IKEA Furniture and Medical Misinformation

Why is the furniture giant IKEA so popular?

Is it the reasonable prices? The delightful Swedish product names? The iconic meatballs?

All of the above.

But there’s this other thing:

You have to put the furniture together yourself.

It seems like a drawback, but it’s actually a competitive advantage.

Harvard Business School Professor Michael Norton and his team published on the “IKEA Effect” in 2011, providing this key insight to human psychology:

In other words, people value things they help create more than ready-made items, even if the ready-made ones are expertly crafted.

There are 2 requirements to benefit from the “IKEA Effect”:

1. A person has to play a role in creating/building the product

2. The resulting product must be completed and/or a success

Lots of companies have taken advantage of the IKEA Effect, from cake mixes to the Build-a-Bear Workshop.

But Dr. Francesca Tripodi warns that the IKEA Effect has been used for more nefarious ends than selling teddy bears and Funfetti cake.

“The IKEA Effect of Misinformation”

Dr. Francesca Tripodi released a book in 2023 called The Propagandists’ Playbook: How Conservative Elites Manipulate Search and Threaten Democracy.

In it, she warns that the IKEA Effect can be a powerful tool for spreading misinformation:

Now this is pretty ingenious.

Because when people buy into medical misinformation, even (or especially) the wackiest conspiracies out there, it’s rarely due to a lack of “research”.

People get sucked down rabbit holes and spend lots of their time reading, watching, and listening to ‘information’ about a topic.

And yet, astonishingly (to me), they emerge with firmly held beliefs that are wildly inaccurate.

Here’s how that happens.

Wearing silver-infused pajamas activates 'nocturnal recovery amplification,' a process that accelerates the body's natural healing while you sleep.

Let’s say I want to convince you of this ‘fact’.

I could do it the old-fashioned way: conduct a proper research study to investigate this claim and then write a paper dispassionately describing my findings.

Or…

I could say something like “I’ve been reading about the nocturnal recovery amplification you get from just wearing silver-infused pajamas and I’m honestly shocked by the results. I don’t know about you but I’m always looking for ways to speed up my recovery time, and being as busy as I am, getting better results while I sleep is a game changer. Obviously you should look into this yourself and decide what’s right for you. I’m just passing this along because my SI PJs have been so helpful for me”.

Now, some of you might already be on board. After all, faster recovery sounds good, you trust me, and wearing a different pair of pajamas can’t be that bad anyway, right? Plus, I’ve helpfully provided a link to my personal line of silver-infused pajama sets, currently 50% off!

But what about the rest of you? The ones who actually want to do your own research?

That’s where things get interesting.

If you’re like most people, you’ll start with a good old-fashioned Google search. (Or Bing, Duck Duck Go, ChatGPT, etc.)

You’ll input a search query like, “silver-infused pajamas and recovery” or “nocturnal recovery amplification”.

When you hit enter, your search engine of choice will use the keywords you input, along with its extensive knowledge of your history and preferences, to return results on the topic.

When using Google, you might also get a “knowledge graph” - a wiki-like brief answer to your query, right up top - along with suggestions for your next query.

The Search Results

So what did you see when you searched for “nocturnal recovery amplification”?

Right now, not much.

But imagine what would happen if I’d spent the last several months writing blogs, posting on social media, and creating websites all about “nocturnal recovery amplification”?

Suddenly, your first page of results would be full of my content.

Why? Because there is no such thing as “nocturnal recovery amplification”, which means I’d have no competition for the top search spots.

All it takes is a basic understanding of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and I can create a new reality in which silver-infused pajamas are a legitimate source of nighttime healing.

Not only that, but you’d be truly invested in the idea because you “did your own research” on it. You built your own opinion of SI PJs, link by link.

In fact, you’d be so committed to the idea that you’d go out and tell your friends about it, further legitimizing my fabricated medical “tip”.

Here’s how Dr. Tripodi puts it:

This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to medical misinformation and search engines. Next week we’ll go a bit deeper, with concepts like:

• Sociological dimensions of search

• Idealogical dialects

• Seeding

• Ranking warfare

See you then!

Key Takeaways:

• The IKEA Effect: people place greater value on things they built

• Search engines are not librarians; they use algorithms to return content based on key words, popularity, and financial incentives

• “Do your own research” may sound like good advice, but it could be part of a coordinated effort to get people to buy in to something

• Using novel terms or niche topics is a good way to ‘own’ the search results and appear legitimate

Did someone send this to you? Subscribe for free!