My precious

Our belongings can have deep meaning, but do  they make us happy, asks Michael Bond DENIS SINYAKOV/REUTERS “ HAVE nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.” This was a golden rule for those struggling to furnish or redecorate their homes, offered by William Morris, a 19th-century British textile designer. Insightful as it sounds, Morris’s advice turns out to be rather impractical. As we all know, our relationship to the things we own goes far beyond utility and aesthetics. Simply put, we love our stuff. Morris’s contemporary, the psychologist William James, had a notion why. Our possessions, he argued, define who we are: “Between what a man calls me and what he simply calls mine the line is difficult to draw.” As well as being useful, our possessions represent our extended selves. They provide a sense of past and tell us “who we are, where we have come from and perhaps where we are going”, says Russell Belk, who studies consumerism at York University in Toronto, Canada. Our things are “repositories of ourselves”, says Catherine Roster at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. “It might be a sweater, a lamp, an umbrella – an object doesn’t have to have material value to have emotional value.” Our ability to imbue things with rich meaning is a universal human trait that develops early in life (see “My blankie!”, page 40), and develops as we get older.  A 1977 survey of multiple generations of families in Chicago revealed that older people tend to prize objects that spur memories and reflection, whereas younger people value things with multiple uses – like a kitchen table and chairs. That may be the case in the digital era as well. Sociologist Eugene Halton, who conducted the survey, speculates that younger people today might prize their smartphone above all else, but it is unlikely to stay special for long. “Not a lot of people collect their old computers and cellphones as meaningful possessions,” he says. The inclination to value things we own beyond what others think they are worth is known in psychology as the endowment effect. It explains why we  are more likely to buy a coat once we  have tried it on, or a car once we have testdriven it – just imagining that something is ours makes it seem more valuable. Our ability to imagine the way new things will change our lives is what drives us to acquire them in the first place, says Marsha Richins at the University of Missouri in Columbia. She found that we have “transformation expectations” about new stuff: we expect things to make our lives better and enhance the way we are viewed by others. It’s a tendency expertly exploited by advertisers, she says. Our culture of hyper-consumerism can make it difficult to determine where normal behaviour ends and compulsion begins.  Of course, we are all materialistic to some extent – some more than others – and we do get a boost of happiness from buying things. But it doesn’t last. And because it is so fleeting, many people quickly feel the desire to top up with another purchase, and another – and  are often willing to go into debt to do so. Studies show that those who routinely seek out material things to make them

POSSESSED BY POSSESSIONS
When our instinct for ownership goes wrong HOARDING As many as 1 in 20 people struggle with an obsession with acquiring stuff and the inability to part with it – some to the point that their home becomes impassable. “This isn’t just about clutter,” says psychiatrist David Tolin at Yale University School of Medicine. “It becomes a disability.” This new diagnosis – it received its own category in the latest edition of psychiatry’s diagnostic manual, DSM-5 – may seem a fitting indictment of a modern society obsessed with stuff and status. But that idea is almost certainly wrong. Hoarding isn’t new. It was referred to in Dante’s Inferno back in the 1300s. But it has only recently been distinguished from obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD). In a 2012 brain-imaging study, for example, Tolin and his colleagues asked volunteers to hold an object they owned and decide whether to throw it away. Unlike people with OCD, hoarders showed overactivity in the anterior cingulate and insular cortex – areas of the brain that help determine importance, relevance and salience. This manifests as perfectionism – hardly the word summoned by reality TV shows with dead cats mouldering under mountains of unworn clothes. Yet it is the growing consensus: people with impaired decision-making worry so much about wrong decisions that they keep the item for later appraisal. “It’s counter-intuitive,” says Tolin, “but it makes perfect sense.” Hoarding also isn’t limited to Western society. Cultural idiosyncrasies may  shape how it manifests, but “hoarding exists in virtually every culture”, says psychologist Randy Frost at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. We can all be reluctant to part with possessions. For hoarders, it becomes an “obsession with not losing a piece of your life”. COMPULSIVE SHOPPING Unlike hoarding, “compulsive buying disorder” is not in the DSM-5, but recent numbers suggest it affects 6 per cent of the US population. Still, no one can agree whether it shares a basis with addiction, impulse control or OCD. There is also an increasingly thin line between normal shopping behaviour and compulsion – one happily blurred by advertisers. There may be an intuitive link between hoarding and compulsive shopping, but the two disorders are certainly distinct. About 60 per cent of people with hoarding disorder are also compulsive shoppers, but the inverse is true for only 40 per cent of compulsive shoppers (Behaviour Research and Therapy, vol 47, p 705). Also, hoarding exists across cultures, but shopping addiction can’t exist without very specific societal conditions: a marketbased economy, availability of a variety of goods, disposable income and free time. As Donald Black, professor of psychiatry at the University of Iowa, puts it: “If gambling opportunities do not exist, it is highly unlikely for gambling addiction to exist.” So shopping addiction truly is a product of our material world.  Sally Adee

