READING: PROCESS ANALYSIS COMBINED WITH OTHER PATTERNS

The Psychology of Stuff and Things

CHRISTIAN JARRETT

Dr. Christian Jarrett is a psychologist and a staff writer for the British Psychological Society’s magazine The Psychologist. He also blogs for both the British Psychological Society and Psychology Today. He has published essays in numerous magazines such as The (London) Times, The Guardian, and Outdoor Fitness. He has also published several books, including The Rough Guide to Psychology (2010) and Thirty-Second Psychology (2011). As you read the following essay on how our relationship with our belongings evolves over the life span, try to identify the other patterns of development he uses.

A man’s Self is the sum total of all that he can call his.

— William James (The Principles of Psychology, 1890)

Stuff everywhere. Bags, books, clothes, cars, toys, jewelry, furniture, iPads. If we’re relatively affluent, we’ll consider a lot of it ours. More than mere tools, luxuries or junk, our possessions become extensions of the self. We use them to signal to ourselves, and others, who we want to be and where we want to belong. And long after we’re gone, they become our legacy. Some might even say our essence lives on in what once we made or owned.

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CHILDHOOD AND ADOLESCENCE

Our relationship with stuff starts early. The idea that we can own something, possess it as if a part of ourselves, is one that children grasp by the age of two. And by six, they exhibit the “endowment effect,” placing extra value on an object simply by virtue of it being, or having been, theirs. Although children understand ownership from a very young age, they think about it in a more simplistic way than adults. A study by Ori Friedman and Karen Neary in 2008 showed that aged between two and four, kids make the assumption that whoever is first in possession of the object is the owner, regardless of whether they later give it away.

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With ownership comes envy. When youngsters play with friends, they soon discover other people’s toys they’d like to get their hands on. Or they experience the injustice of being forced to share what they had assumed was theirs alone. In his 1932 book The Moral Judgment of the Child, Jean Piaget observed that even babies express jealousy over objects, giving signs of “violent rage” when a toy is taken from them and given to another. When Batya Licht and her colleagues in 2008 filmed 22-month-olds playing with their peers in day-care, nearly a quarter of all sources of conflict were over possessions — where the “child either defended his or her objects from another child, or wanted to take an object from another child.”

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Most children have an unusually intense relationship with a specific “attachment object,” usually a favorite blanket or a soft toy. In an intriguing study by Bruce Hood and Paul Bloom, the majority of three- to six-year-old children preferred to take home their original attachment object, as opposed to a duplicate made by a “copying machine.” To the prospect of taking a copy, “the most common response was horror,” says Nathalia Gjersoe, who helped run the studies. “A few very sweet and obedient children said okay but then burst into tears.” Four of the children even refused for their attachment toy or object to be copied in the first place. That’s despite the fact they were happy enough to take a copy of an experimenter’s toy. It’s as if the children believed their special object had a unique essence, a form of magical thinking that re-appears in adulthood in our treatment of heirlooms, celebrity memorabilia and artwork.

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As children mature into teens, we see possessions starting to act as a crutch for the self. In 2007, Lan Chaplin and her colleagues interviewed participants aged between eight and 18 and found that “materialism” (identified by choosing material goods in answer to “What makes me happy?”) peaked at middle adolescence, just when self-esteem tended to be lowest. In a follow-up, materialism was reduced in teens who were given flattering feedback from peers to boost their self-esteem.

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Through adolescence, possessions increasingly reflect who people are, or at least how they would like to see themselves. In his seminal paper “Possessions and the Extended Self” Russell Belk quotes from novelist Alison Lurie’s book The Language of Clothes, in which she observes: “. . . when adolescent girls exchange clothing they share not only friendship, but also identities — they become soulmates.” Similarly, in interviews with teens, Ruthie Segev at Jerusalem College of Technology found evidence that selecting and buying gifts for their friends helps adolescents achieve a sense of identity independent from their parents, and that the mutual exchange of the same or similar gifts between friends helps them to create a feeling of overlapping identities.

