The Psychology of Souvenirs: Why We Bring Places Home
By Dr. Katie Blake, PhD | Social & Cultural Psychologist, Travel Psychology Expert
I collect postcards. Wherever I go, I buy them. Some I write and send on the spot. Others I keep for myself, and the best of those end up framed and hanging on my wall.
The ones I cherish most might surprise you: my postcard collection from Taylor Swift's Eras Tour in 2023. They're printed cardstock. They cost a few dollars. And every time I walk past them, I'm back in that stadium for a second, with the noise, the lights, the friendship bracelets, and the feeling of being one of tens of thousands of people singing the same words at the same time.
No amount of money would get me to part with them, and I don't think I'm unusual in that. Most of us have something like this: a smooth stone from a beach, a chipped ceramic cup, a ticket stub, a magnet that has outlived three refrigerators. Objectively, these things are worth almost nothing. Psychologically, they're priceless.
We tend to treat souvenirs as a slightly silly part of travel, the stuff of overpriced airport shops and "I ♥ NY" T-shirts. But I think souvenirs are one of the most psychologically interesting things we do as travelers. They're our attempt to solve an impossible problem: a place can't come home with us, so we bring home a piece of it instead.
As a travel psychologist, I've come to think the objects we carry home say a lot about how memory works, how we build a sense of self, and how we hold onto the places that changed us. Here's what the research says about why we bring places home, and how to choose souvenirs that will still mean something years from now.
Five Kinds of Souvenirs, Three Reasons We Buy Them
Researchers have been trying to make sense of souvenirs for decades. In 1986, material culture scholar Beverly Gordon proposed one of the most widely used ways of sorting them, and it still holds up remarkably well. She grouped souvenirs into five types:
Pictorial images: postcards, posters, prints, and photographs
Piece-of-the-rock: a physical fragment of the place itself, like a shell, a stone, or a bit of sand
Symbolic shorthand: miniature versions of famous things, like a tiny Eiffel Tower
Markers: ordinary items branded with a place, like a mug or a T-shirt
Local products: things made or grown there, like a woven blanket, a jar of spice, or a bottle of olive oil
Postcards, my favorite, fall into that first category.
More recently, tourism researcher Hugh Wilkins looked at why people buy souvenirs. In a 2011 study in the Journal of Travel Research, he identified three main motivations: memory (to help us remember), evidence (to show that we were really there), and gifts (to share the trip with someone at home). Most souvenirs do a little of all three. My Eras Tour postcards are memory first, but I'd be lying if I said there wasn't a little evidence in there too.
That combination explains why souvenir shopping can feel so oddly urgent on the last day of a trip. As I see it, we're trying to secure all three before the window closes: something to remember the place by, something to prove it happened, and something to bring the people we love into the story.
A Souvenir Is a Key to a Memory
Memory works by association. Psychologists Endel Tulving and Donald Thomson described this in the 1970s as the encoding specificity principle: we remember best when the cues present at retrieval match the cues present when the memory was formed. Smell, sound, and touch are especially powerful, which is why a song can drop you right back into a summer you'd forgotten.
A souvenir is a physical cue we deliberately bring home. It was there. It looks, feels, and sometimes even smells like the place. Holding it gives your memory something concrete to grab onto. And unlike a photo buried on your phone among 10,000 others, an object on a shelf or a frame on a wall meets you in the course of ordinary life, again and again.
That everyday encounter turns out to be a big part of what makes souvenirs work. A 2024 study in Annals of Tourism Research looked at the humblest souvenir of all, the fridge magnet, and found that people use these objects for ongoing "memory work": small, repeated moments of remembering a trip as they pass by them in the kitchen. The magnet keeps the trip alive in a way a forgotten photo album rarely does. I'd say the same is true of my framed postcards. I don't have to go looking for those memories. They greet me in the hallway.
