and you pay a monthly fee, in an exchange for that, you can get as many handbags or designer outfits as you like. It's just that you have to return the former one before you get the next one sent to you.

And so in this sense, you look like you have a fabulous wardrobe, but actually you just have access to rent the runway as long as you pay your subscription fees. That's not like a collection of actual handbags that you're. you can keep on a shelf and they will remain there. And it gives you a sense of having the entire collection rather than having access to it. Now, again, there may be a generational thing here. It may be that those of us who were not born digital think of these tangible things as somehow more real and more rewarding and more substantive and more important than the things we can access.

But if you think about it, if you are what you access rather than you are, are what you have, you have a much broader sense of the world. If you don't have to own a vacation home, but you have access to vacation homes around the world, you're in a sense a broader sort of person that you can take advantage of more cultures and more places and so forth. Now, people get locked into sharing resources like rental unit, not rental units, but not share. A time share. time share apartments. And eventually they get tired of that and want to get out of it and all of the travel that would be involved in the paperwork and so forth is something that they don't enjoy. But nevertheless, in principle, you have access to a much greater array of things via the sharing economy than you would if you had to buy those things all on your own.

Let's talk about another aspect of ownership, which is what happens when we have to give up things that, have been meaningful to us. Listen to an interview, you did where you talked about how helping your mother downsize changed your perspective somewhat on the meaning of possessions. Can you talk about that? I mean, how do we disentangle ourselves from things that have all of this meaning and help define who we are? Well, I'll come back to my mother.

It's a sensitive area of still for me. But if you think about children's toys, for example, and children's art productions from going to school, these are things that we save oftentimes. And at some point, after the children have grown up or left home, we realize that we may need to downsize or may simply need to clean up the clutter in our house. And we can't get rid of these things immediately

because they're so infused with memories. and they're hot possessions, if you will. And so if we put them away for a while in the attic or in the basement, these are places that are sort of liminal spaces where they can cool off a bit. And so when we've been distanced from them, they may not be as rich and saturated with memories as they were previously. Now, I found something similar with my mother, except that I live in Toronto and she lived in Minneapolis.

I'm the only surviving relative. And so I had limited time available to dispossess her of all of these former possessions. Let me go through the stages, I guess. First, she moved from a house with a lot of space and a lot of yard to keep up. And after my father died, it got to be too much for her. So she moved into an adult community where people helped each other, but it wasn't really a care facility. Then she did move into a care facility. Now, at each of those stages, she had to downsize, and we had to jointly decide what to keep and what not to keep.

And, of course, she always wanted to keep more than was physically possible in the space that she had available. At any rate, once my mother died, I was there, and I had only a few days to try to dispossess her of these last sets of possessions. And fortunately, I found that the staff in this care home were working. willing to take many of them. But there were certain things that were special. My father was an artist and certain of his art creations were really important to me. Some of my mother's jewelry, my daughter wanted to have, and she had come out and helped me for a time as well. But for the larger things, I couldn't take them back on the airplane with me. So I left them with a friend of my mothers and came back at a later stage to reclaim them. Nevertheless, I still found it very painful

to put things in dumpsters or to call 1-800 got junk and to immediately transform these things from meaningful possessions into junk, if you will, because they certainly weren't junk to my mother and over they junk to me in these memories. Other things like photos of people I didn't recognize with my mother on a European trip or something of that sort, it was easier to get rid of because if I knew these people, I'd give them the photos, but I didn't know any of them, and it was easy to get rid of those things. But things that I knew the meanings, even if I hadn't shared in them,

it was like throwing away a piece of my mother. We come back to extended self here, and it was a sign of disrespect to treat these things in such a rough way. So that was really a difficult series of action. that I had to perform in order to get rid of those meaningful possessions. Yeah, it's really interesting to me how some possessions become sort of magical once they've been owned by someone you know, you loved, you cared about, or even a famous person. You know, it just imbues the item with something ineffable, but really important.

And it just seems human nature to feel that way about things. Yeah, I think we all do that. I once met a woman who didn't want anything that wouldn't fit in a backpack because that would hinder her mobility. And of course, we think about digital nomads these days who want to be able to take a laptop and go anywhere in the world and have also known such people. And they usually tend to want to have a home base or to have some place that they're going to come back to. do at some point, even if it's a distant point in time like retirement. And so it's difficult to be truly unencumbered with things that we love with possessions, just as it's difficult to be unencumbered, if that would be the word, with people that we love.

And people are a part of our extended selves as well. Now, we keep in touch via social media, and we may follow things that people do, but it's at a bit of a distance. and there's an old cartoon where people were sitting around a funeral hall and the coffin with the deceased was in front. And there were maybe half a dozen, two dozen people in the audience. One is saying to another, I thought there would be more people here. He had over 500 Facebook friends. Of course, these aren't real friends. And so the expectation that there would be many people there just from the social media was not a realistic one.

Some of those people may be dear friends, but most of them, we can't have 500 dear friends. Exactly. Yes. Well, Dr. Buck, this has been really interesting. I want to thank you for joining me today. I really enjoy talking with you. It's my pleasure. To listen to previous episodes of Speaking of Psychology, you can visit our website at www.

www.org, or you can find us on Apple, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. And if you like what you hear, please leave a review. If you have comments or ideas for future podcasts, you can email us at Speaking of Psychology at APA.org. Speaking of Psychology is produced by Lee Weinerman. Our sound editor is Chris Condayan. Thank you for listening. For the American Psychological Association, I'm Kim Mills.