by Bruce Hood
Sartre, in his book Being and Nothingness, realized the extent to which humans are defined by what they own: ‘the totality of my possessions reflects the totality of my being … I am what I have … What is mine is myself.’4 He proposed a number of ways in which this arises. First, by exerting exclusive control over something, one is claiming it for the self – something that we saw evidenced early in infants. Secondly, and in line with the views of John Locke, creating something from scratch means you own it. Finally, Sartre thought that possessions evoke passions.
One way that people express their passion for possession is through accumulating stuff. In 1769, another French philosopher, Denis Diderot, wrote about how possessions can shape behaviour. Diderot bought a new luxury dressing-gown that he thought would make him happy, but he was surprised how miserable this purchase made him and how this item changed his life. Rather than enriching his life, the luxury gown stood in stark contrast to the shabbier items he already possessed. Soon, he found himself buying new items to match the quality of the dressing-gown. But Diderot was not a rich man so this escalation in spending made him even more unhappy. In comparison to his old dressing-gown, in which he had felt comfortable cleaning the house, his luxury purchase meant that he no longer wore his gown to do household chores. As he wrote, ‘I was absolute master of my old dressing-gown, but I have become a slave to my new one.’ The ‘Diderot effect’, a term coined by the anthropologist Grant McCracken, describes the influence that individual items can have on subsequent purchases.5 For example, if you buy one luxury item, you are tempted to aspire to more such items even though you may not need them. Many retailers capitalize on the Diderot effect by advertising to us items that complement our initial purchase. This is also part of the appeal of Apple products. The purchase of the iPhone was for many, according to McCracken, a ‘departure good’ which exerted a new pressure to acquire other Apple products because they reflect identity. Even though a different purchase may be good value, if it sends the wrong signal about identity then the purchaser will be less likely to buy it.
Probably the most excessive form of emotional attachment to objects is found among collectors. Collectors are emotionally invested in their collections. It is not simply the monetary value associated with their things but rather the effort and pursuit that collectors expend when amassing their desirable possessions. Sometimes, the prospect of losing them can be unbearable. In 2012, the German authorities discovered that Cornelius Gurlitt, a recluse living in Munich, had amassed a huge collection of art masterpieces estimated to be worth around $1 billion. The art had been stolen from Jewish owners by the Nazis and sold to Cornelius’s father for a fraction of their true value during the war. Cornelius had come to regard the hoard as his personal responsibility to protect. He described the experience of watching the police confiscate his prized collection as hitting him harder than the loss of his parents or his sister, who had died of cancer that same year. Cornelius told the authorities that protecting the collection was his duty to the extent that he had become ‘intense, obsessed, isolated, and increasingly out of touch with reality’.6
One of the earliest studies to test James’s claims regarding self-construal was conducted by the Yale psychoanalyst Ernst Prelinger in 1959.7 He asked adults to categorize 160 items on a scale from non-self to self and found that minds and bodies were considered more relevant to the sense of self than personal possessions. However, possessions were considered more relevant to the self than other people (though, as we shall shortly discover, this is a very Western perspective). When children were asked to rank the same items, they followed much the same pattern as adults except that, with age, there was an increasing emphasis on the importance of possessions that reflect our relationships with others, which makes perfect sense as we grow up into cohabiting adults.8
The Canadian marketing guru Russell Belk has also written about the relationship between the self and what we own in a series of influential papers championing the concept known as ‘the extended self’.9 Building on the work of James and Sartre, Belk proposed four developmental stages in the emergence of the extended self. First, the infant distinguishes self from the environment. Second, the child distinguishes self from others. Third, possessions help adolescents and adults manage their identities, and finally, possessions help the old achieve a sense of continuity and preparation for death. As we age, we shift in our valuation more to those possessions that remind us of our relationships over the years such as mementoes, heirlooms and photographs – the sorts of things that people often say they would save from a burning house. Sometimes this is literally true. The legendary blues musician B. B. King was famous for his guitar he called ‘Lucille’, which went with him everywhere. He named it after the time when he was playing a gig in Arkansas in 1949, and a fight broke out between two men and a heater was kicked over that set the hall on fire, forcing everyone to evacuate. Once outside, King realized he had left his $30 guitar onstage, so he re-entered the burning building to retrieve it. The next day he learned that the two men were fighting over a woman called Lucille, so King gave his guitar – and every subsequent guitar he owned – the same name to remind him never to run into a burning building again for a guitar, or to fight over a woman.
