Third-party enforcement plays a critical role in ownership, because the power of ownership depends on people's ability to obey the rules even when no owner is present. The behavior of looking the other way undermines the entire value of ownership. If there were no third-party punishment, cooperation between groups and society would collapse, and so this is one of the core features of ownership that is not observed in animals.
Why do children begin to understand the logic of third-party punishment around age three? One answer can be found in the development of understanding others and their things. This is particularly related to what psychology calls 'theory of mind'—the intuitive ability to put yourself in another person's shoes inside your own mind and understand their thoughts and behavior. Theory of mind is one of the most heavily studied topics in human and animal cognition, because this kind of mental ability is critical for predicting other people's behavior and social interaction. If you can read someone else's mind, you can anticipate their next move and even manipulate their behavior by feeding them false information. There is evidence that other animals also have rudimentary theory of mind, but the theory of mind in a 3- to 4-year-old is far more sophisticated and a much more frequently observed phenomenon. 33 Younger infants seem to know that other people have minds, but they cannot read other people's minds as adeptly as more mature children. Around age three, a child's theory of mind grows powerful and they begin to understand other people's thoughts and attitudes about their things, including the sense of loss when something is lost. As a result, an inclination to punish wrongdoers takes root. The ability to understand other people's emotions is a major help in establishing social norms and ownership. 90
Art is related to ownership because both are things of a conceptual nature. The world is full of concepts constructed by the human mind. But how did this come to be? As a developmental psychologist, I have spent my career studying the development of children's concepts, which include everything from understanding of the physical world to belief in the supernatural world. Concepts in every domain seem to develop by progressively elaborating, through experience, on a few principles we are born with. Ownership, too, is a concept that developed on the foundation of the 'principle of possession'—a primitive behavior that humans share with other animals.
Before there was ownership, there was possession. Possession is simply controlling physical access to some resource. Holding a resource, carrying it around, or sitting on top of it are all forms of possession. As described earlier, many animals occupy and defend possessions. In child development too, possession comes before the concept of ownership. After analyzing the development of possession behavior, psychologist Lita Furby presented two principles of possession that operate everywhere in the world. First, after interviewing children aged 5 through adults in their 50s, she found they all agreed that possession gives one control over an object. Second, they all agreed that a possession can become part of one's own identity. This is the psychological owner who, as we saw in Chapter 1, registers in the bond formed between me and my property, in the experience of the self being extended through property. 111
What torments us is not merely the financial loss but the intense feeling of having been violated. Someone who was not invited entered our world and weakened our control over it.
The loss of having to give up a possession we want to hold on to can also cause heartbreak. This reluctance to let go reveals a great deal about the relationship between humans and their possessions. After decades of postwar consumer culture rising, consider the rental storage industry that emerged in the late 1960s. Each year, more and more people, instead of throwing things away, are stuffing them into storage. Today there are more individual storage facilities in the United States than McDonald's outlets, and 65 percent of storage users also have a garage. Many garages are filled not with cars but with possessions that cannot be brought into the home. Why are we unable to throw things away? Why do we need storage units packed with personal belongings that are nearly useless to us? Why are we so emotionally dependent on our possessions?
The reason is that what we own is essentially what we are. In 1890, William James, the father of American psychology, wrote the following about how the self is defined through the ownership we claim:
But in its widest possible sense, however, 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, his yacht and bank account—all of these are included. All of these things provide him with the same emotion. If they grow and prosper, he feels triumphant. If they dwindle and die, he feels cast down. Not necessarily in the same degree for each, but in much the same way.3
What James is talking about here is what psychologists today call 'self-construal'—a view of one's own identity, the emotional effects of loss that reveal a special relationship with one's possessions, and so on. It is not particularly surprising that we think of our body and mind as part of the self. After all, who else could claim ownership of these except us? But the material things included in the list above are not unique to us, and other people may also own them. The house, the land, the yacht—these are property we have acquired. Yet the fact that losing them can affect us personally to such a great degree is very surprising indeed.
Many thinkers have pondered the inner connection between humans and their possessions. As is well known, Plato did not value the material world highly and thought we should pursue higher, immaterial ideas. He argued that a system of communal ownership was needed to avoid the social divisions caused by private property—divisions that lead to inequality and theft—and to encourage the pursuit of the common good. His student Aristotle, who was always debating his teacher, was more pragmatic and emphasized the importance of investigating the material world. Aristotle thought that private property promoted thrift and a sense of responsibility, but pointed out that we tend to envy and become jealous of others because of property. Two thousand years later, French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre argued that the only reason we are possessive is to enhance our sense of self, and the only way we can know who we are is by observing what we have. This is almost like saying we have to dress ourselves up through our possessions. Possessions are visible markers of success. As studies of American wealth have shown, we may not become especially happier after our annual income reaches $75,000, but looking at our possessions strengthens our conviction that we have succeeded. Through possessions we let other people know who we are, and possessions in turn tell us who we are.
