Dr. Andrew Dillon, who is a V.M. Daniel Regents Professor at The University of Texas at Austin, says that once humans gathered more resources than they immediately needed, they were able to break out of the continual hunting mode and start to trade.

Combined with our abilities to plan and count, collecting emerges as a natural disposition that is subject to the influencing forces of economics, social structures, education, fashion, and personal history.

"In treating collecting as routine, we can view the range of collecting behaviors as expressions which might vary across layers but reflect the shared basis of human motivations underlying our emotions, identity, value, and desire for connection," Dillon explains.

While collecting might be an innate tendency, Dillon believes it's culturally and environmentally shaped. "Nomadic peoples were limited to items that were transferable or storable, but a surplus of food and materials of importance suggests that even from earliest times, people collected," he says.

"Changes in the means of production altered patterns of consumption, and the spoils of conflict and resource control exercised through power created a distinct type of collecting for desirable goods, giving us era-specific records of what was deemed important or valuable to different cultures even before the emergence of museums and galleries."

In more recent times, the cabinet of curiosities emerges around the discovery of the Americas and the expansion of people's understanding of place and space, tying collecting to self-presentation of worldliness and forward-thinking.

The Industrial Revolution led to the emergence of a consumer class that sought goods previously unavailable to them (and created a wealthy class that bought items to reflect their emerging status, sending their offspring on grand tours to polish their education and obtain all sorts of historical artifacts to embellish the family’s legacy).

This rising middle class, in turn, engaged in this most human behavior of acquiring and keeping objects of desire to the point where phrases like "Everyone is a collector" were also born.

However, as collecting is increasingly recognized as widespread, Dillon says we still have little data on people's motivations, their reasons, and self-explanations for their hobby.

"Individual case studies or small sample surveys provide some insights, but most of the research is suggestive and leans to inference from market activity," he explains.

"[But] it is sometimes assumed that the primary motivation for investing in artworks or antiques is financial, the belief that such works, by nature of their rarity, represent a distinctive form of investment."

There is, of course, a monetary consideration in major purchasing decisions, but financial returns might be a primary motivation for only a minority or niche group of collectors.

Depending on which study you look at, there's some evidence that the share of collectors who are in for an investment or possible profit can be lower than 10%. 

On the other hand, Dillon says there are innumerable accounts and case studies of individual collectors that explain these people’s actions by appealing to their emotional experiences, insatiable appetites for security, and even erotic ties to material objects, typically rooted in their unsettling earliest life experiences.

"A more contemporary view of people’s relationships to material objects comes from social and cultural studies of consumption by the general public," he explains. "Looking beyond the business analysis of what we buy, some researchers have asked why we buy and how do we treat or use the objects we accumulate over time? In studying these phenomena, people are often conceived as continual consumers on a scale, with collectors at one end and disposers at the other."

"In this paradigm, an individual’s choice of goods is conceived as a reflection of their identity or their desire to be seen by others as part of a group, with their consumption and retention patterns representing a form of expression that signals particular lifestyle values and choices."

Clearly, there is a strong relationship between human psychology and the desire to collect, one that mediates personal identity, a sense of place in the world, and a desire to form networks and build community.

To explore these ties further, fire up our older publications 50 People Share Their Unique Collections and 50 Of The Most Interesting And Unusual Collections People Have.