What Is The Collecting Mindset?

What is the “collecting mentality”? Is it a dimension of which hoarding is the extreme?

When I was a kid, I went through a collecting phase with Pokemon cards, and to a lesser extent, Neopets; many of my peers were instead obsessed with Magic: The Gathering, Warhammer, Runescape etc. (I also had other phases with Star Wars novels, stamps & coins & Boy Scouts badges, and collecting all 151 Pokemon in both Pokemon Blue & Pokemon Red.) At the time, it made perfect sense to me to obsess over how to get a shiny Charizard (and to my classmates, to the point where the principal had to ban cards in school); but eventually it sort of wore off, I stopped walking 2 miles to the local card shop to check if there were any booster packs, the album of cards gathered dust, and when my Neopets account was banned for overly-aggressive stock trading one day, I didn’t bother logging into my alts.

And you know what? My life was none the worse for lack of first editions or Wands of Wishing. I struggle to recall how it seemed to matter so much at the time. Why was I so interested in collecting them, anyway?

Here is one evolutionary psychology story we could tell to explain collecting: collecting is a pathological extreme of ordinary social sexually-selected behavior which is maladapted in a modern economy overloaded with variety & perceived scarcity/value (much of it manufactured specifically to exploit collecting behavior). This is a similar story as we tell about other mental traits like ADHD, OCD, bipolar, depression, Big Five personality factors (some background: Penke et al 2007, Penke & Jokela2016, SSC): there is an inherent trade-off, such as the explore-exploit tradeoff, which can’t be solved perfectly a priori, and while most people fall into the golden mean, it’s difficult to avoid going too far into the extremes.

As a costly signal of quality, simple ‘collecting’ behaviors are sexually selected; eg. male birds collecting shiny bits and bobs for nest-building. This sort of behavior is more necessary for men, who propose, than women, who choose. Such psychology is much more elaborate in humans, where it gets involved in art, religion, and social status: limited forms of collecting tools or natural objects or artwork are useful in signaling one’s surplus resources, intellectual ability to understand and discriminate, and ability to navigate the current local fashions & affiliate oneself with local elites. Because of the elaboration and flexibility, children are not born trying to collect anything specific, but imprint on local fashions. Since it’s there to be costly and impress others, the underlying quality is irrelevant (much like it is irrelevant if our verbal reasoning is correct as long as it convinces others), and it only matters that something seems novel or scarce; should someone try to critique it, it is helpful to have an unfalsifiable story about how it is subtly useful that tasteless incompetent fools like the critic cannot perceive, or is made of rare and expensive materials, or has a connection to entities like gods or dead men who are unavailable to gainsay it. Easy-judged qualities like shininess or smoothness, or being clearly distinct from all other instances, are important to collectibilty. It also explains the emphasis on completion, and why 2 is such an awkward number—1 is normal and justifiable, while 2 makes it look like one is trying, but is incompetent to get more. It is better to look like one is not trying at all (1) or making progress (≥3) than trying & failing (2), and collecting all possibilities is the best of all because it means one is even more skillful at collecting than circumstances permit demonstrating. (Alexander regretted he had but one world to conquer.)

Because of the extreme poverty by modern standards, lack of tools, artisans, artistic genres etc., there just isn’t that much to collect. (Once the chief has autographed your coconut which looks like a human face, what do you collect next?) One can easily “catch’em all”, and the culture is extremely static, sharply limiting any collecting behavior; any budding collectors or hoarders are stopped before they can manifest any extreme behavior. There is also the typical anti-market norms of egalitarian groups: mere crass commerce subverts the signaling of taste and is cheating (because enabling the merely powerful/wealthy) and coldly calculating rather than the kindness and generosity of gift-giving and reciprocity and credit—not that ‘markets’ are all that relevant in the first place. (‘Trading’, however, is fine because it keeps everything opaque and relies on taste.) Beyond this, any ‘collecting’ is on the higher plane of elite religion, politics, and warfare.

