“The Ikea effect” seems an inappropriate name for the notion that we derive greater enjoyment from things we’ve worked harder to create. You can see the rationale of the researchers who coined it – there’s a unique pleasure to successful self-assembly – but they’d clearly had only atypically trouble-free encounters with Billy bookshelves. Yet, more generally, this cognitive bias is now well-established, and provides another persuasive explanation for why great material wealth has such a small impact on happiness: the effortlessness of having everything fall into your lap is somehow fundamentally unsatisfying.
(and other 2011 resolutions, via jingc)
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