When hands are handy

2 minute read

In a fascinating discussion over coffee, some researchers wondered where the adage – “If you want something done right, you have to do it yourself” came from. Why did their own hand picket fences last longer than the pre-fabricated ones some builders gave as an add-on?

This coffee shop conversation predictably led to a series of experiments to determine whether consumer psychology around self-building/assembly could lead to better performance outcomes associated with the product.

To test this hypothesis, they enlisted a group of students for a couple of experiments.

In the first experiment, they divided the students into two groups and asked them to take part in a golf putting challenge. The first group was asked to assemble the putters themselves while the second group was provided pre-assembled putters. Researchers observed that the students in the group that assembled the putters needed (on an average) fewer strokes to sink their putts compared to students who were given pre-assembled putters (7.92 vs 9.51).

This result validated their hypothesis that just by putting in the effort to assemble a product, a person could improve their own performance.

To further test this hypothesis, they performed another experiment. This time, the two groups were asked to perform an anagram task (i.e., generate as many words as possible from a set of eight letters). One group was asked to assemble a ball point pen using six pieces while the other group received a pre-assembled pen for the task. Similar to the results of the first experiment, the group that were asked to assemble the pen formed on an average five more words as compared to the group of students who received a pre-assembled pen.

Practical applications of this phenomenon could extend to the food delivery industry where some level of the food assembly is left to the end consumer, thereby helping them accentuate the perceived taste of the dish. This phenomenon may also be used by marketers in the physical goods industries like running shoes, where the runners are provided the shoes, in-soles and laces separately and asked to assemble the final shoe in order to best leverage this psychological phenomenon.

Original research by Soren Kocher and Keith Wilcox

https://myscp.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/jcpy.1262