Society & Culture - Posted by Greg Swenson-CU on Wednesday, April 14, 2010 16:19 - 16 Comments 
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(3 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5) Loading ...Is materialism a turnoff?
A new study shows that not only will investing in material possessions make us less happy than investing in life experiences, but that it often makes us less popular among our peers. “People who are materialistic incur many mental health costs and social costs—they’re less happy and more prone to depression,” says Leaf Van Bowen. “Trying to have a happier life by the acquisition of material possessions is probably not a very wise decision.” (Courtesy: iStockphoto)
U. COLORADO / CORNELL (US)—People who pursue happiness through material possessions are liked less by their peers than people who pursue happiness through life experiences.
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The text of this article by Futurity is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivatives License.
“The mistake we can sometimes make is believing that pursuing material possessions will gain us status and admiration while also improving our social relationships,” says Leaf Van Boven, professor of psychology at the University of Colorado, Boulder.
“In fact, it seems to have exactly the opposite effect. This is really problematic because we know that having quality social relationships is one of the best predictors of happiness, health, and well-being.”
Van Boven has spent a decade studying the social costs and benefits of pursuing happiness through the acquisition of life experiences such as traveling and going to concerts versus the purchase of material possessions like fancy cars and jewelry.
“We have found that material possessions don’t provide as much enduring happiness as the pursuit of life experiences,” Van Boven says.
Van Boven says the “take home” message of the research, published in the April issue of Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, is that not only will investing in material possessions make us less happy than investing in life experiences, but that it often makes us less popular among our peers as well.
“So for many of us we should rethink these decisions that we might make in terms of pursuing material possessions versus life experiences,” Van Boven says. “Trying to have a happier life by the acquisition of material possessions is probably not a very wise decision.”
In the recent study, Van Boven conducted five experiments with undergraduate students and through a national survey to find out if people had unfavorable stereotypes of materialistic people and to see if these stereotypes led them to like the materialistic people less than those who pursued life experiences.
In one experiment undergraduates who didn’t know each other were randomly paired up and assigned to discuss either a material possession or a life experience they had purchased and were happy with. After talking for 15 or 20 minutes they were then asked about their conversation partners by the researchers.
“What we found was that people who had discussed their material possessions liked their conversation partner less than those who had discussed an experience they had purchased,” Van Boven says.
“They also were less interested in forming a friendship with them, so there’s a real social cost to being associated with material possessions rather than life experiences.”
In another experiment using a national survey, the researchers told people about someone who had purchased a material item such as a new shirt or a life experience like a concert ticket.
They then asked them a number of questions about that person. They found that simply learning that someone made a material purchase caused them to like him or her less than learning that someone made an experiential purchase.
“We have pretty negative stereotypes of people who are materialistic,” Van Boven says. “When we asked people to think of someone who is materialistic and describe their personality traits, selfish and self-centered come up pretty frequently.
However, when we asked people to describe someone who is more experiential in nature, things like altruistic, friendly, and outgoing come up much more frequently.”
So what do you do if you’re somebody who really likes to buy lots of material possessions?
“The short answer is you should try to change,” Van Boven says. “Not just our research, but a lot of other research has found that people who are materialistic incur many mental health costs and social costs—they’re less happy and more prone to depression.”
Van Boven says one thing you can do is choose to be around people who are less interested in material goods.
“It’s not a quick fix, but it can be done,” he says. “I think what makes it particularly challenging is that it requires some extra effort and mindfulness about the way we make decisions about how to be happy in life.”
Researchers from Cornell University contributed to the study.
More University of Colorado news: www.colorado.edu/news
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16 Comments
Caravaggio
Allan Lees
The research is worthless, because life isn’t about being liked, it is essentially about reproductive success. Despots who have access to many women are more reproductively successful than kind men who are excluded from mating opportunities by others who are more ruthless. So, by this marker, the research should actually have looked at whether or not the acquisition of visible signs of wealth (expensive cars, watches, jewelry, etc.) led to more mating opportunities for the males displaying them. The answer would most probably have been a resounding “yes” because evolution selects for traits that led to increased reproduction. Likewise women acquire expensive trinkets because they are symbols of wealth and therefore imply a greater probability of food, shelter, etc. for their offspring. Of course we’re not conscious of these things, but behavior is largely unconscious. Our emotions and our behavioral patterns have been shaped by selection pressure over the last two hundred thousand years and we are simply following the successful patterns of the past. So the researchers were asking the wrong question to begin with, which is why the results are worthless.
grabtheday
Life will be defined by each generation. My generation is concerned about planet
over-population, degradation of resources and personal skills that have guide me
in a hectic urban environment.
I have to know more, negotiate more and understand more.
If my wife loves an exquisite handbag – it fits my life. 20 similar handbags – no.
Caravaggio
@Allen Lees… although I might not disagree with your position entirely, I must state that your premise is somewhat overly narrow in approach and your conclusion somewhat harsh. Social dynamics are not dominated by the singular dimension of a reproductive strategem. There are many more variables than procreation success in complex societal interactions.
May I suggest a more holistic view of the study as being “conditio sine qua non” (required here).
