IKEA Effect

What is it?

The IKEA effect, named after the furniture company whose products require self-assembly, describes the tendency to place disproportionate value on things we helped create, regardless of their objective quality. Research by Michael Norton, Daniel Mochon and Dan Ariely showed that people valued IKEA furniture they had assembled themselves more highly than identical pre-assembled items, and in a related study builders expected others to share their high opinion of their creations. The effect seems to require successful completion: an unfinished or dismantled piece holds less appeal. Psychologically, the effect is linked to feelings of competence, the desire for a positive self-image, and the tendency to equate effort invested with value. Labor becomes love. At work, the IKEA effect can create costly blind spots. Leaders become attached to strategies they developed, engineers to code they wrote, designers to solutions they created, and defend them past the point of reason. It may contribute to "not invented here" syndrome, where external ideas are rejected in favor of weaker internal ones. Mitigating the effect requires recognizing that our creations feel more valuable than they are, seeking objective feedback, setting evaluation criteria before creating, and separating creators from evaluators in decision processes.