It's the thought that counts unlocking human power

The true value of a gift is not how much it costs, but the story that we attach to it.

Four shopping days to go. Four more days of dutiful self-torture as you combat the crowds and the rising terror over just how much this is costing; and all to buy the perfect Christmas presents for your loved ones or at least the ones to whom you owe the biggest favours.

At the root of Christmas shopping is an old fiction, one long past its sell-by date. It's the notion that two separate things, the shop price of a product and its value to a consumer, are really one and the same.

You know the spiel: sure that cardigan's expensive, but doesn't Auntie Meena deserve a bit of cashmere? This idea is really what the pricier retailers are flogging all year round and Christmas is the time when punchdrunk footsore overspent shoppers are most willing to buy it. At least until the sales start.

Yet monetary cost and true worth are not the same thing at all, which is one reason why accountants, loss-adjusters and Alan Yentob all come in for such stick. It's also why Rob Walker and Josh Glenn were able to conduct one of the most life-affirmingly cheeky studies I have seen for ages.

Valued objects

Two American writers interested in how objects are valued, Walker and Glenn have spent the last couple of years flogging stuff on eBay.

I say stuff, but what I really mean is utter tosh: an old Pez dispenser, an ugly mug that last saw light of day in 1976, an abandoned jam jar of marbles.

This is the sort of loft-dwelling detritus your mum wouldn't even ask your permission before chucking away. Yet each item they put on sale on the internet was accompanied by a story meant to add a bit of context or interest.

Paired with their new biographies, here's what happened: a Utah snow globe that originally cost 99 cents fetched $59; an old shot glass was snapped up for $76, and even the jar of marbles took in $50. In all, 100 items that cost the authors $128.74 were sold for a total of $3,612.51.

This wasn't a scientific experiment, although it would be astonishing if some goateed PhD student wasn't even now imitating the study in lab conditions with a proper control and thereby sucking all the blood out of this particular orange.

Nor is it a new idea that adding a backstory or a brand to an item can vastly enhance its value, certainly not to the trainer-wearing men and women working in that branch of media black ops known as advertising.

But marketing takes for granted that the object it's pushing is, to coin a phrase, the best a man can get for the price, at least. It was the opposite for Walker and Glenn, who practically flaunted the fact that they were auctioning junk that buyers could get from other eBay sellers at a tenth of the price.

And their scratch experiment suggests that the backstory might be even more crucial in determining the value of an object than generally imagined. Or, to put it another way, if you thought you were buying a nice Christmas gift that just happened to have a fancy brand, you might well have it the wrong way round.

It's the story you're buying not just the advertising but also the message that your purchase conveys about you and the person you eventually give it to rather than the piffling item.

— Guardian