If Endowment Effects Are Real, Most Advice Is Wrong

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I'm really not sure at this point which ideas from behavioral economics are actually true, and which are just specious. But if the idea of endowment effects is real (and broadly applicable), much of the advice in the world is wrong.

"Endowment Effects" is the idea that we value something more because its ours. The classic experiment is to give one person a pen and another person a mug, and ask them if they want to swap. Supposedly, almost-nobody ever wants to swap, even though they were randomly allocated either a pen or a mug, and the only reason they should consistently value their thing more is because it is theirs.

But this effect would (I think) trouble a lot of common advice. E.g. "it's not the winning that counts, it's taking part" – in most competitions, most people lose and few people win. If endowment effects make us (over)value what we have, possibly winning does count, but the rest of us trick ourselves into believing that the participation trophy we have is as good as the winner's trophy we lack. And this applies to any domain where few people do X, and the advice-givers are likely to be from among the many who didn't. It doesn't require that anyone be lying or (as the kids say) coping, just that they're irrationally attached to the thing they have.