An Object is worth more to you if you already own it. Researchers found that some Cornell students who would choose a chocolate bar over a coffee mug start to prefer the mug once they have been given one. This ” endowment effect” has been spotted with all sorts of things, from basketball tickets to shares and petrol vouchers. The question that has puzzled economists is just why a supposedly clever species like Homo sapiens should fall prey to something so irrational.
Now scientists may have provided an answer. The endowment effect has been in brain-imagining studies in people and in chimps which suggests it is an evolutionary adaptation. Trade was risky when there were no contracts, law or language. The bird in the hand was worth even more when bushes were dangerous.
Are humans, then, hardwired to cling on to their possessions? if so, this primordial instinct joins a lengthening list of maladaptations to modern life. Attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, ADHD, may have suited a nomad, because the itch to wander off led to serendipitous discoveries of food and mates. The ability to store food as fat was handy if food was sometimes scarce. Such adaptations may have done the human race nicely when it was chasing wildebeest in the savannah, but they are worse than useless in the Googleplex. The fat, the impulsive and the unity are genetically normal, but they are equipped for yesteryear. The thin, the focused and the neat are freaks but they are cut for success.
For modern life disapproves of clutter, almost as much as it scorns obesity and fidgetting. Cubicle life and hot-desking make no allowances for employees who own anything, Architects and designers, like Le Corbusier and Walter Gropius,long ago tried to eliminate clutter fromthe home, and, along with the arbiters of taste, the high cost of housing argues against clutter. If you want to keep up with fashion, in handbags and iphones, it is constanly in with the new. Modern life demands that the old should go out at the same time.