The Psychology of Collecting: A Short Review

Collecting has been recognised as a widespread activity since ancient times. In fact, most people know a friend, colleague, or acquaintance who owns a proper collection of some sort. The question is why do people invest money, time, and energy in such a curious and probably never-ending activity? In this chapter, we attempt to answer this query, or to at least shed some light on this topic from the point of view of the psychological literature, of which we offer a short review, and from which we believe it is possible to derive some hypotheses for future multidisciplinary research and application.