Bruce Hood
Developmental psychologist at the University of Bristol, senior author on the 2018 study of how the IKEA effect develops. His wider work on essentialism and ownership is the relevant background: if what makes a self-made object valuable is authorship rather than hours, the explanation belongs with ownership research.
Who they are
Hood works on the origins of intuitive beliefs, psychological essentialism and how children come to treat objects as owned.
That makes him an unusual senior author for a paper about a consumer-psychology effect, and the reason the paper asks a different question from the rest of that literature. Instead of testing whether the effect holds, it asks when it arrives and what it is made of.
The finding that it emerges around age five alongside self-concept formation, is not moderated by effort, and is not explained by ownership alone, is what leads them to propose a creation-to-self link rather than either standard account.
Key papers
Marsh, L. E., Kanngiesser, P., & Hood, B. (2018). "When and how does labour lead to love? The ontogeny and mechanisms of the IKEA effect." Cognition, 170, 245-253. Senior author. Published online 25 October 2017, in the January 2018 issue, so the issue year is cited here.
Key ideas
Neither effort nor ownership alone accounts for it, which is the paper's stated conclusion. See Psychological Ownership.
Essentialism as the wider frame: objects acquire properties from their history and their maker, which is a more general version of the same intuition. See Psychological Essentialism.
Development as a method. When a bias appears tells you something about what it is made of.
Sources
- Marsh, L. E., Kanngiesser, P., & Hood, B. (2018), Cognition, 170, 245-253, doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2017.10.012, published online 25 October 2017 in the January 2018 issue.