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The IKEA Effect Makes You Overvalue Things You Build Yourself
A Harvard study found that people place disproportionately high value on products they partially created, even if the result is objectively mediocre. Participants valued their own amateur origami creations nearly as much as expert-made ones.
Why It’s Fascinating
It explains why home cooks love their own food, why managers love their own plans, and why IKEA is so successful. The labor itself creates emotional attachment, which means effort does not just produce value — it produces the illusion of extra value.
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The Dunning-Kruger Effect Shows Incompetent People Cannot Recognize Their Incompetence
People with low ability in a domain tend to dramatically overestimate their competence, while experts tend to underestimate theirs. The very skills needed to produce correct judgments are the same skills needed to recognize what correct judgments look like.
Your Brain Makes Decisions Up to 10 Seconds Before You Are Aware of Them
Neuroscientist John-Dylan Haynes used fMRI scans to show that brain activity predicting a decision can be detected up to 10 seconds before a person consciously feels they have decided. The unconscious brain appears to choose first, and consciousness follows.
Being Watched Makes You Better at Simple Tasks and Worse at Hard Ones
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