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In the transition from adolescence to adulthood, it’s the first car that often becomes the ultimate symbol of a person’s emerging identity. Interviews with car owners conducted by Graham Fraine and colleagues in 2007 found that young drivers, aged 18 to 25, were particularly likely to make the effort to personalize their cars with stickers, unusual number plates and seat covers, as if marking out their territory.

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ADULTHOOD

As our lives unfold, our things embody our sense of self-hood and identity still further, becoming external receptacles for our memories, relationships and travels. “My house is not ‘just a thing,’” wrote Karen Lollar in 2010. “The house is not merely a possession or a structure of unfeeling walls. It is an extension of my physical body and my sense of self that reflects who I was, am, and want to be.”

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As our belongings accumulate, becoming more infused with our identities, so their preciousness increases. People whose things are destroyed in a disaster are traumatized, almost as if grieving the loss of their identities. Photographs from the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, which struck the US East coast in 2012, show people standing bereft, staring in shock and bewilderment at all they’ve lost. Reflecting on the fire that took her home, Lollar says it was like “a form of death.” Alexandra Kovach, who also lost her home in a fire, wrote in The Washington Post in 2007: “It isn’t just a house. It’s not the contents, or the walls, but the true feeling of that home — and all that it represents.”

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LATER LIFE AND BEYOND

Older people don’t just form bonds with their specific belongings, they seem to have an affection for brands from their youth too. Usually this manifests in a taste for music, books, films and other entertainment from yesteryear, but the same has been shown for fashions and hairstyles, it has been hinted at for perfumes, and in a study published in 2003 by Robert Schindler and Morris Holbrook, it was found that it also extends to the car.

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Dozens of participants aged 16 to 92 rated their preference for the appearance of 80 cars, ranging from the 1915 Dodge Model 30-35 to the 1994 Chrysler Concorde. Among men, but not women, there was a clear preference for cars that dated from the participants’ youth (peaking around age 26). This was particularly the case for men who were more nostalgic and who believed that things were better in the old days. What other examples might there be? “Children of both sexes tend to have strong feelings about foods they like as they grow up,” says Schindler. “Although we haven’t studied food, I would expect both men and women to have a lifetime fondness for foods they enjoyed during their youth.”

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As decisions regarding these “special possessions.” A common theme was the way cherished objects come to represent particular memories. “I can look at anything [in this house] and remember special occasions,” recalled Diane, aged 70. “It’s almost like a history of our life.”

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After a person dies, many of their most meaningful possessions become family heirlooms, seen by those left behind as forever containing the lost person’s essence. This idea is also seen in the behaviors that follow the death of a celebrity. In a process that Belk calls “sacralization,” possessions owned by a deceased star can acquire astonishing value overnight, both sentimental and monetary. This is often true even for exceedingly mundane items such as President Kennedy’s tape measure, auctioned for $48,875 in 1996. A study by George Newman and colleagues in 2011 provided a clue about the beliefs underlying these effects. They showed that people place more value on celebrity-owned items, the more physical contact the celebrity had with the object, as if their essence somehow contaminated the item through use.

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THE FUTURE

Our relationship with our stuff is in the midst of great change. Dusty music and literary collections are being rehoused in the digital cloud. Where once we expressed our identity through fashion preferences and props, today we can cultivate an online identity with a carefully constructed homepage. We no longer have to purchase an item to associate ourselves with it, we can simply tell the world via Twitter or Facebook about our preferences. The self has become extended, almost literally, into technology, with Google acting like a memory prosthetic. In short, our relationship with our things, possessions and brands remains as important as ever, it’s just the nature of the relationship is changing. Researchers and people in general are gradually adjusting. The psychology of our stuff is becoming more interdisciplinary, with new generations building on the established research conducted by consumer psychologists.

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Twenty-five years after he published his seminal work on objects and the “extended self,” Russell Belk has composed an update: “The extended self in a digital world,” currently under review. “The possibilities for self extensions have never been so extensive,” he says.

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