What Is the IKEA Effect?

Laurie Santos says the IKEA effect is a psychology finding that people like an IKEA thing more, and think it is better, just because they built it themselves. Effort feels good and creates value, so handing off a task like writing an email to a tool that can do the writing is easy, and it gives away the value the work itself creates.

Scaled to the cognitive work young people do, they value what they create themselves. A pattern in animals called contra freeloading points the same way. Offer a free reward that takes no effort and a reward that takes more work, and animals prefer the reward that takes more work, then wind up healthier afterward. Challenge has been known to feel good since Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi studied flow. Taking cognitive work out of young people's hands has a cost. Learning already costs something, and kids who skip their own work miss the chance to push through friction: getting past boredom, not knowing what to do, fear of failure, and a blank page. The happiness benefit of pushing through goes untracked. Lean on the shortcut in September, when classes first start, and the skill of pushing through never develops, so the shortcut happens more and more. The worry is cognitive offloading.