Can a nar­ra­tive attached to an every­day object increase its objec­tive value? That was the ques­tion posed by Rob Walker (author of The New York Times’ Con­sumed col­umn) and Joshua Glenn (author of Tak­ing Things Seri­ously) when they started the Sig­nif­i­cant Objects Project—an exper­i­ment designed to test whether a series of sto­ries cre­ated about an object will increase its sell­ing price.

After buy­ing 100 “unre­mark­able” objects with an aver­age price of just under $1.29 each, the two adver­tised them for sale along­side nar­ra­tives cre­ated by vol­un­teers. They then sold for a total of $3,612.51—more than 28 times their orig­i­nal price.

Dan Ariely of Pre­dictably Irra­tional dis­cusses the project and its find­ings:

The results may seem sur­pris­ing, but this is actu­ally some­thing we see all the time. It’s the basic idea behind the endow­ment effect, the the­ory that once we own some­thing, its value increases in our eyes. […] But own­er­ship isn’t the only way to endow an object or ser­vice with mean­ing. You can also cre­ate value by invest­ing time and effort into some­thing (hence why we cher­ish those scrag­gly scarves we knit our­selves) or by know­ing that some­one else has (gifts fall under this category).

And then there’s the power of sto­ries: spend a fan­tas­tic week­end some­where, and no mat­ter what you bring back […] you’ll value it immensely, sim­ply because of its asso­ci­a­tions. This explains the find­ings of the Sig­nif­i­cant Objects Project, and also how other things like brand­ing works.