The psychology
Professor Dillon is an expert on the psychology of collecting. He works at the University of Texas.
» ‘Is it an innate human desire to accumulate? Yes,’ he tells Bike. ‘We’ve evolved from creatures that had to scrounge for resources, and having a surplus was a positive because it meant less day-to-day scrounging. That’s in our genes. So when people get a lot of money, one of the first dreams they have is acquisition. ‘You get all these life coaching lessons saying the best use of money is experiences not objects, but that’s not what comes naturally. We need to think of this [collecting] behaviour as routine, not extreme. We need to recognise that this is something humans have always done.
‘Generally a distinction is drawn between people with a “sensible” number of objects and the big collectors, and that perhaps there is something psychologically different about them. My sense is that that is not actually true. It’s more of a continuum. The general interest that drives anyone to have more than one of anything is shared and pretty consistent. However, I think hoarding is a very different syndrome – that’s when people can’t let go of anything and their houses are overrun with stuff. It’s indiscriminate.’