In Being and Nothingness, Sartre realized just how far human beings are defined by what they own. "My total possessions reflect my total being. (…) I am what I have. What is mine is myself." He suggested several ways in which this happens. First, by exercising exclusive control over something, we claim 'this is mine.' This was even observed in infancy. Second, similar to John Locke's view, when one creates something from scratch, it becomes one's own. Finally, Sartre believed that possessions arouse passions. 229
People who worship products
Possessions are extensions of the self, but as substitution into digital form proceeds with the development of new technology, our physical connection to many material possessions is destined to disappear. In the era of Instagram and email, film photographs and handwritten letters have become rare. Interestingly, a few years ago people predicted that vinyl records and bound books would soon disappear, but both are gaining popularity again because people love that materiality. In 2017, in the UK, vinyl record sales hit a 25-year high as people again grew interested in 'music you can touch.'10 Similar trends are seen in the decline of e-book sales and the preference for physical books.
One reason for this reversal is that it is hard to feel emotional attachment to non-physical things. The desire to possess and keep tangible objects is a kind of fetishism. The word 'fetish,' derived from the Portuguese 'feitiço' meaning 'fascination' or 'magic,' was a term used by Europeans traveling in Africa to describe the practice they observed of worshiping objects believed to possess supernatural power. Since then, fetishism has come to refer to the emotional satisfaction people derive from inanimate objects. Sexual fetishism toward various types of clothing is among the most extreme forms.
Every object has the potential to elicit fetishism. In the first chapter of his anti-capitalist treatise Das Kapital, Karl Marx described the psychological relationship between people and commodities, calling it commodity fetishism. According to his explanation, the value of a thing—the reason we are willing to spend money on it—is something we have assigned to it. This value is transferred to the thing as if it were an essential property, even when it has no functional value. For example, for most of human history, gold and silver were not intrinsically valuable. Gold and silver only became valuable later because of their scarcity and their usefulness as a convenient currency. As soon as the market regards certain goods as valuable, an emotional response on the part of the consumer develops toward them.
What is judged to be valuable can give rise to fetishistic thinking. Is there anyone who doesn't feel a special tingle when touching gold? Goldsmiths who handle this metal every day might not. But for most of us, gold has long been a metal associated with magic through folklore and fairy tales—a magic linked to touch. Anyone who thinks they get something out of holding and touching an object will easily understand fetishism. In magical thinking, this is also called positive contagion: people want to touch the object of their desire because of the belief that the positive properties of the object will be transferred. Once at Cambridge University's Trinity College, near the graduates' lounge, I saw a pure gold Nobel Prize medal hanging unguarded over a fireplace, and everyone wanted to touch it. Even today, banknotes have no intrinsic value, but holding a wad of cash in your hand makes you feel something special. 234
The 'Diderot effect,' a term coined by anthropologist Grant McCracken, refers to the influence an individual object can have on subsequent purchases. For example, after buying a luxury item, you can easily fall into the temptation to buy more similar things you don't even need. Many retailers leverage the Diderot effect to advertise products that complement our initial purchases. This is also part of why Apple products are so attractive. According to McCracken, for many people, buying an iPhone becomes a 'departure product' that increases the pressure to buy other Apple products, because identity is infused into these products. No matter how good a value other products may have, if they send the wrong identity signal, buyers are unlikely to purchase them.
The most extreme form of emotional attachment to objects can be found in collectors. Collectors make an emotional investment in their collections. This reflects not just the monetary value of the objects but the effort and passion the collector poured into gathering the desired items. Sometimes the fear of losing them can grow unbearable. In 2012, German authorities discovered that Cornelius Gurlitt, who had been living a reclusive life in Munich, had stockpiled an enormous quantity of art masterpieces estimated at about $1 billion. These works had been stolen from Jewish people during the Nazi era and disposed of cheaply during the war to Cornelius's father. Cornelius felt a sense of responsibility to protect the collection. He said that watching the police seize his precious collection was a greater shock than the deaths of his parents, or the death of his sister to cancer that same year.
