Article by Nick Michelioudakis (2)
Social Psychology and ELT: The IKEA Effect [1]
‘The Pleasures of DIY’
The
egg theory:
The late 1940s saw the advent of ready-made baking mixes in the
American kitchen. Yet
while housewives were happy to use these for biscuits and piecrusts,
they shunned the ones for cakes. But why should this be so?
Manufacturers pondered this problem a lot before the answer
finally dawned on them:
piecrusts and biscuits were not self-contained courses, but cakes
were! That meant that a housewife could use such products for,
say, a pie and still feel that the end product was her own, but this
was impossible in the case of the cakes! The solution to the problem
was ingenious – somehow they would have to find a way to allow
people to claim ‘ownership’ of the cake they baked.
Marketing expert E. Dichter suggested that they left out the
eggs from the mixture, so that housewives would have to add fresh
ones together with milk and oil.
Sales soared! Brilliant!! 1 (Ariely 2010)
Origami Artists 1: How
much do we value our own creations – just because WE were the ones
who created them? Dan
Ariely (2010) set himself the task of finding out.
He gave some students a sheet of paper together with some
instructions of how to construct a paper frog or a paper crane.
He explained to them that their creations would belong to
him, but that they could buy them back afterwards if they so
desired. So the students
tried their hand at origami and after some time managed to produce
an animal of sorts (whether scientists would recognize the species
is a different matter…
J
). Ariely then asked
them to say how much they would be prepared to pay for it so they
could keep it. On
average they offered 25 cents.
Yet was this a reasonable offer given how much the creature was
worth – or had the creators overvalued it because they had made it
themselves? There was
one way of finding out.
Ariely showed his subjects some perfect paper frogs and cranes made
by true origami experts.
How much would they be prepared to pay for these?
Amazingly, the answer was…around 5 cents!
The results speak loud and clear: The students valued their
deformed, mutant specimens about 5 times as highly as the others!!
We value our work not
because of its inherent qualities, but because it’s ours!
Applications in the field of ELT:
The implications of this discovery for ELT are far-reaching.
Obviously, we want students (ss) to take pride in what they
are doing as this will seriously affect their level of motivation
(Dornyei 2001). A number of
principles immediately suggest themselves:
Get ss to create something:
If Ariely’s subjects had been asked to simply fold a piece of paper
and then buy it they would have laughed in his face.
The reason they were prepared to fork out 25 cents is because
they had created something recognisable (albeit sometimes only
vaguely!) as a frog or a crane.
Similarly, asking ss to transform endless columns of
sentences is a recipe for boredom.
Instead, we should focus more on activities which yield a
tangible end-product.
For instance, we could ask them to write a poem (e.g. a haiku!) or a
ghost story perhaps.
Maybe they could give a short talk about the history of their
favourite team, or write an ad for an imaginary product (for more
ideas see for example Hadfield & Hadfield 1990 or Wicks 2000).
Do not make it too easy for ss:
Many of the activities we ask our ss to do, require too little of
them. All too often we
give them a cloze text together with the words and they simply have
to slot them in.
Educationally sound though this may be, it is the equivalent of the
ready-made cake mixture.
I shudder to think what would happen if we asked our ss how much
they would be prepared to pay for such a completed paragraph!!
J
Even if we do need to keep using such techniques for reasons of
face-validity or perceived usefulness, I believe they should make up
a smaller part of our ss’ ‘classroom diet’… 2
Get the balance right:
So what is the right balance?
What is the point beyond which ss feel that what they have
made is their own creation? In the kitchen Sandra Lee came up with
the winning ‘70/30 Semi-Homemade’ formula! (Ariely 2010).
She argued that cooks would be happy to use 70% ready-made
materials, provided the rest was their own personal contribution.
Ariely wanted to test this and in another experiment he asked
his subjects to work with Lego bricks.
Sure enough they fell in love with their Lego creations,
despite the fact that they were identical to everyone else’s! (ibid)
So this is the challenge facing us!
Think of the appeal of jig-saw puzzles or modelling – perhaps
we could give ss the ‘skeleton’ of an essay and ask them to flesh it
out; maybe we could give them the drab outline of a short story and
ask them to add descriptions and adjectives.
Origami and article-writing:
Ariely also discovered something else: not only did people overvalue
their own creations, but they were unaware that they were alone in
doing so! 3 Another experiment showed they genuinely
believed others viewed their misshapen animals in the same, positive
light! This is not
always the case of course… There are people like myself who, such
experiments notwithstanding, remain absolutely objective in their
appraisal of their own work. It is true, I am slightly miffed by the
fact that my articles still have not received any ‘Duke of
Edinburgh’ awards or indeed that my name has not yet made it to the
‘Honours List’ for my services to the ELT world.
Still, I am sure it is only a matter of time… Till then I
carry my articles around wherever I go, especially when I travel,
since as Oscar Wilde put it ‘One should always have something
sensational to read in the train…’
J
2.
There are reward mechanisms in our brains which gives us a dopamine
boost every time we solve a problem; the harder ghe problem, the
bigger the boost (Nettle 2005).
3.
In
fact, this is true of almost all of our cognitive biases (Sutherland
1999).
1.
Ariely, D. “The Upside of Irrationality” HarperCollins 2010
2.
Dornyei, Z. “Motivational Strategies in the Language Classroom”
Cambridge 2001
3.
Fine, C. “A Mind of its Own”
Icon Books 2005
4.
Hadfield, C. & Hadfield, J. “Writing Games” Nelson 1990
5.
Nettle, D. “Happiness” Oxford 2005
6.
Sutherland, S. “Irrationality” Constable and Company 1992
7. Wicks, M. “Imaginative Projects” Cambridge 2000
Articles and Presentation Notes