In a modern country post-Gutenberg or post-Industrial-Revolution, however, the environment is ‘collectogenic’ and things are wildly different. Innovations like woodblock printing mean that a single press can run off thousands of different pieces of artwork a year, and their cost plummets to the point where an ordinary laborer could have a collection of hundreds, without any overlaps or coming close to exhausting the available supply, and any specific artwork may seem scarce (a given copy may be the only instance one ever sees) but actually be common as dirt over all of Europe, due to the unintuitiveness of mass manufacture, specialization, and exports. There is always another object to collect: it is pretty much impossible to think of instances where a collector has bought something and realized that that is it, he collected them all and in mint condition, it’s done, complete, finished. This lifts the ceiling on potential collecting behavior. Collecting is further reinforced by the intermittent arrival of rewards in the form of a missing item showing up, and by the monetary value fluctuating, adding addictive gambling-like mechanisms. (That one is likely at a net loss on the investment is ignored since one doesn’t mark-to-market or sell the bulk of the collection, and so it simply feels like winning occasionally as a reward for one’s persistence.) Further, one may be exposed to elite lifestyles and the elite use of collectibles and seek to emulate one’s betters.

Like the sudden surplus of calories, the sudden surplus of objects can be difficult to handle. The collecting behavior fails to fulfill its usual social function and ranges from normal (a minor diversion at most not interfering with normal behaviors) to dysfunctional (consuming noticeable fractions of discretionary wealth & time) to pathological (hoarders literally crushed under their ‘collections’): what strikes one person as just junk to be discarded if no use comes to mind, strikes another as a fascinating object to be collected, and strikes a third as rare treasure to be hoarded in their filthy pest-ridden house already groaning with trash. Males, who need it more, are worse hit; their greater systematizing, autistic traits, and greater variance in general all predispose them to collect. Collecting continues because it is no longer self-limiting or has natural endings. Children, exposed to the hyper-accelerated fashion of modern societies, latch onto the objects of their childhood only for them to keep mutating or be replaced by other fashions, and can never attain mastery or completion. This same fragmentation means that collecting ceases to impress many people, and involutes on itself; the pressures of conventional careers and children may suppress it but it can return if one is, say, a childless professional or one retires.

Are collectors happier? It does not really seem that way. Does one enjoy collecting? Or, like an addict, does one just chase the high of the next hit, wanting but not liking it? When one watches the face of someone playing slot machines in a trance, “enjoyment” does not seem like the right word. Most collectors seem aware that they are on a hedonic treadmill where an acquisition brings them brief pleasure, but then they return to the baseline, and are uncomfortable and ambivalent when questioned about it, and have doubts about it.

Any specific kind of collecting is essentially arbitrary. There is nothing so ridiculous that someone has not fixated on it and started to ‘collect’ it. Why little cards of baseball statistics? Why Kool-Aid packets? Why wines? Why Bobblehead dolls? Why cast-iron doorstops in the shape of a dog? Why psychedelic drugs worth a dozen life sentences? Why Pez dispensers? There is probably ultimately no deeper reason than there is for all the sexual fetishes out there, or individual differences in preferences—random idiosyncratic noise & exposure to relevant stimuli at critical instants.

Collecting necessarily risks losing money: if you are buying it for the purpose of collecting, you must pay a premium over the utility price everyone else pays; and if you sell it onwards at a higher price to a fellow collector, who does he sell to? It’s tantamount to a Ponzi scheme; at best, on average one breaks even minus transaction costs if the bubble is stable. In practice, the books are balanced by most collectors simply writing off the costs. (Where did all that money I spent on Pokemon cards go, in the end, when I abandoned them years later and didn’t sell them for what they cost? It didn’t come back to me, but it went to the local dealer, Nintendo, Wizards of the Coast, the card manufacturer…)

But given the extreme wealth and size of modernity, collecting can achieve ‘lift off’ and become its own mini-economy, sucking in resources from the surrounding economy. Since human wealth and population continuously expand and any given collectible represents a minute fraction of expenditures (however much hardcore collectors might be spending) and can be classed as entertainment, it’s not too hard for a bubble to be stable or increase in total value indefinitely as new people enter.

This furnishes endless roles for parasites and commensual organisms and collectors-turned-pro and investors etc., and organizations can take over the care and feeding of a bubble or manufacture entirely new bubbles on demand. This is a challenging task, though, as they must do several contradictory things: the house must turn a respectable profit and maintain hefty margins over the true intrinsic value of the collectibles, they must match supply and demand, they must maintain the illusions of scarcity & quality even when they are literally manufacturing millions of items off assembly lines in factories, they must maintain the illusion that collectors are exercising taste and making progress, must satisfy existing collectors while drawing in new ones at a sustainable rate to pay off the necessary losses, and must do all this while preserving the gift-norms even as that leads to severely-dysfunctional markets which do not admit of standard solutions such as auctions or raising prices.

