I think I buy too much stuff. What does this say about my values?

There is no question that the world is organized to make it easy for us to be great consumers and buy lots of things.  I can feel cool or important or part of a great group because I own things that broadcast these messages about me.  And it is virtually impossible to live in our hyper-connected world and be immune to consumer messages.  There are now dozens of psychological studies that have findings indicating that materialism relates to negative personal well-being.  In today’s post, I want to focus on the different kinds of issues that are raised when we “buy into” the messages of consumer culture.

Helga Dittmar and her colleagues (2014) did a meta-analysis (a kind of study combining the results form a lot of other studies) in which they combined data from 259 different studies.  There found a number of interesting things but I want to highlight a few that are important to our discussion of values.  They found that materialism was associated with many different kinds of well-being outcomes (life satisfaction, positive feelings, self-appraisals, anxiety, depression, compulsive buying, physical health, risky behaviors)  One of the stronger associations was between materialism and poor self-appraisals.  This finding suggests if we are not happy with ourselves, then we may buy things to help us feel better.  Giving life meaning by pursuing values might be an antidote to this (see February 5^th post).  The researchers also investigated a lot of different factors that might moderate or lessen the negative relationship between materialism and well-being.  Being older (over 18) and still being materialistic was worse than being under 18 suggesting that as this habit develops, its effects get worse.  In terms of culture, materialism was associated with low levels of well-being in different cultures, but the effect was amplified when people live in cultures with constant consumer messages.  Perhaps the more we are exposed, the more at-risk we are.  Finally, no factor that they studied was able to turn the relationship around and make materialism relate to positive well-being.  It turns out that as a value, materialism pretty much sucks!

Reference

Dittmar, H., Bond, R., Hurst, M, & Kasser, T. (2014). The relationship between materialism and personal well-being: A meta-analysis. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 107: 5, 879–924. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/a0037409879