There's a deeper layer, too. In their classic 1981 study The Meaning of Things, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Eugene Rochberg-Halton interviewed 80 Chicago families about the objects in their homes. What emerged was that the possessions people cherished most were rarely the most expensive. They were the ones tied to memories, relationships, and a sense of who they were. Consumer researcher Russell Belk later described this as the extended self: the idea that the things we keep become part of how we understand ourselves.
Souvenirs fit that description beautifully. My Eras Tour postcards are a record of a night I loved, and they're also a small declaration of who I am: someone who collects, who cherishes paper and handwriting, and who still gets a little giddy about a really great concert.
Why "It Was Really There" Means So Much
In the 1800s, chipping off a piece of Plymouth Rock was such a popular tourist ritual that, according to writer Rolf Potts in his book Souvenir, a nearby grocery kept a hammer and chisel on hand for visitors. People have been carrying home dirt, stones, and splinters from meaningful places for as long as there have been pilgrimages.
Why does a fragment of the actual place feel so different from a replica? Psychologists have a word for one likely answer: contagion. It's the intuitive belief, studied for decades in research on what's sometimes called magical thinking, that objects can absorb something of the people or places they've touched.
In a 2011 study in the Journal of Consumer Research, George Newman, Gil Diesendruck, and Paul Bloom asked why people pay enormous sums for objects that belonged to celebrities. They found that contagion was the critical factor. The more physical contact the celebrity had supposedly had with an item, the more people wanted it. A sweater described as worn by the celebrity was far more appealing than one they had barely handled.
Newman's study looked only at celebrities' belongings, so this next part is my interpretation. But I think the same intuition is at work when we treasure a shell we picked up ourselves over a perfect one from a gift shop. The real thing was there. It sat in that sand, under that sky. Holding it feels like holding a little of the place itself. Tourism researchers have consistently found that authenticity ranks among the qualities travelers value most in souvenirs, and I suspect contagion is part of why.
It's also part of why my Eras Tour postcards mean so much more to me than the same images would if I'd ordered them online afterward. I bought them there, in that crowd, on that night. They were part of it.
Souvenirs Do Their Best Work Long After the Trip
It's easy to think of a souvenir as the end of a trip, the last thing you buy before heading home. Psychologically, I'd argue it's closer to a beginning. A souvenir's real job starts once you're back.
Part of that job is nostalgia. For a long time, nostalgia had a bad reputation in psychology, treated as a form of homesick longing. But research by Tim Wildschut, Constantine Sedikides, and their colleagues has changed that picture considerably. In a 2006 series of studies in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, they found that nostalgia is mostly a positive emotion, and that it bolsters social bonds, raises positive self-regard, and lifts mood. Later work from the same group found that nostalgia increases a sense of meaning in life, largely by making people feel more connected to others, and that it strengthens self-continuity: the feeling that the person you were then is still connected to the person you are now.
That last finding is the one I keep coming back to as a travel psychologist. Travel changes us, sometimes in ways we can feel slipping away once ordinary life resumes. I've written about that in Re-Entry Rituals and The Psychology of Post-Travel Blues. A souvenir can work as a thread between those two selves, the one who traveled and the one who came home. Every time you see it, it reminds you that the version of you who stood in that place still exists.
So when I walk past my Eras Tour postcards and feel a little rush of joy, I think my mind is doing exactly what nostalgia is built to do: reconnecting me with a good memory, with the people I shared it with, and with a version of myself I really liked.
A Souvenir Can Be a Way of Bringing Someone With You
Remember that gifts were one of Wilkins's three big reasons we buy souvenirs. To me, this is the most underrated part of the whole practice.
When you buy a souvenir for someone at home, you're telling them you thought of them while you were away. Researchers Gerald and Valerie Mars, writing about souvenirs from the English seaside resort of Blackpool, described souvenir-gifts as "tokens of filial esteem": small objects that express care and keep family bonds warm across distance. The price of the gift is almost beside the point. What counts is the gesture of bringing the person into an experience they weren't physically part of.
This is a big part of why I send postcards from wherever I am. A postcard written on the spot does something a text message can't. It travels the same distance you did. It arrives days or weeks later, a little battered, with a stamp from somewhere else and your handwriting on the back. Folklorist Bjarne Rogan has written about the picture postcard as an unusually layered object: at once a souvenir, a collectible, and a form of ritual communication between people. I think that captures it perfectly.
