We Are What We Own
THE EXTENDED SELF
Nusrat Durrani looks like a rock star. When I met him in 2017, he was a senior executive at MTV, but even if you did not know that, you probably would have guessed he came from the media world just by looking at him. He wears designer clothes, most often black or leather, over his slight frame, has an abundance of jet-black long hair and wears tinted glasses – an Indian Joey Ramone. Even among the colourful gathering of fashionistas, futurists, venture capitalists and entrepreneurs at the Kinnernet gathering in Venice where we met, you could tell that Nusrat was super cool. Except that, when we met, he was far from cool.
Nusrat had just arrived from Rome where, the evening before, he had been robbed in a restaurant by opportunistic thieves who had taken his bag of personal items. With around 40 per cent unemployment in Rome, petty crime and theft from tourists has become a main source of income for the poor. It was an inconvenience but Nusrat is a relatively wealthy man. He has the luxury of time and resources to travel the world. These possessions could be easily replaced. At first, he was relaxed about the incident and seemed calm and collected. But over the next few days of the meeting, he became increasingly agitated about it. Like many unwelcomed intrusions in life, theft generates initial bewilderment followed by a growing sense of rage.
Nusrat’s reaction is common. We are often surprised by how much theft upsets us, no matter how well off we are or how cool and calm we would wish to remain. This is because possessions are an extension of our selves. When they are taken without permission, it is equivalent to a violation of our person. Household burglary is particularly distressing as it includes an invasion of our territory where we usually feel most safe. Almost two-thirds of those burgled in the UK are extremely upset, experiencing a variety of symptoms including nausea, anxiety, crying, shaking and ruminating well after the event. Insurance companies report that it takes around eight months to feel safe again, and one in eight never recover emotionally.1 It is not just the financial loss that distresses us; rather, it is more an intense sense of infringement. Someone has come into our world uninvited and undermined our control.
Loss can also be upsetting when we are forced to give up possessions that we would rather keep. It is this reluctance to let go which is one of the more revealing aspects about humans and their relationship with possessions. Consider the storage unit industry that took off in the late 1960s, after the decades of post-war consumerism. Every year more of us are putting our stuff in storage rather than getting rid of it. Currently, there are more self-storage facilities in the US than there are branches of McDonald’s, even though 65 per cent of storage users also have garages.2 Many garages no longer contain cars but rather the overspill of possessions that we can no longer keep in the house. Why are we reluctant to relinquish our things, and why do we keep lock-ups full of personal possessions that are of little value? Why do we have this peculiar emotional dependency on our possessions?
The reason is that we are what we own. In 1890, the father of North American psychology, William James, wrote how the self was defined by what we can claim ownership over:
In its widest possible sense, however, a man’s Self is the sum total of all that he CAN call his, not only his body and his psychic powers, but his clothes and his house, his wife and children, his ancestors and friends, his reputation and works, his lands, and yacht and bank-account. All these things give him the same emotions. If they wax and prosper, he feels triumphant; if they dwindle and die away, he feels cast down, – not necessarily in the same degree for each thing, but in much the same way for all.3James is describing what psychologists call ‘self-construal’, the way we think about who we are as well as the emotional consequences of loss, which reveals the special relationship we have with our possessions. It is not particularly surprising that we consider our bodies and minds as part of our self. After all, who else can claim them? However, many material things on the list are not unique to us and could be owned by another. Houses, lands and yachts are properties that we acquire. It is striking then that losing them can affect us so personally.
Many thinkers have considered the intrinsic link we have to our material possessions. Plato famously had little regard for the material world and thought we should aspire to higher, immaterial notions. He argued that collective ownership was necessary to promote pursuit of the common interest, and to avoid the social divisiveness of private property that leads to inequality and theft. His student Aristotle, always one to argue with his mentor, was a little more grounded, and emphasized the importance of studying the material world. He thought private ownership promoted prudence and responsibility but noted how we tend to envy and be jealous of others because of ownership. Two thousand years later, the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre maintained that the only reason we want to own is to enhance our sense of self, and the only way we can know who we are is to observe what we have – almost as if we need to externalize our self through our possessions. Our acquisitions are tangible markers of our success. Like the study of wealth in the US, we may not get much happier after reaching an income of $75,000 a year, but we are more self-assured that we are successful if we can see our possessions. Not only do we signal our self to others through our possessions, our possessions signal back to us who we are.
Sartre, in his book Being and Nothingness, realized the extent to which humans are defined by what they own: ‘the totality of my possessions reflects the totality of my being … I am what I have … What is mine is myself.’4 He proposed a number of ways in which this arises. First, by exerting exclusive control over something, one is claiming it for the self – something that we saw evidenced early in infants. Secondly, and in line with the views of John Locke, creating something from scratch means you own it. Finally, Sartre thought that possessions evoke passions.
