Neuroscientists Neil Macrae and Dave Turk have been looking at what happens in the brain when objects become ours.29 The change of ownership from any object to my object registers in the brain as enhanced activity. In particular, there is a spike of brain activity called a ‘P300’ which occurs 300 milliseconds after we register something of importance – it’s a wakeup-call signal in the brain. When something becomes mine, I pay more attention to it in comparison to an identical object that is not mine. This process is fairly automatic. In one study, participants observed particular products being divided into two shopping baskets – one for them and the other for the experimenter. Their P300 signals revealed that they paid more attention to things that were theirs. After sorting, participants remembered more of the items placed in their own basket compared to the experimenter’s basket, even though they were not instructed that there was going to be a memory test.30
This is because, as James said, part of who we are is defined by our material possessions, which is why institutions in the past removed them to eradicate the sense of self. Uniformity both in clothing and personal possessions was regulated to prevent individuals retaining their individual identity. Some of the most harrowing images from the Nazi concentration camps are the piles of personal possessions and luggage that were taken away from the victims in an attempt to remove their identity. These objects are now regarded as sacred. In 2005 Michel Levi-Leleu, a sixty-six-year-old retired engineer, took his daughter to see a Parisian exhibition on the Holocaust, with objects on loan from the Auschwitz–Birkenau Memorial and Museum. There, he spotted his long-lost father’s cardboard suitcase with his initials and address. Michel demanded its return, leading to a legal battle with the museum that stated that all objects from the death camp were to be retained for posterity as sacred items. Four years later, a settlement was reached whereby the suitcase has been loaned to the Paris exhibition on a long-term basis.31 The need for identity is so strong that when prisoners or institutionalized individuals are stripped of their possessions, they will confer value on items that would otherwise be considered as worthless.32
In some individuals with OCD, object possession becomes a pathological condition known as hoarding where the household can become filled with worthless possessions that are not thrown away. In one unfortunate case, a hoarder was killed by the collapsing mound of rubbish that she had accumulated over the years.33 Most of us are more restrained and have a few cherished personal possessions or household items with which we identify. One of the first things individuals do on moving to a new residence is to bring personal objects to stamp their identity on their new home. In contrast, sometimes people may destroy personal objects as a way of symbolically cutting ties with the past – especially if they are a jilted lover or cheated spouse.
When Losses Loom Large
Clearly, for many people, possessions are an expression of personal preference. People choose to buy certain products that they believe reflect qualities with which they would like to be associated. These are objects aligned with an identity to which we aspire. This link between self and possessions is something that modern advertisers have been exploiting for years. They understand that people identify with brands and that the more that a brand signals success, the more people will want it. Rolex watches, iPods and Nike trainers are just some of the branded objects that people have lost their lives defending from thieves.
Russell Belk, Professor of marketing at York University in Canada, calls this materialist perspective the ‘extended self’.34 We are what we own, and when these possessions are violated through theft, loss or damage, we experience this as a personal tragedy. Only recently, this happened to me. I am not particularly car proud, but when someone deliberately scratched the paintwork on my car a couple of months back, I felt very upset, as if the crime had been deliberately perpetrated against me. It was a random act but I felt enraged. I imagine that if I had confronted the perpetrator I could have lost it and acted violently.
Even ruthless killers and drug-dealers appreciate the importance of possessions. Vince the hitman from the modern classic movie Pulp Fiction (1994) complained to Lance, his dealer, about his Chevy Malibu car that got scratched:
Vince: I had it in storage for three years. It was out five days and some d**kless piece of sh*t, f**ked with it.
Lance: They should be f**king killed man. No trial. No jury. Straight to execution.
Of course, I would not go as far but there is something deeply emotive when it comes to someone violating your property.
The Endowment Effect
Our attachment to objects may have less to do with personal choice than we imagine. In what is now regarded as a classic study in behavioural economics, Richard Thaler handed out $6 college coffee cups to half a class of Cornell undergraduates and then allowed them to trade with their classmates who made them a financial offer to buy the cup.35 What Thaler found was very little trading because owners placed much greater value on objects in their possession, relative to what other people are willing to pay for them. Moreover, as soon as an object comes into our possession, we have a bias to overvalue it in comparison to an identical object. This bias, known as the endowment effect,36 has been widely replicated many times with items ranging from bottles of wine to chocolate bars.37
Even when the object is not actually in one’s physical possession, such as when bidding for an item in an auction, the prospect of eventually owning something produces a bias to value it more.38 People who bid for the same items in an auction but had been allowed to handle the items for thirty seconds, compared to those bidders who only examined the object for ten seconds, were willing to bid 50 per cent more for the same objects. However, the contact seems to be the critical factor. If we are just told that we own something, then that does not trigger endowment. The longer we are in personal contact with an object, the more we value it and don’t want to part with it. Is it any wonder that we are always being invited by salespersons to go for a spin or try things on? They know that once we have made that first contact, achieving the sale is much easier.
A commonly accepted explanation for the endowment effect is not so much that we value everything we can potentially own, but rather that we fear what we might lose. This bias is called loss aversion – a core component of the prospect theory proposed by Daniel Kahneman, the same scientist who left colonscopes up the backsides of patients for an extra three minutes. According to this theory, losses are weighted more substantially than potential gains. Just like switching doors on the Monty Hall problem or selling our lottery ticket, we fear losses greater than we welcome gains. The prospect of regret seems to weigh heavily for us.
The Trading Brain
Brian Knutson has been looking at brain activation during buying and selling product scenarios using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) technology.39 He found that when we look at products we like, irrespective of whether we are buying or selling, there is increased activation of the nucleus accumbens, a region of the brain’s reward circuitry. When we think that we can buy it at a bargain price, the mesial prefrontal cortex, another region of the reward system, is also activated, but not if the price is too high – after all, most of us like a bargain. However, if subjects were presented with an offer to sell the desired product at a lower price than expected, then the insula in the right hemisphere became active. This region signals discrepancy between anticipated goals and outcomes and could be regarded as the neural correlate of disappointment. Moreover, the insular activity was predictive of the size of endowment effect for each participant. These imaging findings are consistent with the loss aversion account, whereby a discrepancy of perceived value and the offered sale price produces a negative emotional response. It’s not that we simply have a bias, but rather we feel bad about selling a possession for a price below what we believe it is worth.