Materialism

What it is

Richins and Dawson's measure splits the construct into three dimensions. Acquisition centrality is how central getting things is to a person's life. Pursuit of happiness is the belief that acquiring is what will make them happy. Possession-defined success is judging oneself and others by what they own. Anyone writing about materialism should be reaching for this scheme.

The framing as an individual difference is what makes the construct tractable and also what makes the correlational findings around it hard to read causally. People who score high on these dimensions differ from people who score low in many other ways at the same time.

One typology in circulation should be handled with care. Miriam Tatzel published a money-attitude scheme in 2002 which is a two-by-two, tight against loose money attitude crossed with high against low materialism, yielding four cells. At least one popular textbook prints it as three types, with what reads as a transcription error in one cell's money attitude. Do not reproduce the three-type version. Go to the original.

In effect

The direction of association most often reported is between higher materialism and lower wellbeing, and the strongest theoretical reason for it is hedonic adaptation: possession-defined happiness cannot hold, because the satisfaction of acquiring decays and the standard resets.

A children's study by Bottomley and colleagues in 2010, using a consumer involvement measure with dimensions of dissatisfaction, consumer orientation and brand awareness, reports that more materialistic children had lower self-esteem, more conflict with parents and more engagement with consumer society. The popular source this vault read gives no sample size, no age range and no country for it, so the finding is carried here as a direction of association and not as a figure.

A great deal of what surrounds these findings in popular treatments is uncited: that materialists are selfish and discontented, that adolescent materialism tracks screen time and homework, that materialism increases work and family conflict, that peer influence and parental materialism shape it. None of these is implausible and none is followable from the source.

There is also a signalling account of why people keep buying, which argues that consumption is a competitive game in which the supply of status is fixed however fast the economy grows. Geoffrey Miller's distinction between goods bought for use and goods bought to be seen with is a genuinely useful sorting instrument and is entirely untested. The headline experiment usually cited for the status-and-consumption link, Vladas Griskevicius and colleagues in 2010, has since failed a large collaborative registered replication across six countries, which removes the evidence underneath that account without removing its elegance.

What it does not say

It does not say who is materialistic. The demographic story is explicitly in dispute in the literature, and this publication sides with the concession that data on age, education and income correlates are unclear. Do not write that materialists are younger, poorer or less educated.

It does not say materialism causes unhappiness. The association is correlational and the construct is an individual difference, so the ordering is unresolved.

It does not support the status-priming result. That experiment did not replicate.

It does not have four uncontested dimensions or three types. Use Richins and Dawson's three dimensions, and take Tatzel's typology from Tatzel.

And the measures do not lend their reliability to the correlates. Good scales and unattributed associations must not be cited in the same register.

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