Handmade! And priceless!
Your grandma's day-glo knitted sweaters are proof: People love the stuff they make, even when what they make is a disaster. It's a weird little corner of human psychology studied by behavioral economist Michael Norton
, who dubs it the IKEA phenomenon, having observed in his own studies that people love the IKEA boxes they assembled themselves more than the identical IKEA boxes assembled by some other dude, and that people consider their wretched origami animals valuable works of art while others call them "nearly worthless crumpled paper
." He speculates that it may be the pride of accomplishment that makes people behave this way, or some warped sense that anything that took more work to make is inherently better. But anyone who's wasted a perfectly good Saturday working on a BEKVÄM
can tell you that it ain't love or pride that keeps you from throwing that ...