Matching supply & demand similar to the problem of the central banker trying to avoid both inflation and deflation while maintaining the credibility of his currency: too little demand/too much supply flooding the market can shatter the illusion that something is scarce (when Beanie Babies flood the market, too many people will wake up and say “this is just a plushie which costs $0.10 to make in China, and I don’t even like this shade of purple—what on earth am I doing paying $500 on eBay for this‽”), but too much demand can be bad if it sends prices soaring, threatening to shift too many things from gift-norms to market-norms and tainting the supposed essence with the grubby hands of commerce. A good collectible-manufacturer like Nike or Wizards of the Coast will surf waves of demand, titrating supply of new collectibles while deprecating old ones to encourage collectors to continually perceive a need for the new ones and gradually eat the losses on the old ones.

Manufacturing scarcity and quality follow time-honored tricks of marketing and logistics. Limit purchases by individual or location and try to avoid too-easy purchases or commodification (as ‘commodity’ the collectible is worthless!), allocate just a few to shops trickled out over time, manufacture as few as possible (it may seem like you are losing out on huge profits, but those are phantom profits), churn up the variety as much as possible with microscopic differences like serial numbers, invent new use-cases or categories or competitions. (Canceling or rebooting, like Magic: The Gathering or comic book universes or My Little Pony’s discrete “generations”, is a particularly extreme way of managing the backlog to enable introducing new collectibles.) Advertise heavily—if you saturate the media enough in the right ways, perhaps you can create a ‘brand’. Use unnecessarily expensive materials and methods: handmade, exotic materials like titanium or animal parts, arbitrary technical requirements, moral fashions like veganism or environmentalism. Maintain connections to the ostensible uses of collectibles—what do the sneakers hypebeasts have to do with Nike stunts like setting world records in sprinting, or paying athletes tens of millions of dollars to wear Nike logos? Nothing, but it feels connected. (Watches and sneakers are particularly pure collectible markets in which to observe these tricks.)

The need to avoid overt market-norms can be solved by foregoing maximum revenue and effectively hiring scalpers as middlemen to take the blame—Nike can say, “it’s a shame our new limited-edition sneaker sold out in 5 seconds to scalper bots and now you have to buy it at 3× on the secondary markets, but it’s not our fault! We love our fans and would never raise our prices 300% to make the market clear!” This is, of course, a lie; Nike knew perfectly well the sneakers were going to sell out (as they do every year, and have for decades), and that it could stop scalping by simply making more such sneakers or auctioning off the sneakers. But it won’t. Indeed, it may well be harvesting some of that “scalping markup” by expedients such as having “premium APIs” (a form of price discrimination) or secretly selling directly to retailers at a higher price, splitting the margin as quasi-kickbacks. An even better example is the Ticketmaster scalping scandal: while the ‘public’ tickets for hot artists like Taylor Swift would sell out instantly, Ticketmaster would take blocks of tickets and sell them privately at closer to the true market price and kick back most of the sales to the artist, who could then tell the fans that “the evil scalpers bought all the tickets, sorry. Whaddaya gonna do, it’s all that horrible free market’s fault, no one could possibly have foreseen this.” (Online games like MMOs with their perennial problems with “Chinese goldminers” & botting are another example: all they have to do is set a price for items below the cost of the labor and they can zero out the market; but they don’t. A more real-world example is the perennial American ‘shortage’ of gun ammo dating back to ~2008: gun owners appear to see no connection between their rage at any price increase no matter how bad the shortages are—to the extent of filing hundreds of legal complaints about “price gouging” by the few retailers who can keep ammo in stock—and outcomes like ammo manufacturers like Remington going bankrupt even as scalpers flip ammo for >100% returns, and low margins on official ammo prices.)

Some implications, which as far as I know have not been empirically checked yet:

• ordinary collecting and elite collecting will be related but clearly distinguishable in terms of latent factors

• collecting will increase as countries and individuals get wealthier; net financial return for average collector will be negative

• an inverted U-curve of collecting behavior with life outcomes like fertility: more is good until it goes too far

• hoarders and collecting behaviors should correlate in families, decaying with additive distance

  • both will be highly polygenic (as complex psychological & behavioral traits), around the typical heritability of >50%

  • but, similar to religion/politics, the specific kind of collecting will be largely shared-environment + non-shared-environment idiosyncratic factors (ie. the amount of time spent on generic ‘collecting’ may be similar, but one will collect baseball cards and the other will collect vinyl records)

  • soft selection on collecting will be difficult or impossible to detect, and if it is, will be stabilizing selection and probably mostly through genetic correlations with outright mental illnesses