Ikea, Marie Kondo, and the life changing magic of empathy
By: Jason Wheeler
Tags: IKEA, Konmari, Psychology, Self Improvement, Advertising

A 2002 commercial for Ikea directed by Spike Jonze shows a young woman throwing out a dated red office lamp. She carries it downstairs from her apartment and leaves it out on the curb with some other trash. It begins to rain. We see the old lamp from inside the apartment, dripping, cold, and pitiful on the sidewalk. Next we are looking up from the dark curb into the bright window of the lamp’s old home, the owner sitting with a shiny new lamp. The red lamp has been replaced, forgotten, abandoned. Finally, a Scandinavian man enters the frame in between the viewer and the lamp, blocking it from view. He addresses the audience abrasively: “Many of you feel bad for this lamp. That is because you crazy. It has no feelings! And the new one is much better.”

Watch the 60 second ad here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBqhIVyfsRg

This brilliant, prize-winning commercial, called Lamp, has its surprising effect on the viewer by activating a central human psychological system: empathy. The ability to feel what another is feeling has been studied in many areas of psychology and has an obviously large role in psychotherapy (which I practice and teach). Deficits in empathy are implicated in some syndromes of autism, in which people struggle with understanding other people’s minds. Empathy must be developed; young children can be shockingly unempathic and ruthless. Sympathy and antipathy are close relatives with different tones.

The advert works by first tricking our empathy system into action, using music and camera angles to give us the idea that the lamp has a point of view, and engaging weather and lighting to establish a personal mood of pathos towards the lamp, as if it were a character in a sad story. In the clever reversal at the end, we are surprised to notice that we have been spinning our empathy wheels for no reason: this is not a person abandoned on the curbside, it’s just glass and metal and wires. It may be guiltlessly replaced, Ikea wants us to realize, and we should go and do so immediately at our nearest blue and yellow superstore. The ad campaign of which Lamp was a part apparently (according to Wikipedia) increased sales at Ikea by 8% — nothing to sniffle at.

The 2019 Netflix series, Tidying Up with Marie Kondo, has been something of a phenomenon. It has massively extended the reach of her previous books on the subject and is reportedly filling goodwill and second-hand stores to overflowing. Although there are many things one could say about the series and its approach, the most interesting aspect of it, I think, from a psychological perspective is Kondo’s activation of empathy systems in her clients.

She does this in several ways, exemplified in different episodes. In most she begins her work by kneeling and greeting her clients’ home, as if praying or listening secretly to a domestic language that only she can hear. She then typically says some encouraging things about the house and its occupants.

In dealing with clothes, generally her first tidying category, she asks clients to thank those items that are to be discarded, to indicate gratitude for their service. Even items that have never been worn should be thanked, she suggests, for teaching us that we don’t like that kind of item after all.

Clothes that are to be kept are not simply piled back into the draws and closets from which they had been dragged into a big heap. Our relationship to them is to be changed moving forwards, and this is accomplished by folding. Most clothing is carefully, lovingly folded, patted or petted even in the process, and then stacked neatly in rows so that each may be seen and deliberately chosen for use.

When tidying books, one of her main categories, she likes to tap them to wake them up, as if they have been sleeping, forgotten and unappreciated on shelves or in stacks. There may be other examples that I have overlooked in the series, and certainly perhaps more in her several books.

Where the clever Ikea commercial tricks us into feeling empathy for an inanimate thing, only to pull the rug out at the end and ask us to buy new things, Kondo aims to get her clients to treat their current things as well as they would treat other people, thus making it easier to look after them. It is perhaps not a great surprise that our empathy systems may be activated and harnessed in this way; after all we are used to treating lots of things — plants, babies, and pets for instance — that are not really, or yet, or quite, people as if they were.

Marie Kondo’s background apparently includes five years serving as a Shinto miko, or supplementary priestess. The long tradition in Shintoism of relating to all kinds of objects as imbued with kami or spirits certainly makes her method continuous with a long spiritual practice in Japan. In the West and in contemporary psychological science we might speak more comfortably, as I have been doing here, of the activation of psychological empathy systems rather than of spirits or magic. Either way I think, whether empathy or kami is doing the work, treating all of our things like people that we care about is a surprisingly powerful idea.