happy may be struggling to find fulfilment in other aspects of their lives, such as relationships. But, interestingly, the drive for stuff itself may not be the cause of this discontent: a study by Rik Pieters at Tilburg University in the Netherlands showed that loneliness tends to make people more materialistic, but the inverse isn’t necessarily true.  Another reason to refrain from “retail therapy” is the sizeable toll consumerism has on the environment. In part to make way for new stuff, people in the US throw away an average of 30 kilograms of clothing and other textiles each year. Also, it turns out that the more you prize possessions, the more likely you are to dismiss environmental concerns. Still, the solution isn’t simply to reject our instinct for accumulating belongings. Our stuff has an important role in shoring up our sense of identity, one made most apparent when we are forced to let it go. This can be difficult, even traumatic, since it is akin to letting go of parts of ourselves. Institutions such as prisons and military camps strive for just this effect by removing clothes and other personal items from people and issuing them with standardised kit to diminish their individuality. They become like clay, primed for reshaping. People who have lost their homes  and everything in them because of a natural disaster often report a profound confusion of identity. Following the huge wildfire in Oakland Hills, California, in 1991 that left more than 5000 people homeless, Shay Sayre at California State University in Fullerton recorded the feelings of survivors. One told her: “We became orphans without a past. Like we had amnesia, like we didn’t exist before the fire.” When people lose their possessions, reflected Sayre, questions of the self become critical, for if we are what we own, who are we when we own nothing? Status update Our sense of self isn’t the only reason we accumulate stuff, or doggedly hang on to it. Possessions are also symbols of social standing and status. Several recent studies suggest that today’s 20 to 35-yearolds are far more inclined than previous generations to try to acquire status or prestige by buying things like designer handbags or high-end fashion items. Part of that may be because they receive more disposable income from their parents or have more ready access to credit cards. The availability of such “easy money” may explain another recent finding: investigating materialistic tendencies among older teenagers in the US, researchers at San Diego State University in California found that, since the  mid-1970s, there has been a growing discrepancy between young people’s desire to own expensive things and THESE ARE A FEW OF YOUR FAVOURITE THINGS When we asked New Scientist readers what item you had purchased in the past decade that brought the most happiness – for the chance to win a set of beautifully bound popular science books from the Folio Society – nearly 2000 responded. Your answers inspired, amused and at times bewildered us, but above all they showed how deeply we connect to the things we own. Unsurprisingly, there are many bibliophiles among you – some with cherished collections of paperbacks, others who praised e-readers for enabling you to tote around an entire library. Many of you loved a specific book: the text recommended by a professor that spurred a career; the “mouldy copy of a children’s tale I’d borrowed from a dying library”. You also celebrated your pets, even if the notion of “buying” them didn’t sit quite right. As Jared Cole told us: “I never think of my dog Grimm as property, but I did buy his freedom. I couldn’t have better spent that cash.” Love was a common theme – from the purchases that launched a romance to the ones that signal enduring commitment. Many of you mentioned your wedding or engagement rings, but Sheree Jonker’s  was perhaps the most surprising: “My girlfriend hates jewellery. I proposed to  her with a red ring pop... she said yes,  then ate it.” You celebrated gifts given to others, favourite cars, cameras that captured your travels, the seeds with which you started  a garden – and the “truckload of manure” to make it grow. There were the homes  you bought, the university education that fulfilled you and the plane tickets and trips that took you around the world and returned you to friends and family. We asked how much you paid for the thing that made you the happiest. There were some big-ticket items – a handful of you spent more than £6000 or even £60,000. But most of you paid less than £600 for that happy-making item, and for a third of you, it cost less than £60. Whatever you spent, you showed us that psychologist Elizabeth Dunn at the University of British Columbia is on to something (see page 43): money can buy happiness, you just have to spend it right.  > Tiffany O’Callaghan
their willingness to do the work to earn them – which they call the “fantasy gap”.  Our materialistic desires are usually dictated not by what we need, but by  what those around us have. Envy is a mover of markets. At a deep level, it is all about fairness and dignity, says Edward Fischer, an anthropologist at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. “Is it fair that I have less than others? And what does this mean to my sense  of self-worth?” This isn’t just a feature  of affluent societies, he adds. “It is also true among rural Maya farmers, Cairo’s workers and around the world. The norms of those peer groups vary a lot,  but the influence of relative standing in them is important everywhere.” How to spend it We may not be able to shake our drive to acquire stuff, nor our tendency to compare ourselves with others. But we can change the amount of happiness we get out of the stuff we buy. It is well known that once you earn enough to maintain a comfortable lifestyle, additional money doesn’t continue to improve your quality of life. But that may be because people are spending it wrong. Research by psychologist Elizabeth Dunn at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, found that spending on experiences and other people offers a more enduring boon than splashing out on other things. Whether you buy your nephew the fanciest football boots you can find or a basic pair matters less than whether you go to the park with him to try them out, she says.  Another strategy is to think about  how our purchases will affect how we go about our daily lives. Though we expect new things to bring change, in truth  this is often a hazy notion, which, for  its nebulous nature, evaporates all the more quickly once we have acquired that new thing. So before you break out the credit card, Dunn suggests you pause to consider what you will actually be able  to do differently once you have your  new thing, and whether it will truly affect the way you spend your time – the most precious commodity.  ■