Article summary of Materialism and living well by Kasser. - Chapter

What is this article about?

Materialism refers to the extent to which someone believes that it is important to attain money, possessions, image, and status. Evidence has shown that materialism is a fundamental aspect of the human value system and that it stands in conflict with intrinsic values concerning personal growth, relationships and helping others. It turns out that people score lower on well-being tests when they prioritize materialistic values and goals. Not only is being too materialistic bad for one's own well-being, but it also has a negative impact on the well-being of others in the present and future. This article explains this, but it ends on a positive note, because recent studies have also shown that materialism can diminish when people receive interventions that encourage intrinsic values, that involve deep inward reflections, or that lead them to disengage from and question materialism.

So, the four goals of this article are the following:

1. To show that the construct of materialism can be understood as an aspect of the human value system.
2. To review the evidence which has documented that people experience lower levels of personal well-being to the extent they place a relatively high priority on materialistic values and goals.
3. To show that when people prioritize materialistic values, they are also likely to hold attitudes and behave in such ways that interfere with others' well0being. 
4. To describe some interventions that hold promises for decreasing materialism and in turn increasing well-being. 

Why is materialism part of the human value system?

You can look at materialism in different ways. It was introduced by Belk as a personality trait that had facets of possessiveness, non-generosity, and envy. Others look at it as a feature of someone's identity. Others see it as a construct composed of a set of attitudes about money and wealth. Most empirical work follows Richins and Dawson (1992) and Kasser and Ryan (1993, 1996) who see materialism as a set of values, goals, or strivings.

Seeing it this way, that someone is materialistic means that the person believes it is important to have money and possessions that convey status and a desirable image, and that these aims in live are relatively high priorities compared to all the other aims for which a person might strive. Support for this conceptualization of materialism comes from research showing that such aims consistently emerge as a fundamental set of values across cultures. Recent research strongly supports that materialism is a set of values and goals that people have, and that the prioritizing of materialistic values comes at the cost of de-prioritizing certain other values.

Why is materialism bad for someone's own well-being?

People tend to think that materialism or prioritizing materialistic values is good for someone's own well-being. Studies seem to disprove this idea. A meta-analysis by Dittmar et al. (2014) showed that the relationship between materialism and well-being is small but consistently negative. Some measures of materialism show stronger results than others, but they all show the negative effect across different sorts of people and cultural circumstances. 

One possible explanation for this consistent negative correlation between materialism and well-being, is that trying to achieve a goal, can lead to disappointment when that goal is not reached. Having strong materialistic values would lead someone to always feel the pressure of having to achieve goals. But there is contradictory evidence for this goal-attainment hypothesis.

A second explanation is that materialistic values can make someone compare his own situation to that of others. If your goal is to be rich, there will almost always be someone you know that is richer than you. This can make you insecure. However, there is no support for the spill-over hypothesis. 

A third explanation is that materialism results in lowered levels of well-being when people find themselves in environments that are at odds with their values. This is the environmental congruence hypothesis. There is some proof for this hypothesis, but also some contradictory findings.

A fourth explanation is that people have inherent psychological needs to choose their own behavior, to feel connected to others, and to be efficacious at their valued behaviors. So, all people value autonomy, relatedness, and competence. The idea of the need-based hypothesis is that focusing on materialistic goals can make someone lose sight of his inherent psychological needs. There is some proof for this hypothesis. 

In sum, there is substantial empirical agreement on the idea that materialism is negatively associated with well-being, but there is no consensus as to why that is. The need-based hypothesis has the most supporting evidence. Further research is needed to examine the relationship between materialism and well-being further.

Why is materialism bad for someone else's well-being?

Materialistic values are not only bad for someone's own well-being, but they are associated with a variety of attitudes and behaviors that are likely to undermine others' well-being as well. This is because materialistic people are more selfish, have less close interpersonal relationship, engage less in pro-social activities, and care less about their environment or the harm that they are causing. Evidence shows that the more people prioritize materialistic values and goals, the less kindly they treat others and the planet.

What are types of interventions to decrease materialism?

It is important to develop ways to diminish the prevalence of materialism in people, organizations, and society. There are different types of interventions that can help with this:

• Encouraging people to more highly prioritize the intrinsic, self-transcendence, and spiritual values.
• Make people reflect on their values, for instance by mindfulness training. 
• Decreasing children's exposure to social models that proclaim the worth of materialistic aspirations, mostly commercial media. 

Materialism can be decreased through each of the three types of interventions described above. There is evidence for this, but more evidence is needed to prove this for samples from a wider range of backgrounds.