Why We Love Things We Build Ourselves 263
RichDiesal writes "The IKEA Effect refers to the tendency for people to value things they have created/built themselves more than if made by someone else – in fact, nearly as much as if an expert with much greater skill had created the same item. Is this the reason that open source software proponents are so 'enthusiastic' about their products while the general market resists them – because those proponents had a hand in developing them?"
Yes (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes.
Its kind of in our nature, no? (Score:4, Insightful)
Maybe its something else though. I know that when i was going through my programming lessons I really wanted to get things done perfectly. Sure, the lessons from the texts were cookiecutter, but i went on to play with the concepts learned from the text. I played with my own small applications and wrote features I thought would be interesting or necessary. It wasn't anything big. It would never be a huge success, but it was mine.
Ikea Customers (Score:2, Insightful)
are also more likely to appreciate worthless chipboard so it makes sense that after they put together a worthless disgrace of a table that to gloss over their pathetic nature they react as if they built the empire state building all by their very own selves.
Around since the dawn of time - NOT IKEA! (Score:5, Insightful)
A person who has fashioned an item from the start will implicity trust it in operation until proved otherwise, because they saw it's construction. This is true of any tool in any era. That trust is extended to "experts" generally because those are individuals whom other people you trust (that have tools provided by said expert) have recommended for that same "the tool works for me" reason.
Quite why we need to ascribe a brand name to this offends my sensibilities. Not everything requires a brand.
Re:Ikea Customers (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe more people would appreciate furniture built from good materials if those manufacturing furniture didn't think a rectangular TV stand made from wood and with proportions a first-year design student knows by heart was somehow worth $500+ just because it wasn't ugly as hell (I've become increasingly convinced that furniture manufacturers deliberately make their cheaper pieces of furniture ugly in various ways to ensure sales of their more expensive furniture remain high).
Of course, even IKEA seems to be doing this. Their cheaper furniture often looks like they took a decent design and "tweaked" it to have weird proportions and added some random design elements that would ugly it up a bit...
The real IKEA effect (Score:3, Insightful)
Training customers to accept cheap shoddy goods
Re:music (Score:2, Insightful)
If the culture is so "do-it-yourself" why does someone else need to release tracks for others to mix?
Re:to and extent.. (Score:2, Insightful)
I do agree that the IKEA effect is real but I don't think that FOSS is a pile of crap like the OP hints ... while the general market resists them ... "
from the summary: "
I'm no expert here but I think the general market embraces FOSS software. I mean look at firefox, openoffice, vlc, mpc-hc... and when you get to smaller utilities it is even more open source stuff: ffmpeg (and many other codecs), hundreds of browser plugins, you name it they have it in open source.
If the OP meant FOSS OSs then I partially agree, the genpop is not interested and mainly avoids FOSS OSs but the reason behind it is not the IKEA effect but the "I am afraid to learn new things" effect which has plagued humankind for that best part of last century and the full ongoing one..
just my 2c
Two important caveats (Score:2, Insightful)
1) Most OSS enthusiasts cannot code. It's unfortunate, but true.
2) The study cited is not publicly available. Psychology studies are often very flawed in various ways and until it becomes freely available and we can be sure that many more eyes, also (or should I say especially) outside the field, have had a look at it.
There is also something asinine about citing a closed paper in an OSS-related article.
A better way to look at it (Score:5, Insightful)
I agree with the IKEA affect, at some level, but believe people are wrong about what it means. Just because someone has worked on an open source project does not mean they have rose colored glasses and expect it will solve every problem more efficiently than another alternative. In my view, it means that they have a more sophisticated view of what the project actually can do, in part because it is open, and are ready to share that information.
I own an open source company that deals with Drupal and CiviCRM. It is not uncommon to be in a conversation where someone is telling me of course I think Drupal is the greatest thing out there, and assumes I am not well versed in anything else. I can go on about the virtues of Drupal all day long, but that is besides the point. I have an in-depth understanding of Drupal, Wordpress, Joomla (and it's predecessor Mambo), Plone, Xoops, and a number of other open source tools.
I have contributed to each of these platforms at one time or another and understand the way they work in great detail. Compared to Sharepoint, where I don't understand the internals, I am not going to have a lot to say. If you come to me asking what you should be using, I am going to talk about Drupal, but am also going to ask what you currently use.
There are parallels with the automotive industry that can help explain what is going on there.
My mechanic actually makes cars. He purchases transmissions, chassis, all the component parts you need to assemble them. He has a large lot, looks almost like a junkyard on the outside, and he keeps a fleet of jumkers around to restore them and sell them off. On the inside, his shop is a paradise of tools, diagnostic machines and the like.
His obsession with cars extends to his personal life. His house is filled with cardboard boxes that contain custom parts he picked up because he knows what he can do with them. He can explain them in terms of torque, output and a lot of other factors that go beyond my ability to appreciate a car and what it does.
My neighbor is also someone I would call a car guy and drives a german supercar. It was top of the line when he bought it. I mention the car to the mechanic, and he can tell me about every part in it and why it is good or bad. He has strong opinions about the car and why it is poorly designed, with several prognostications about parts that will die prematurely due to flaws.
When I speak to my neighbor about it, all he knows is he has an expensive car. that impresses people. He can talk about all the luxury lines and his knowledge of the component parts extends to the makeup of the interior, the warmth of the seats, the placement of cup holders, and the like. What he really cares about is not under the hood, it's how the car looks to other people.
If you put the question to both of these kind of people about what kind of car to drive, you are going to get very different answers because one understands how cars are built, the other understands what the car means to other people who see it. There is a qualitiative difference there people don't always appreciate between different types of afficinados.
That said, there are ideological zealots out there who will always tell you to use a platform for it's own sake. I don't always get the sense these people always know what they are talking about, and generally get the feeling they cling to one platform due to their ignorance of the benefits of others. They have a tendency to become very defensive when confronted and make very bold assertions in the absence of facts.
This later class of people generally don't have much to do with how the platform is built. They tend to be the ones who are proponents of the platform and have strong opinions based on their participation in the community. While they can be fun to spend time with, there are situations where you get sick of being around them. To be candid, there are a lot of people in open source communities who are like this, and I think that's where the confusion comes from.
But don't mistake them for the people who actually love open source and understand it's benefits and drawbacks in comparion to other platforms.
Then use IE6 for the rest of your life (Score:5, Insightful)
Because without opensource, IE6 is all you would have. Love it, it is the only way.