The Psychology of Ownership & What It Says About Hoarding

A recent BBC article, "Why we love to hoard ... and how you can overcome it," asks a really great question: How do you make something instantly twice as expensive? The answer that they give: By thinking about giving it away.

For many of us, the idea of tossing our belongings can bring on feelings of dread or actually increase our possessiveness. This is a phenomenon called the Endowment Effect, meaning that these objects are special to you because they are yours. Think about the last time you bought yourself a new car. Remember the feeling you had when you took it out for a test drive? The salesman was trying to use the Endowment Effect to make you want the car enough to not want to part with it.The Endowment Effect comes into play in a big way when it comes to clutter and hoarding.

Tom Stafford, the author of the article, offers some tips for how he has applied his awareness of the Endowment Effect: "Say I am cleaning out my stuff. Before I learnt about the endowment effect I would go through my things one by one and try to make a decision on what to do with it. Quite reasonably, I would ask myself whether I should throw this away. At this point, although I didn't have a name for it, the endowment effect would begin to work its magic, leading me to generate all sorts of reasons why I should keep an item based on a mistaken estimate of how valuable I found it.

After hours of tidying I would have kept everything, including the 300 hundred rubber bands (they might be useful one day), the birthday card from two years ago (given to me by my mother) and the obscure computer cable (it was expensive).""Now, knowing the power of the bias, for each item I ask myself a simple question: If I didn't have this, how much effort would I put in to obtain it? And then more often or not I throw it away, concluding that if I didn't have it, I wouldn't want this."

I invite you to think about your life and how powerful the Endowment Effect is in how you view your possessions. Have you been hanging onto too many things for too long?

WANT MORE TIPS AND TOOLS LIKE THESE?

Sign up for our popular monthly newsletter and have our latest articles, resources and events delivered directly to your inbox. Trust us. You will LOVE it!