IKEA Effect
We place disproportionately high value on products we partially created.
The IKEA effect is a cognitive bias in which consumers place a disproportionately high value on products they partially created. The name refers to the Swedish manufacturer IKEA, which sells many furniture products that require assembly. Research by Michael Norton, Daniel Mochon, and Dan Ariely found that people who assembled IKEA furniture themselves valued it far more highly than identical pre-assembled furniture — even when their assembly was poor.
What it looks like in the wild.
- Everyday life Homemade Baking People consistently rate their own homemade baked goods as better than identical commercially produced versions, even when blind tasting shows the opposite.
Recognising a definition is not the same skill as spotting it.
Two scenarios from the app, with distractors drawn from the same family of biases — which is what makes them hard.
After cooking Thanksgiving dinner from scratch, Anna believes her turkey is the most delicious one ever, dismissing her mother-in-law's identical recipe prepared in a professional oven.
David wrote a basic app for tracking his workouts. He believes it's more effective than professional fitness apps, even though it lacks key features.
Biases rarely arrive alone.
Understand more. Assume less.
188 biases, 18,869 scenarios, and a record of how you actually decide.
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