And the nostalgia research suggests this social side isn't incidental. One of nostalgia's main functions is strengthening our sense of connection to others. A souvenir that reminds you of the people you traveled with, or that links you to someone back home, may be doing some of its most important psychological work through those relationships.
How to Choose Souvenirs That Will Still Mean Something in Ten Years
Not every souvenir earns a place on the wall. Some end up in a drawer, and some end up in a donation bag. Based on the research, and on a lot of years of collecting, here's what I'd suggest:
Tie it to a moment. The souvenirs that hold up best are linked to a memory you can name. A postcard bought at the café where you had the best morning of the trip will mean more than a generic one grabbed at the airport.
Lean toward the real thing. Local products and objects with a genuine connection to the place tend to hold their meaning. Just be thoughtful about piece-of-the-rock souvenirs: in many protected places, taking stones, shells, sand, or plants is prohibited or harmful, so check the rules and leave it if in doubt.
Write on it. If you collect postcards like I do, jot the date and one line about the day on the back, even if you never send it. Future you will thank you for the context.
Display it where you'll see it. Remember the fridge magnet study. A souvenir does its memory work when you encounter it, so give it a spot in your everyday path, framed in the hallway or propped on the windowsill, instead of tucking it in a box.
Bring someone with you. Send a postcard from wherever you are. It's one of the simplest ways to turn a trip into a moment of connection.
How My Postcard Habit Became The Postcard Société
My love of postcards eventually became something bigger. I founded The Postcard Société, a curated postcard subscription built on a simple idea: one postcard, one person, once a week. It grew out of everything I've described here: my own collection, my belief in handwritten things, and what the research tells us about how small, tangible objects keep us connected to places and to each other.
You don't need a subscription to enjoy any of this, though. Next time you travel, buy a postcard. Keep one for yourself. Send another to someone you love. Then put yours somewhere you'll see it every day, and let it do what souvenirs have always done: bring a little of the place home with you.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why do people buy souvenirs?
Research by tourism scholar Hugh Wilkins identified three main reasons: to help us remember a trip, to serve as evidence that we were there, and to give as gifts to people at home. Most souvenirs serve more than one of these purposes at once.
What are the different types of souvenirs?
Material culture scholar Beverly Gordon grouped souvenirs into five types: pictorial images (like postcards and photos), piece-of-the-rock items (like stones or shells), symbolic shorthand (like miniature landmarks), markers (branded items like mugs and T-shirts), and local products (things made or grown in the place).
Why do souvenirs bring back memories so strongly?
Memory works through cues. A souvenir that was physically present during a trip, and that you see regularly at home, acts as a reminder that can bring back the sights, feelings, and people connected to that place. Research on nostalgia also shows that revisiting fond memories boosts mood, social connectedness, and a sense of meaning.
Why do souvenirs from the actual place feel more special?
Psychologists study a belief called contagion: the intuitive sense that objects absorb something of the people or places they've touched. Research on celebrity possessions found that physical contact strongly increases how much people value an object. A similar intuition likely explains why a shell you found yourself can feel more meaningful than a store-bought replica.
Are postcards good souvenirs?
Postcards are one of the most classic souvenir types. They're inexpensive, easy to display, and can work as a souvenir, a collectible, and a personal message all at once. Writing a line about your day on the back makes them even more meaningful over time.
If this resonated, I write about the psychology of travel — where we go and how those places change us — every week on Psychologie. Subscribe here to get it straight in your inbox.
Katie Blake, PhD is a social and cultural psychologist, travel psychologist, and writer based in the USA. She is the publisher of The Journal of Travel Psychology and the founder of The Postcard Société. She works with individual travelers and leading travel and hospitality brands on psychology-informed experiences and campaigns. Available for media inquiries, expert commentary, podcast appearances, and brand collaborations — visit drkatieblake.com/press.