Cornelius told the authorities that protecting the collection was his duty, and so he became "very serious, obsessed, isolated, and increasingly losing his sense of reality." One of the first studies to test James's claim about self-construal was conducted in 1959 by Yale psychoanalyst Ernst Prelinger. He asked adults to classify 160 objects using a scale ranging from non-self to self, and found that the body and mind play a more important role in the sense of self than personal possessions. But also, possessions were classified as more important to the self than other people. (As we shall see, however, this is a very Western perspective.) When children were asked to rank the same items, almost the same pattern as adults emerged. The only difference was that older subjects tended to emphasize possessions that reflected their relationships with others—understandable given that we grow into adults who live with one another.
Canadian marketing scholar Russell Belk also wrote in several influential papers about the relationship between the self and what we own. At the center of his work is the concept of the 'extended self.' Building on the work of James and Sartre, Belk divided the development of the extended self into four stages. First, infants distinguish themselves from their environment. Second, children distinguish themselves from others. Third, possessions help adolescents and adults manage their identities. Finally, possessions help the elderly attain a sense of continuity and prepare for death. 231
In a study with children in India and the UK, when participants were asked to talk about themselves immediately before being asked to share, both groups behaved more selfishly. Here we can see the power of activating implicit memory to easily change attitudes toward possessions. Sharing behavior changes flexibly depending on context, and especially shifts greatly when one becomes aware of others' expectations.
The reason we are reluctant to share our possessions is not so much that we do not think of others, but that we are too focused on what we have. The moment we think about ourselves, we pay special attention to what is important to us and adopt a task-centered attitude. In a study using a supermarket sweep-style game, participants were given the task of dividing photos of groceries and household goods into either a red or blue shopping basket according to color cues in the photos. Then they were asked to imagine that all items in one basket had won a prize and that they would get to take home everything in the photos. After the sorting task, the experimenters tested how many objects participants remembered. The result was that both adults and children around age four remembered more accurately and in greater quantity the items they were told had won the prize than the items in the other basket. This is called the 'self-reference effect': information encoded in relation to oneself is later remembered better than information encoded in relation to others. 249
The origin of 'introspection'—systematically reflecting on one's own mind—goes back to the time when psychology was born as a science. At that time, researchers like Ernst Weber and Gustav Fechner began systematically studying the subjective thresholds of perception. How bright must light be before we can see it? How much louder must a sound become before it sounds twice as loud? These pioneers of perceptual research approached the problem like physicists in search of measurable experiences that could be expressed by mathematical equations. So they came to be called psychophysicists who measured the immaterial dimensions of the human mind.
Kahneman and Tversky used this kind of introspection to identify people's attitudes toward risk, gambling, financial transactions and so on. Just as the early German psychophysicists discovered the properties of human perception, Kahneman and Tversky discovered that people's attitudes toward losses and gains are systematically biased. Consider twins who do exactly the same work and have exactly the same goals and attitudes in life. They are identical in every respect. One day, the company president comes by and tells the twins that they will receive either a $10,000 raise or 12 days of additional vacation as a bonus. They are both indifferent in personality, so they decide by a coin flip who will get the raise and who will get the extra vacation. Both are equally satisfied with the outcome. A year later the president returns and says they will now swap bonuses. How will each twin feel about losing the $10,000 or the additional vacation time?
According to Kahneman and Tversky, even though the two bonuses are equal in value, the twins will be reluctant to swap. They called this 'loss aversion'—and this is why standard economic models do not apply to such situations. 56 If two resources are of equal value, swapping them should also be easy. But once something is established or owned, people do not treat it the same. When reasoning about economic decisions, we have to take into account the biases of the human mind. Why is human reasoning so capricious?
In the bestseller Thinking, Fast and Slow, 57 Kahneman argued that the human mind has two systems for arriving at decisions. System 1 operates quickly and intuitively, often relying on emotional 'gut feelings,' while System 2 is slow, deliberative, and arrives at decisions much more slowly through rational logic and reasoning. We use both types of thinking, and conflicts sometimes arise over the solution. Standard economic models are based on the cold, hard logic and reasoning of System 2, but humans often surrender to the fast, intuitive biases of System 1, so without taking emotion into account our decisions can look illogical. Recognizing the differences between these two systems, the irrational aspects of ownership begin to make sense. 256
Behavioral economics applied psychological biases to economic decision-making and, by attending to humans' capricious decision-making, overturned the models that had been the standard of commerce. Through 'prospect theory,' Kahneman and Tversky proposed several psychological principles that govern the kind of reasoning involved in decision-making. Just as when we calculate social status or the temporary pleasure gained from a purchase, our brain does biased work even in decision-making. First, as already discussed, evaluating changes in the surrounding situation is highly relative. Whether we will gain or lose depends on what we had in the past. Our experience is shaped by past events—from a single sweet drink that lingered like honey to the boredom of a program rerun many times. Think again about the hedonic adaptation that occurs to us all the time. We compare every experience to the past version of ourselves. The second principle Kahneman and Tversky proposed is that all change is relative to the present value of what we currently have. So our current position matters as much as past experience. Even if we were rich in the past, if we are starving now we will gratefully accept anything. The most important final principle is that anticipated losses loom larger in our minds than anticipated gains. We are willing to release the bird in our hand only if there are at least two birds in the bush.