One way that people express their passion for possession is through accumulating stuff. In 1769, another French philosopher, Denis Diderot, wrote about how possessions can shape behaviour. Diderot bought a new luxury dressing-gown that he thought would make him happy, but he was surprised how miserable this purchase made him and how this item changed his life. Rather than enriching his life, the luxury gown stood in stark contrast to the shabbier items he already possessed. Soon, he found himself buying new items to match the quality of the dressing-gown. But Diderot was not a rich man so this escalation in spending made him even more unhappy. In comparison to his old dressing-gown, in which he had felt comfortable cleaning the house, his luxury purchase meant that he no longer wore his gown to do household chores. As he wrote, ‘I was absolute master of my old dressing-gown, but I have become a slave to my new one.’ The ‘Diderot effect’, a term coined by the anthropologist Grant McCracken, describes the influence that individual items can have on subsequent purchases.5 For example, if you buy one luxury item, you are tempted to aspire to more such items even though you may not need them. Many retailers capitalize on the Diderot effect by advertising to us items that complement our initial purchase. This is also part of the appeal of Apple products. The purchase of the iPhone was for many, according to McCracken, a ‘departure good’ which exerted a new pressure to acquire other Apple products because they reflect identity. Even though a different purchase may be good value, if it sends the wrong signal about identity then the purchaser will be less likely to buy it.
Probably the most excessive form of emotional attachment to objects is found among collectors. Collectors are emotionally invested in their collections. It is not simply the monetary value associated with their things but rather the effort and pursuit that collectors expend when amassing their desirable possessions. Sometimes, the prospect of losing them can be unbearable. In 2012, the German authorities discovered that Cornelius Gurlitt, a recluse living in Munich, had amassed a huge collection of art masterpieces estimated to be worth around $1 billion. The art had been stolen from Jewish owners by the Nazis and sold to Cornelius’s father for a fraction of their true value during the war. Cornelius had come to regard the hoard as his personal responsibility to protect. He described the experience of watching the police confiscate his prized collection as hitting him harder than the loss of his parents or his sister, who had died of cancer that same year. Cornelius told the authorities that protecting the collection was his duty to the extent that he had become ‘intense, obsessed, isolated, and increasingly out of touch with reality’.6One of the earliest studies to test James’s claims regarding self-construal was conducted by the Yale psychoanalyst Ernst Prelinger in 1959.7 He asked adults to categorize 160 items on a scale from non-self to self and found that minds and bodies were considered more relevant to the sense of self than personal possessions. However, possessions were considered more relevant to the self than other people (though, as we shall shortly discover, this is a very Western perspective). When children were asked to rank the same items, they followed much the same pattern as adults except that, with age, there was an increasing emphasis on the importance of possessions that reflect our relationships with others, which makes perfect sense as we grow up into cohabiting adults.8The Canadian marketing guru Russell Belk has also written about the relationship between the self and what we own in a series of influential papers championing the concept known as ‘the extended self’.9 Building on the work of James and Sartre, Belk proposed four developmental stages in the emergence of the extended self. First, the infant distinguishes self from the environment. Second, the child distinguishes self from others. Third, possessions help adolescents and adults manage their identities, and finally, possessions help the old achieve a sense of continuity and preparation for death. As we age, we shift in our valuation more to those possessions that remind us of our relationships over the years such as mementoes, heirlooms and photographs – the sorts of things that people often say they would save from a burning house. Sometimes this is literally true. The legendary blues musician B. B. King was famous for his guitar he called ‘Lucille’, which went with him everywhere. He named it after the time when he was playing a gig in Arkansas in 1949, and a fight broke out between two men and a heater was kicked over that set the hall on fire, forcing everyone to evacuate. Once outside, King realized he had left his $30 guitar onstage, so he re-entered the burning building to retrieve it. The next day he learned that the two men were fighting over a woman called Lucille, so King gave his guitar – and every subsequent guitar he owned – the same name to remind him never to run into a burning building again for a guitar, or to fight over a woman.
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SELFISH ME
Sometimes we give our stuff away as a measure of who we are. The reason self-construal is so relevant to ownership is not only that it reflects our attitudes towards our possessions, but also what we do with them. Ownership entitles you to share your resources with others. You can’t share what you don’t own, nor can you share that which belongs to others. If our possessions are part of our self-construal, then the cultural differences in individualist and collectivist processing style can explain the differences observed in sharing behaviour around the world. Someone who is self-focused is less likely to be generous to others compared to someone who thinks more about other people.
As every parent knows, children have to be constantly reminded to share with others, as we all start out fairly self-centred. Jean Piaget described the mental world of the young child as egocentric and demonstrated this in his perspective-taking games. In one classic study,45 young children were seated directly opposite an adult. On the table in front of them was a papier mâché model of a mountain range with three differently coloured peaks of different sizes that were readily distinguishable. Some had conspicuous landmarks such as a building or cross on top. Children were then shown photographs of the mountain range taken from different angles and asked to select which picture matched what they could see. They were also asked to choose the picture that corresponded to what the adult could see. Below four years of age, children typically selected the photograph that corresponded to their own view, irrespective of where the adult was sitting. Piaget argued that this revealed they could not easily take another’s perspective because they were so egocentric. This is one reason why it is unusual to see spontaneous sharing behaviour at this age. However, from an early age, children from the East are encouraged to be less egocentric and, as a consequence, share more than their Western counterparts, which reflects their collectivist upbringing.
