by Bruce Hood
I think that objects are a reflection of our self or at least a perceived notion of how we would like to be seen by others. William James was one of the first psychologists to understand the importance of objects to humans as a reflection of their notion of self, when he wrote, ‘A man’s Self is the sum total of all that he CAN call his, not only his body and his psychic powers, but his clothes and his house, his wife and children, his ancestors and friends, his reputation and works, his lands and horses, and yacht and bank-account.’25
Objects serve an important function as ostensive markers for self-identity. When we take possession of objects they become ‘mine’ – my coffee cup, my Nikes, my telephone. This obsession with ownership can be traced to early childhood.26 In our labs, we found that many preschoolers had formed an emotional attachment to sentimental objects such as blankets and teddy bears and would not readily accept an identical replacement.27 Many of these children would grow up into adults who would become emotionally distressed just at the thought of destroying their beloved ragbag. We know this because we wired adults up to a machine that measures arousal and found that they got anxious when they had to cut-up a photograph of the object of their childhood attachment. Myself and colleagues have recently created a series of brain imaging studies where we show adults videos of their objects being blown up, driven over, axed, chainsawed and jumped on. A brain scanner reveals the different regions of the brain that are activated during these distressing movies. So far the results look encouraging. Sometimes, I really love my research!28
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.
This aversion to loss sounds remarkably similar to insecure attachment – when individuals cannot bear to be separated from loved ones. Individuals who were rated anxious in their personal relationship attachment style showed a much stronger endowment effect in that they demand a higher price for personal possessions.40 They weren’t just clingy to people but also clingy to objects! Moreover, if they were primed to think about past relationships that made them feel anxious and insecure, the endowment effect was further increased. Clearly emotions linked with our past social relationships are registered in our brain and can spill over into reasoning systems when it comes to how we value possessions.
The Extended Self
Despite thirty years of research on the endowment effect, only recently have researchers started to look at the phenomenon in populations other than North American students. This is an important limitation as other cultures have different attitudes towards object ownership. For example, in comparison to Westerners, Nigerians are reported to value gifts from others more and exhibit less of an endowment effect for personally acquired possessions.41 A recent study of the Hadza hunter-gatherers of Northern Tanzania also found no evidence of endowment for possessions.42 This difference is believed to reflect the cultural difference between Western societies where the self is thought about mainly as one of independence compared to non-Western societies, especially those in East Asia where the self is thought of in terms of its relationship to others or interdependence. For example, there is a self-characterization task43 called the ‘Twenty Statements Test’ where participants have to write twenty statements in response to the question at the top of the page, ‘Who Am I?’ It is a fairly simple measure of their self-concept reflecting various attributes such as physical ones, such as ‘I am tall’, or social roles, as in ‘I am a father’, or personal characteristics, such as ‘I am impulsive’. After completing the twenty statements, these are categorized as being internal (traits and intrinsic qualities) versus external (social roles in relationship to others). In comparison to individuals from interdependent societies, Westerners typically make more internal statements compared to external references.
How do these differing self-concepts manifest when it comes to ownership? One suggestion, following from Belk’s ‘extended self’ idea, is that the endowment effect is at least partly a function of the tendency to value the self. But not every personal attribute is fixed. Psychologist William Maddux and his colleagues44 first established that the endowment effect was not as strong in East Asians compared to Western students attending Northwestern University. However, in a clever twist Maddux asked the students to either write about themselves or their relationships with other people. This task can shift the self-perspective from being focused on one’s self to one’s relationship with others. When East Asians focused on themselves, they endowed things they owned with greater value, whereas Westerners instructed to write about others showed the opposite – a reduced endowment effect.
Not only do we overvalue our own possessions but we also covet that to which others seem to pay attention. It turns out that when we watch other people looking and smiling at objects we automatically prefer them to objects that have not been looked at.45 These sorts of studies show that, when we come to value things, make choices and exhibit preferences, we can easily be manipulated simply by considering context and our role among others. Being a member of a group generates our self-concept in ways that seem to defy the notion that societies are a collection of individual selves. Rather, our self is a reflection of our extension not only to our possessions, but also to everyone around us.
6
How the Tribe Made Me
Did you know that one of the most terrifying experiences people can imagine is speaking in front of other people? When this fear becomes so extreme that it begins to affect how people live their lives, it is known as social anxiety disorder. According to the American Psychiatric Association, it is the number one most common anxiety problem and the third most common mental disorder in the United States. More than one in ten of us have social anxiety disorder, which is surprisingly high given that we are such a sociable species.1 Why is this?
The mind that generates our sense of self is a product of a brain that has evolved to become social. But in being social, the self is radically altered by the presence of others and our need to fit in with them. This is such an imperative, that being in a group can be one of the most life-affirming experiences but also one of the greatest anxiety-inducing challenges.
One theory is that other people trigger our emotions reflexively.2 As soon as we are in a crowd we become aroused. The limbic system that controls our behaviour responds automatically to the presence of others. Arguably, this is the basic function of emotions – to motivate social behaviour to either join or avoid others. When people simply look at us we become aroused by the focus of their attention. In one of our studies3 we showed that direct attention from staring eyes triggered increased pupil dilation, which is controlled by the limbic system. This system controls how we interact with others – whether we fight them, flee from them or fornicate with them.
Sometimes, arousal can improve performance. We run faster, cycle faster and basically up our game when others are about. However, this energy can also impair performance when we are not that skilled in the first place. When others look at us, our mouths dry up, our voices tremble and our hands shake – all signs of limbic arousal. These are the butterflies that we get in our stomach, which explains why opening-night nerves are a common experience for actors who are not yet comfortable in their roles. It’s only when we become expert that we can rise to the occasion.4
However, not all group behaviour leads to increased performance. In a tug of war, teammates expend about half as much energy as when they pull as individuals in a phenomenon known as ‘social loafing’.5 As soon as we blend into the crowd we no longer feel the need to put in as much effort if it is not recognized. It is only if the group appreciates our efforts that we try harder. This need for recognition also explains why groups can become more polarized on issues that would normally generate only moderate views.6 In an effort to gain group approval, individuals adopt increasingly extreme positions that they feel represent the group, which in turn drags the group further towards that position. If you couple that dynamic force with ‘groupthink’,7 the tendency to suspend critical thinking when we are one of many decision-makers so as to try and galvanize the gathering, then it is easy to see how we behave so differently in groups than we would as individuals. It explains why the rise of political extremism requires not only the d
etermination of the few but also the complacency of the many. When we are in large groups, whatever self we believe we have is swamped by others. The illusion is to assume you are more autonomous than you really are.
Suicide Baiting
In January 2010, a distressed woman on a bridge over the M60 motorway in the UK brought the traffic to a four-hour standstill while the police attempted to talk her down. A radio DJ, Steve Penk, thought it would be a funny prank to play Van Halen’s hit track, ‘Jump’, for the frustrated drivers caught up in the drama.8 Moments later, the woman jumped allegedly after hearing the song on a radio turned up by one of the waiting motorists. Luckily, the woman survived her suicide attempt but Penk was unrepentant.
Left to his own devices, the DJ would not have taunted the potential suicide victim unless he thought his clowning would please the listeners. The drivers trapped on the motorway would probably not have normally wished this woman harm either. They were sufficiently removed from the incident that they did not feel any consequences of their actions. This kind of crowd behaviour is known as suicide baiting. Fortunately, it is very rare, probably because most suicides are not public spectacles. However, there are well-documented cases where crowds have urged individuals to kill themselves. How can we understand such behaviour? Conceivably this is not the sort of thing that individual members of a crowd would normally encourage on their own.