The moment Thaler encountered prospect theory, much of human economic behavior became suddenly clear, like gears clicking into place. People are not rational about ownership. People have a bias toward overvaluing their own possessions, and this can be explained, as prospect theory predicts, by loss aversion. Just as with simple gambling like a coin flip, on average people demand twice as much to give up a possession as they would willingly pay to acquire it. This may look like good bargaining attempts in which both buyer and seller are trying to maximize their gains, but the real issue here is the seller's exaggerated sense of ownership and personal loss.
We overvalue things once they have become our possessions. Called the 'endowment effect,' this bias is one of the most firmly established phenomena in behavioral economics. In short, when selling an object, we expect more money than we would willingly pay to acquire the same object. There is always an imbalance between sellers and buyers, but the imbalance is much larger when the item to be sold is a personal possession.
The endowment effect can be induced by various manipulations. In an auction, once you've bid on an item you don't yet own, you are more likely to make additional bids; this tendency, well known to most auction houses, is what generates frenzied bidding wars. Simply holding or touching the item you wish to buy can trigger the endowment effect. Sales clerks who urge you to try on clothing or test-drive a car are exploiting the endowment effect (the first experience of ownership) to overcome the biggest barrier to purchase.
The endowment effect is common but not universal. As researchers began to investigate various societies and cultures, an interesting point emerged. The strength of the endowment effect varied along the individualism/collectivism dimension. Social psychologist William Maddux and an international research team conducted an interesting cross-cultural study with Western- or Eastern-born university students in the U.S., Canada, China, and Japan. The team assigned students the role of either 'buyer' or 'seller.' The sellers were given a mug bearing the school logo and were told they could just keep it, but if they were willing to sell it, they could choose a price between $0 and $10. The buyers were asked how much they would be willing to pay for the same mug. As predicted, the seller's average asking price of $4.83 was twice as high as the buyer's average offer of $2.34. But when the students' cultural backgrounds were broken out, Western-born sellers asked far more ($5.02) than buyers offered on average ($1.78). In contrast, the Eastern-born students' seller asks ($4.68) and buyer offers ($3.08) did not differ very much.
In another group of Chinese students, the experimenters manipulated participants' self-construal before the trade. They had these Eastern students write a brief essay either about their friendships and camaraderie with other students, or about their own unique personality, skills, and superior strengths compared to others. When the students wrote about other people, the endowment effect decreased; when they wrote about themselves, the endowment effect increased.
Finally, the team manipulated the relationship between the owner and the mug by having Eastern or Western students write about how important or unimportant the mug was to them. As a result, this manipulation increased the endowment effect among Western students, while it produced the opposite effect among Eastern students. In other words, when attention was directed to the possession, Western students valued it more highly while Eastern students valued it less. Clearly, the endowment effect is not inevitable; it instead reflects our attitude toward possessions according to self-construal, which is in turn shaped by individualistic or collectivistic cultural norms.
If the endowment effect is influenced by culture, can we observe the seeds of this effect in children before culture intervenes? We targeted very young children to investigate the development of the endowment effect, activating implicit memory of self or others in a task evaluating toys. Among Western children, the endowment effect is usually only observed around age 5 or 6, so we targeted 3- to 4-year-olds.
Children at this age don't understand the concept of value. But if a child places one toy on a smiley face and another on a frowning face on a smiley-face scale, we can assume the child likes one toy more than the other. This is a kind of relative value.