COMMODITY FETISHISM
Possessions are an extension of our self, but the development of new technologies means that our physical connections with many material possessions will disappear as they are replaced by digital formats. Physical photographs and hand-written letters are a rarity in these days of Instagram and email. Interestingly, vinyl records and bound books were predicted to disappear a few years ago, but both are making a comeback as people appreciate their physicality. In 2017, vinyl record sales in the UK hit a twenty-five-year high as listeners returned to ‘tangible music’.10 The same trend is evidenced in the decline of ebook sales in favour of the physical article.
One reason for this reversal is that it is difficult to become emotionally attached to non-physical things. The desire to have and to hold tangible things is a form of fetishism. The word ‘fetish’ (derived from the Portuguese word feitiço, meaning ‘charm’ or ‘sorcery’) was used by European travellers to Africa who noted the practice of worshipping objects believed to have supernatural powers. Fetishism has since come to refer to the emotional gratification that people gain from inanimate objects: sexual fetishism of various types of clothing being one of the most extreme forms.
Any object has the potential to generate fetishism. In the opening chapter of his critique of capitalism, Das Kapital, Karl Marx wrote about commodity fetishism as the psychological relationship that people have with products.11 He was describing the value we ascribe to things that is based on what people are willing to pay for them. This value transfers to the object as an intrinsic property even when it has no functional value. Hence, for most of human history, gold and silver were not intrinsically valuable (they have since been found very useful in electronics), but rather became valuable because of their rarity and usefulness as a convenient form of currency. As soon as the market considers some commodity to be valuable, consumers develop emotional reactions to it.
Valuable things can generate fetish thoughts. Who does not feel that special tingle at the touch of gold? Possibly a goldsmith who works the metal every day but, for the rest of us, gold has long been a magical metal found throughout folklore and fairy tales and associated with touch – remember King Midas? Fetishism makes sense if you think there is something to be gained from holding and touching things – a tangible connection. In the field of magical thinking, this is known as positive contagion, where there is a belief that some positive attribute will transfer from the item – which is why people want to touch objects of desire.12 I was once shown around the Fellows’ common room at Trinity College, Cambridge where a solid gold Nobel prize medal was displayed unguarded atop the fireplace. Everybody wanted to hold it. Even today, banknotes are not intrinsically valuable but, again, there is something special ab
out holding a wad of cash.
In fact, positive contagion has real-world consequences. When adults were asked to putt using a club that they were told belonged to the US golfing pro Ben Curtis, who had won the 2003 Open Championship, their performance was much better compared to those who were told nothing about the putter.13 Not only did they putt more accurately but they also judged the golf hole to be bigger, which gave them more confidence to be on target. This psychological boost is the explanation for supposed lucky charms. Students who bring their own lucky charms into a test situation perform much better on memory tests and solving anagrams compared to those students who have their charms taken away during testing.14 In all of these examples, physical contact with a desirable object generates positive psychology.
Simply handling money changes the way we think and behave, but not always for the better. The behavioural economist Kathleen Vohs, who studies the psychology of money, has shown that holding cash makes both children and adults less pro-social, less interconnected and more selfish.15 Like Gollum, the pitiful, grotesque character with his precious ring in Tolkien’s The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings trilogy, some owners become psychologically obsessed with their possessions. From misers to drug lords, from Fagin in Oliver Twist to Walter White in Breaking Bad, the depiction of individuals gloating over their hoards is usually one of selfish greed.
When it comes to the way we regard our personal possessions as part of our self-construal, Russell Belk also thinks that we enter the realm of magical thinking:
The possessions that we see as most a part of ourselves also show close relationship to the objects that we see as most magical, include perfume, jewelry, clothing, foods, transitional objects, homes, vehicles, pets, religious icons, drugs, gifts, heirlooms, antiques, photographs, souvenirs and collections.16
Recently, however, Belk has updated his extended self concept to include our increasing reliance on and inter-relatedness with the digital world and the rapid changes that have taken place over the last twenty years.17 People are using the new technologies of social media to change their self-construal online to one that they would prefer to promote to others. One of the major concerns about social networking is that people create and broadcast inaccurate profiles of who they are, preferring to emphasize, elaborate or fabricate information that they believe will impress others. The reason it’s a concern is that this online promotion creates unrealistic expectations of how happy and successful everyone else is, which contribute to feelings of inadequacy among vulnerable individuals.18 We generate multiple versions of ourselves that reflect the differing contexts in which we interact with others; we all experience an illusion of selfhood, rather than a veridical, unchanging self that remains constant over time, from one situation to the next.19
Digital platforms enable us, and indeed encourage us, to share personal information promiscuously that previously would have been considered crass, boastful or even embarrassing. We are now much more inclined to social peacocking online, but there is also a threat to our self-construal from digital technologies. Our memories and experiences now exist in formats that do not fade naturally and can be easily retrieved and verified. Background checks of online profiles are now common practice among potential employers. Many naive students applying for positions in my laboratory are shocked when I tell them that we usually check their social media profiles in order to discover more about them that they may not have shared in their applications.
