Following up on the endowment effect, consider what happens when you’ve had a change of heart or come to your senses and realize that you’d like to be a bit (or a lot) less well-endowed. Moving often prompts a reassessment of our devotion to our stuff. When you’ve got to box and load it and then unload and unbox on the other end, even most inveterate packrats are likely to cut some stuff from their team.
This is the “coming to ones senses” time of the year in one college town. Sidewalks are littered with people’s castoffs. Stating the obvious, the pile of discards are often labeled “FREE”. The assortments could best be described as trash, minus the bag. Keeping an eye on the piles over a week, I can say with confidence that FREE isn’t getting the job done. (And this was one of the nicer looking accumulations.)
The endowment effect can be overpowered by the reality that what the mind knows, the eye will see. Even the packrat has a mind to know and eyes to see that trash is trash.