Sandra Belchien and I first demonstrated the game so the young children could understand it, placing various toys on the smiley-face scale. Then we gave the children two identical spinning-top toys. If the children placed both equally on a smiling face, that meant they considered them equal in value. Then Sandra gave the children one of the two tops as a gift, and asked them to draw a picture of themselves, of a friend, or of a farm scene. Then the children were asked to evaluate several toys, including the two tops, again. Just like Maddux's adults, children who had been asked to draw themselves rated their own top higher than the same top that wasn't theirs. In this way, by directing attention to oneself, we were able to induce the endowment effect in children of an age in which it is normally not observed in this experiment.
If the bias of overvaluing one's own possessions is related to self-construal, then a recent finding that the endowment effect does not appear in people with autism is consistent with this explanation. The self-construal of these people is expressed differently from that of people in general. Children with high-functioning autism spectrum disorder who do not have language difficulties often have trouble using the first-person pronouns 'I' and 'me' and have deficits in autobiographical memory. Perhaps because of these differences in self-awareness in psychological terms, they do not overvalue their own possessions as most people do.
Differences in self-construal along the independence/collectivism distinction can also explain cultural differences in the endowment effect. Think again about the Hadza of northern Tanzania, one of the last remaining hunter-gatherer societies in the world. As we saw earlier, they have very few personal possessions and follow a demand-based sharing policy in which others can take what they need if they are not using it. So in trading experiments using items appropriate for Hadza culture, it is no surprise that many Hadza people did not show the endowment effect. Why?
One reason is that hunter-gatherers have few possessions other than what is needed to maintain a nomadic life. Carrying many things is impossible, so possessions are not a top priority for them. That is also why demand-based sharing developed, to optimize the amount of materials and resources that must be carried. But there was an interesting exception, observed among Hadza people who had been exposed to Western influence. Anthropologists studying this subgroup found evidence of endowment bias among those who had frequent contact with tourists or who had market trading experience. The bias was also observed among Hadza people who had had to deal with Westerners.
People who exhibit a strong endowment effect have a hard time becoming successful merchants. If you always demand twice what people are willing to pay, your shop will close very quickly. The price an experienced merchant asks comes closer to the price the consumer is willing to pay, which is also why the endowment effect declines. In this case, too, brain imaging studies confirm the reduction of loss pain. Compared with inexperienced merchants who still feel sales as a loss, experienced merchants show less activation in the brain's negative loss centers. Yet whether the endowment effect declines over time because of merchant experience, or whether successful merchants succeed because they were less attached to possessions to begin with, is still unclear. The endowment effect appears to be a System-1 bias for avoiding losses, but the effect can also disappear depending on the cultural context of the value we assign to possessions and the goal of seeking profit. 271
People addicted to the chase
What drives us to acquire things? Why do some people think of themselves as shopping addicts? Ordinary people may think that acquiring something brings great satisfaction, but many people obsessed with shopping will testify that the anticipation of acquiring is even more powerful. This anticipation can develop into frenzy. As we see in the rise of the 'Black Friday' phenomenon, in which shoppers, gripped by the expectation of gain, fight to be the first to grab the discount items, even law-abiding citizens can turn into a law-flouting mob. There have even been incidents in which people were trampled to death rushing toward the discount goods.
Jean-Paul Sartre took William James's quote that "a man's 'self' is the sum total of all that he can call his" and twisted it, writing: "The human is less the sum of what he already has than the sum of what he does not yet have, what he might have." To Sartre, what defines who we are is the pursuit of goals rather than acquisition. And his insight aligns with the neuroscience of motivation. The brain has mechanisms that operate differently depending on whether we already own something or are wishing to own it. Objects already perceived as extensions of the self are integrated into the neural networks that produce the sense of self. By contrast, objects we want may also stimulate our sense of self but also activate systems that respond to novelty and the thrill of pursuit. If we think about it carefully, we spend more time pursuing pleasure than consuming it. The common thread among the most enjoyable experiences is novelty. Recall the Coolidge effect. As Brian Knutson, a Stanford neuroscientist, has pointed out, the long tradition of exploration—from crossing oceans to mountain climbing to landing on the moon—aptly demonstrates the powerful force of novelty that motivates us. The reason we celebrate and remember such people is also that, through them, a kind of ownership was first established. An easily attained goal feels less rewarding than an achievement that took much time and effort. Why?