Digital memories can also undermine the growing preference for experiences over possessions when it comes to satisfaction. Remember, this preference depends on our constantly changing memory of events as being more pleasurable. It may be the case that the digital era eventually removes those rose-tinted spectacles when it comes to reminiscing, by reminding us exactly what happened and who we are.
More alarming is the prospect of the digital afterlife online. People continue to acknowledge birthdays of the deceased, and it has been estimated that the number of ‘dead’ profiles on Facebook will increase at a rate of roughly 1.7 million per year in the US alone.20 Facebook has memorial accounts for the deceased, and legacy arrangements for others to manage your account upon your death. But death is a minor inconvenience when it comes to your digital self. Companies such as Eterni.me, an MIT start-up, can generate re-creation algorithms that mimic the preferences of a dead individual and write posts from beyond the grave, enabling the bereaved to stay in touch with the dead. Even if we don’t want to pay for such services, just as my wife was reluctant to discard the items she’d inherited from her parents, grieving families will find it emotionally difficult to delete the online profile of deceased loved ones. Storing millions of digital remains online will accrue mounting archival costs and so there will have to be some financial model that keeps these files active. The digital afterlife industry may be weird, but such is the inevitability of death and the online self that Oxford ethicists have proposed guidelines to regulate the field.21 Digital innovations will literally be able to extend the lifeless self well after we are gone.
WEIRD PEOPLE
The notion of the extended self, defined by what we own, turns out to be a characteristically Western phenomenon. One of the major criticisms of psychology is that it represents a field that has been based largely on research conducted upon white American college students over the past sixty years, motivated to participate in experiments for course credit. They have been called WEIRD – Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic. An analysis of studies published in six leading journals found that almost all the participants were WEIRD, and yet this demographic represents only around 12 per cent of the world’s population.22
To that list of cultural differences we can add self-construal and concepts of ownership. In his book The Geography of Thought, psychologist Richard Nisbett argues that, political ideologies aside, cultures traditionally differ in self-construal – with a broad division between the West and the East.23 The Western concept of the self is relatively individualistic compared to Eastern societies, where self-construal is considered more interdependent with others or collectivist. Western values emphasize the notion of the independent self: the ‘self-made’ person and so on. Personal possessions, individual achievements and a higher appreciation of one’s differences from others are all part of the Western egocentric view.
In contrast, Eastern societies with long traditions of Buddhist and Taoist philosophies, which emphasize lack of self and the importance of the group, teach children from an early age to value the group over the self. Indeed, children from rural collectivist cultures tend to share more fairly and generously than children from industrialized Western countries.24 A higher value is placed on belonging to family and community, and it is more common to live in larger households that extend beyond the immediate family. Eastern families are often more physically interconnected than those in the West. In some societies, multiple generations – grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins – may live under the same roof.
These differences are even reflected in the way we describe ourselves. For example, people raised in collectivist societies often describe themselves in relation to others. My student Sandra Weltzien recently conducted a study of seven- and eight-year-old school children from the Indian city of Pune, where she asked them to tell her what made them special, only to find that they almost always described their achievements in relation to family members and friends. A typical comment was ‘I am good at counting so that it makes my mother proud.’ In contrast, UK children of the same age in Bristol were quite proficient in rattling off why they were so special without the mention of others.25 In some cultures, this inter-relatedness to others extends back to ancestors. Elsdon Best, an ethnographer of the Maori peoples of New Zealand, noted that they would often refer to their tribe in the first person, for example when describing a battle that may have taken place a hundred years earlier they would say: ‘I defeated the enemy there.’26
Are these broad stereotypes generally acc
urate, or just sweeping generalizations that we use to categorize foreigners? Remarkably, a variety of experimental evidence supports the distinction between East and West. Tasks that are characterized by either analytical processing (individualistic) or holistic group processing (collectivist) produce different performance profiles in individuals from across the cultural divide. Even the way we see the world depends on our cultural heritage. When shown complex underwater scenes with multiple fish and an array of reef structures and plants, Japanese and American students notice different things.27 On recognition tasks, where they had to identify whether some feature was present in the original image, American students tended to only notice the large dominant fish, whereas Japanese participants noticed much more of the surrounding scenery. Japanese students were more likely to say that the picture was ‘a pond’, whereas Americans were three times more likely to say something focal like, ‘It was a big fish, swimming to the left.’ The Japanese were much more sensitive to context and relationships between features. This interpretation is supported by a simple demonstration. Take a look at the diagram below.