Husain S
The secret lies in taking the middle road. Being too complacent & philosophical about life isnt going to put food on your table. And to kill yourself working to keep up appearances doesnt sound too smart either. It would only take common sense….if it WERE NOT for our ego’s, because it is this deep primal instinct & the respect that is shown to the weallthy, that ULTIMATELY guides our materialistic behaviour
Emil Zalinyan
If we divide the society into different social classes on the basis of their living standards, we’ll see the utility of material possessions diminishing. Thus as we move up the social ladder people seek greater happiness from enriching their life experience.
fang
@ Allen Lees: going by the evolutionary logic, life is only about reproductive success only up till the end of a person’s reproductive window. Qualities that enhances one’s survival beyond reproduction window are not sexually selected for. Also, reproductive success, like food and shelter, are among the fundamental human needs which sees diminishing marginal return to utility. However, the traits that enhances quality of life beyond this level are not sexually selected for, and therefore are not deeply ingrained in the human psyche as the fundamental ones.
Still, I agree that material possessions are diminishing in accuracy as status markers, compared to rare and expensive life experiences.
Marie-Pierre
I fully agree with the conclusions of the study. The issue is now how to get out of our materialistic behavior ? I used to have a high salary and company car then I was sacked and off it was … It took me some time to realize that happiness was not just that but I can tell you it was hard! Every day I was looking at the nice cars around and thinking about my past “glory”… It’s been more than a year now and I haven’t recovered yet… But, now I fully enjoy the nice moments I spend with my son aged 6… walking around in the woods, playing with him outside, meeting nice people… But it’s not easy, what I miss is as you say in the study : purchasing experiences rather than material goods. The next step will probably be to find a nice human network …
I think Allen Lees is being a little simplistic. Whether the answer to the research on reproductive success of materialistic people would be a resounding ‘Yes’ remains to be seen. It may not be about outward show at all but the quality of the relationships and whether the number of offspring survive to reproduce. Humans are a co-operative species and as such, I would suggest that we have a inbuilt instinct to detect those that would reciprocate. If people dislike and distrust materialists then this might lead to their not being included in beneficial networks.
John
So scientists have finally proved what those in the spiritual industries have been saying for centuries. It would be a lot more convincing however if the science itself were convincing. Neither this story or the abstract provided by the link give much away but what always alarms me about the surface descriptions of these ‘studies’ is how many alternative explanations or possibilities for false conclusions have been eliminated. For example, the study used undergraduates as subjects. But undergraduates represent a very narrow and specific social sample; how did the study address this? The Professor and his group have a history in this realm and seem to have a philosophical bias: how did the study compensate for this? What controls were used? A 15 minute conversation is the basis for the conclusions: how was the obviously suspect validity of that measure established?
The growing problem in my view is that each wobbly conclusion is then used as a base for further wobbly conclusions. This study relies on studies that ‘prove’ that “having quality social relationships is one of the best predictors of happiness, health, and well-being”. OK but if those studies were based on no better science than this appears to be then what we’re building here is house of cards.
Many scientists are taking to the lecture circuits, espousing feel-good themes that are stock spiritualism but that–because of the speaker’s credentials–appear, falsely, to have a scientific base. I have nothing against the spiritual or the scientific but I do have a problem with spiritualism posing as science. I wonder whether many studies as this, because they “prove” what a large following wants to hear (or disprove what everyone else wants disproved), are not getting as much scrutiny as the need.
j. francis
It is not clear whether the study controlled for people who eschew material things in favour of lecturing others about them. Vegetarians, varioust ‘ists, and others who claim to forego pleasures for some ostensible moral purpose are quite boring as well.
Since material things necessarily represent aspirations, both when we consume them and those we reject, anyone who talks about things is bound to be less interesting. Fran Lebowitz said, “Great people talk about ideas, average people talk about things, and small people talk about wine.”
At least now we have empirical data.
This research helps explain why the Dos Equis “worlds most interesting man” has over 401,000 “people like this” hits on facebook. The next hot phrase in retail will be “experiential purchases”. With the costs of many things getting lower and lower – - life with “stuff” will be truly what you make it!
The way I look at it is that it’s okay to have material goods but don’t show an extreme interest in them especially if leads to hoarding because hoarding in the long run can lead to depression. In fact I’d like to add by saying that I’m personally not surprised at parents who don’t want to purchase excessive amount of toys for their kids one of the reasons being that they don’t want their kids to hoard toys which may lead their kids to depression.
ahsin
I like that very much. Materialism and happiness is important for every man. I learn many points and tips from there. Your blog on materialism and happiness is very fine for me.
http://mohammad-mohsin.blogspot.com/2010/06/materialism-vs-happiness.html
Toni Merchant
It seems that the scientific community is very often stung by the fashion bug. People were buying lots of stuff in 1996 or in 2006 because it gave them status. Their friends would go to their mac mansions and have coctails with them. With the economic crisis we have been forced to think outside the materialistic world (once more). Marketing research, such as this “experiment” shows what anybody (who is not Warren Buffett, or Carlos Slim) can tell you just by telling your their experiences in the job market.
Another case of the structure determining the superestructure, as Marx would say. It is not that we “value” spirituality more now, it is because we are unemployed and we need to reassure ourselves that we are fine without our rampant consumerism. This kind of research seems like the preamble of a rehab program. We were addicted to material goods, to fashion. Now that we cannot afford it….we will be addicted to judging others because they are doing better than us.
Fashionable research…..fashionable times. It is all fashion and no science.
Guillermo
Another point of view is the sense of life. The importance depends of the age, social position, experience etc. The article is worthless in this point of view, but at the same time it is very good!
Bravo. The study is very appropriate given the realities this country has faced over the last two years. Materialism has supplanted much of our culture, beginning in the mid-90s. One that is reinforced in an avalanche of marketing and advertising. Unfortunately, until such time as a mindful consumption meme can be produced and successfully adopted, we will continue to “follow the herd” in our material acquisition efforts — even at social expense, it would seem.