The explanation can be found in how the brain's various systems that motivate us to attain goals operate. Deep within the brainstem—the brain's oldest part and the support of all life functions—lies the ventral tegmental area, VTA. Here are dopamine neurons that activate the brain's motivation system, which responds to novelty and reward. One such region is the striatum at the top of the brainstem, a connected collection of systems that control our behavior in relation to punishment and reward. In 1954, Canadian McGill University psychologists James Olds and Peter Milner, while studying brain learning mechanisms in rats, accidentally stimulated various brain regions with an electrode every time the rat happened to bump into something arousing. Rats with electrodes implanted in the septal region (the equivalent of the human striatum) kept pressing the lever to receive brief electrical stimulation, even forgoing food and water. The rats were addicted to the stimulating reward. The dopamine neurons of the ventral tegmental area also extend to the prefrontal cortex, where executive decisions are made. This is the area that controls the passion of pursuit. Together with the ventral tegmental area, the striatum and the prefrontal cortex form the motivational circuit that identifies our goals and initiates their pursuit.
Since the brain's pleasure center was first discovered, much research has confirmed that the dopamine neurons of the ventral tegmental area are activated by various addictive human activities such as sex, drugs, and rock and roll. And shopping will be on this list as well. In a study with patients who were taking drugs that regulate dopamine activity to control Parkinson's disease, one side effect was an increase in gambling, sex addiction, and shopping addiction. All of these side effects are related to the anticipation of pleasure. As when Dr. Frank-N-Furter in the musical Rocky Horror Picture Show is teasing us, what gives the greatest pleasure is not conquest but anticipation. Knutson and his colleagues demonstrated that anticipation of a sale activates the ventral tegmental area, while a high price or financial loss is registered in the aversion centers of the insula.
We think the joy of acquisition fuels consumer culture, but in fact what drives us to fill our lives with all kinds of objects is the chase. Goals based on the motive to acquire are inherently tied to reward, so failing to attain the goal brings disappointment or frustration. But even if the goal is attained, satisfaction does not follow, because acquisition does not provide the joy we expected. Even if we do get pleasure, this feeling is easily habituated, and we begin to look for the next thing we 'must have.'
Even before getting hold of a possession, our brain savors the anticipated reward. And once we have it, we attribute excessive value to it because the possession is an extension of the self. The problem is that many people quickly become habituated and look for the next conquest. With this powerful emotional drive that makes it hard to be easily satisfied with what one already owns, some people cannot stop the acquiring behavior, and may even lose their lives or be quite literally suffocated by their possessions. 275
Are ownership and happiness the same thing?
Through the power of ownership, we extend our personal self into the world, and through possessions we communicate our identity and status to others. The reason loss of possessions hits us so hard is not so much because of their value but because they represent our identity to a great degree. This relationship varies by individual and by culture, but to some degree we all build a sense of self through ownership. This explains both our motivation to acquire more and the reason we have such a hard time letting go of what we have. To solve the problems of unrelenting materialism and consumer culture—not to mention territorial disputes—we need to understand this peculiar relationship between humans and the things we possess.
Our irrational behavior arises because we identify ourselves with the things we believe are ours. But there is something inherently contradictory about this. We overvalue our possessions and have trouble letting them go because they represent our identity, but we also habituate easily to most of what we own. We strive to acquire more, in an unrelenting—but ultimately unfulfilled—desire to elevate our identity. This may give us a greater sense of success, but ironically, the more we accumulate, the less satisfied we become.
You will surely disagree with the claim that materialistic goals do not bring satisfaction. In fact, you may believe the fundamental warning message of this book has nothing to do with you. Many people are convinced that they will be satisfied if they have more, and so all of life's motivation is built on this belief. Ownership is a central issue in our morality, politics, and worldview, and the only way to settle this debate is to look at the data. We have to look not just at the data of one or two studies on the WEIRD group, but at the data from as many studies on as many people as can be found while exploring the link between materialism and happiness.
Studying all the available studies in this way is called meta-analysis. Because instead of relying on a particular study, research group, or individual scientist that may be biased in finding particular results, it averages the findings of many studies to provide a much more balanced and accurate assessment of a research field, it has become the standard for scientific research. And the jury is in. According to the most comprehensive recent meta-analysis by Helga Dittmar's research team at the University of Essex, performed on more than 750 measurements drawn from over 250 independent studies, "there is a clear and consistent negative association between people's beliefs that prioritize materialistic pursuit in their lives and various types of personal happiness. 38. This holds across cultures, ages, and genders. Some factors reduce this relationship, but in no case has a positive relationship been found."
If we were satisfied with what we currently own, we would not need to strive to have more. But considering the thrill of pursuit, the desire for status, and the destructive effect of anticipated loss, we can see that ownership is one of humanity's strongest impulses and rarely responds to reason. Of course, most of us think we are free of that desire, that we are the exception. So in the end, we cannot let go of what we hold. 293