What is remarkable is that our selfishness never really disappears. Both children and adults donate less to charity when they are not being watched, indicating that, privately, we still retain selfish motivation.46 When they look to others, children in both urban America and rural India will reduce their sharing if stingy behaviour is modelled by an adult, but only Indian children increase their giving when generous behaviour is provided as a role model. One reason is that Eastern collectivist societies are more focused on reputation, whereas this is less of a concern for children from individualist societies.47 But again, this can be easily manipulated. In her studies of Indian and British children, Sandra Weltzien showed that both groups become more selfish simply by being asked to talk about themselves just before they are asked to share. Again, the power of priming reveals that we can be shifted in our attitudes to what we own. Sharing is flexible and context specific but strongly influenced by others’ expectations if we are reminded of them.
One of the reasons we are less likely to share our possessions is not so much that we do not think about other people, but rather we think too much about what we have. When we think about our self we are more task-focused, paying particular attention to things that are relevant to us. In a supermarket-sweep study,48 participants were asked to sort a series of images of grocery and household items into a red or blue shopping basket, based on a colour cue on the item image. They were then asked to imagine that they had won all the items in one of the baskets, so all the items pictured in it belonged to them. After the sorting was over, participants were tested to see how many items they could remember. Both adults and children as young as four remember significantly more items they are told they have won compared to the items in the other basket.49 This is known as the ‘self-reference effect’ whereby information encoded with reference to the self is more likely to be subsequently remembered than similar information encoded with reference to other people.50The advantage for processing self-referential information registers in the brain as activity in the medial prefrontal cortex – where your temples are – but when associated with ownership also triggers corresponding activation in the lateral parietal cortex, an area further back just above your ears, which is usually active during object processing.51 In other words, as objects are processed, they are given the additional ownership tag that registers in regions of the brain that are active when we think about ourselves. This explains why activation of this self-referential and object processing network is stronger in Western compared to Eastern subjects.52 In contrast, when it comes to thinking about others, activation in Eastern subjects is stronger in brain regions that respond when reflecting about one’s relationships with others.
If Eastern ways of perceiving the world are collectivist, does that mean they are less obsessed with social status and, if so, less likely to pursue status symbols? On the contrary, Asia is one of the strongest markets for luxury goods. How can competition to be seen to be successful through conspicuous consumption square with traditional collectivist values that emphasize group identity? How can an Indian farmer spend extravagantly on a helicopter ride, if Indian society is supposedly collectivist and other-focused?
Marketing expert Sharon Shavitt argues that in addition to the individualistic–collectivist dimension, there is also a critical vertical–horizontal dimension within cultures that explains the apparent contradiction.53 Individualistic cultures with a vertical structure include countries such as the US, UK and France, where people distinguish themselves through competition, achievement and power. They are likely to endorse statements such as ‘winning is everything’ and ‘it is important that I do my job better than others’. However, individualistic cultures with a horizontal structure include such countries as Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Australia, where people view themselves as self-reliant and equal in standing to others. They are more likely to agree with statements such as ‘I’d rather depend on myself than others’, and ‘my personal identity, independent of others, is very important to me’. In contrast, collectivist cultures with a vertical social hierarchy include countries such as Japan, India and Korea, where people focus on complying with authority and enhancing the cohesion and status of their in-groups, even when that entails sacrificing their own personal goals. They are more likely to say, ‘it is my duty to take care of my family, even when I have to sacrifice what I want’, and ‘it is important to me that I respect the decisions made by my group’. Finally, collectivist cultures with a horizontal structure, such as Brazil and other South American countries, are characterized by sociability and egalitarian arrangements of assumed equality. They are more likely to endorse statements such as ‘to me, pleasure is spending time with others’, and ‘the well-being of my co-workers is important to me’.
When cultures have vertical structures, members are still going to aspire to social status through conspicuous consumption, irrespective of whether their self-construal is independent or collectivist. Cultures with horizontal structures will have more aversion to conspicuous consumption, bragging and showing off, and are more likely to promote modesty or engage in tall-poppying. These dimensions also explain why marketeers need to be sensitive to the cultural structures of countries. In Denmark, advertising appeals to individual identity and self-expression, whereas in the US, another individualistic society but with a vertical structure, advertisements are more likely to emphasize status and prestige.54At birth, one human brain is much the same as another, but the emerging body of neuroscience research indicates that cultural self-construal manifests in different brain activation. These variations reflect historical, political and philosophical perspectives indicating that our brains are shaped by biocultural influences during development rather than through some evolutionary hard-wiring. If ownership is a major component of our self-construal, then it’s how we raise our children that determines their attitudes towards possessions.
Bruce Hood
POSSESSED
Why We Want More Than We Need
