Saturday, February 15, 2014
Unknown
“The world says: "You have needs -- satisfy them. You have as much right as the rich and the mighty. Don't hesitate to satisfy your needs; indeed, expand your needs and demand more." This is the worldly doctrine of today. And they believe that this is freedom. The result for the rich is isolation and suicide, for the poor, envy and murder.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov: A Novel in Four Parts With Epilogue
Materialism, the forgotten child of monist ontology. The nature and definition of matter have occasioned much philosophical debate, even from ancient times.
In ancient Greece, philosophers like Thales, Epicurus
and Democritus prefigure later materialists; their theory mainly suggests that
all that exists is matter and void, and all phenomena result from different
motions of base material particles. During the Middle Ages, Pierre Gassendi
represented the materialist tradition, as opposed to René Descartes' theory,
according to which natural sciences may be explained with dualist foundations. In
the 19th century, Karl Marx extended the concept of materialism to elaborate an
alternative conception of history based on the empirical world of human
activity, thus establishing the dialectical materialism. But, how is
materialism perceived today, in a global playground? There are three ways of
attaining happiness, according to Sartre: by having, doing and being. Over the
next decades, sociologists and psychologists began to train their sights on the
study of gaining external happiness, Sartre's concepts of having and doing had
become the psychosocial ideas of materialism. Materialism may be nowadays
described as a way of thinking that gives much importance to material
possessions rather than intellectual things. That means, materialism is
nowadays considered as a sociological tool in developing an understanding of
modern capitalistic culture via referring to the desire of material needs, rather than a
philosophical argument or a conception of history. But, would materialism and
consumerism be accompanied by greater well-being?
Materialism
and wealth are many times perceived as related terms. Actually, wealth may be
an elusive as well as an extrinsic goal. Many people chase money; few achieve
great wealth. Are rich people happier than poor people? In order to answer these
fundamental questions, we will may try to explain materialism as a construct.
Materialism, as the devotion to acquisition and possession, may be described as
a defining characteristic of our age which has been criticized on religious, philosophical, and social grounds.
Materialism as an individual variable has been effectively defined by Richins &
Dawson (1992). Their scale measures three components of materialism:
acquisition as the central goal in human life, including acquisition as the
path to happiness and success in life as defined by possessions. High scorers,
compared to low scorers, are in general less satisfied with life, want more
money, are less likely to share, and seem to suffer from poor adjustment, much
like those who are preoccupied with money. High scorers also value financial
security, while low scorers give priority to interpersonal relationships and a
sense of personal accomplishment. On the same basis, researchers have conceptualized materialism as the
consumption style that results when consumers perceive that value inheres in
consumption rather than in experiences and people.
Well-being
may be easily correlated with materialism. Well-being may assessed in terms of science as subjective well-being or SWB (Diener 1984), which encompasses the cognitive appraisal of one’s life as satisfactory.
Given strong motives for acquiring money, with its promises of freedom, power,
and even love, the actual impact of income on life satisfaction within a society
seems unaccountably meager. Academic researchers such as Ahuvia and Friedman change the focus from objective wealth to subjective appraisals. For instance,
they report a strong relationship between perception of income and subjective
well-being. SWB increases as income increases from below average to above
average within one’s home community. The subjective approach also helps us
understand why financial goals seem to have an insatiable quality: as people acquire
more, they seem to want even more, with dissatisfaction persisting along with
apparent success. However modest the relationship between income and SWB, once the
poverty threshold is passed, it is still a positive relationship. Money matter
for well-being, but that money’s influence is mediated and limited by
personality buffers (self-esteem, control and optimism). Individuals’ happiness
level is more or less preset, going up a bit when we experience self-esteem,
control, and optimism, and going down a bit when those qualities falter.
Increased income has a positive effect all aforementioned buffers, and therefore
the happiness level moves toward the upper end of the range.
Materialism and
SWB may be highly correlated. Initial evidence of the relationship between
materialism and well-being was provided by Belk (1985), who associated
materialism with such undesirable traits as non-generosity, envy, and greed and
found that these traits have a significant negative correlation with both
happiness and overall life satisfaction. Subsequent studies using Belk’s scale
have found that materialism is negatively correlated with satisfaction with
personal finances and career accomplishments and positively correlated with
social anxiety, dependency or even self-criticism.
Well-being predictors may be categorized as genetically
determined, circumstantial, or intentional positive behaviors and cognitions.
Genetic factors, such as genes and personality traits, account for a large
percentage of the variation in between-subject well-being, but they are very
difficult, if not impossible, to alter. Circumstantial factors such as income,
marital status, and employment account for only a smaller percentage of the
variance in well-being levels due to the phenomenon of hedonic adaptation. Thus,
positive behaviors offer the best potential route to longitudinal increases in
well-being since people have considerable control over these activities. Hedonic
products are those “whose consumption is primarily characterized by an
affective and sensory experience of aesthetic or sensual pleasure, fantasy, and
fun” (Dhar & Wertenbroch 2000). We may define
hedonic consumption as a consumer's regular expenditures on specific hedonic
products or services. It reflects how much of the hedonic experience consumers
enjoy regularly. Hedonic product usage is positively associated with consumers'
well-being, and experiential purchases may even make people happier than
material purchases. However, as the human race grows richer, the problems
associated with hedonic consumption, may result in negative effects on
consumers' well-being. In general, consumers tend to maximize their satisfaction through economic activities
that consist of the exchange and consumption of goods. Consumers may enhance their well-being by recognizing
their own needs and satisfying them by engaging in consumption activity and attaining consumer products. Consumption, especially of hedonic consumer products, is highly important for happiness among modern consumers, which
leads highly developed economies to tend to exhibit an increased emphasis on hedonic consumption.
Thus, consumption appears necessary for overall and subjective well-being in modern societies.
The possession and consumption of more hedonic products represents the cultural aspiration towards personal happiness and well-being.
We
should also refer to materialism and strategic consumption as a means for
social affiliation. Humans have an innate need to be a part of social relationships
because a social group afforded survival and safety throughout evolutionary
history. It
is not surprising that people have developed psychological mechanisms that help
them ensure that their need to belong is being met. More specifically,
exclusion heightens people’s tendency to form new social connections. Excluded
people are eager to work and play with others, and they tend to view new
sources of social connection in a positive, optimistic light. Consumers use the
symbolic ways of consumption as a way to communicate information about
themselves to others. Such communication attempts are particularly prevalent
when people want to make a good impression on others or facilitate social
interaction. Thus,
self-presentational motives guide consumption decisions, and people may use
consumption as a way to communicate specific information about themselves to
others. Excluded people strategically consume in the service of affiliation. Happiness in
this case, may be correlated with consumption as a way to be socially accepted
and avoid social exclusion.
Let's take for granted that, for the time being, in Western societies, capitalistic materialism cannot be avoided. Brands need to sell and consumers need to consume, at least for the time being. Academic researchers, brands and marketers, having understood how crucial the situational correlation between materialism and
well-being may be, need to develop a general framework of mechanisms and ethics in order to make materialistic habits better influence consumers' lifes. For instance, they could provide external stimuli and motivation for emphasizing that materialism may improve social relationships. Actually, financial aspirations are
often egocentrically motivated, to get ahead in life. But they can also be
sociocentrically motivated. Materialism could be actually motivated to satisfy
the need for relatedness. Possessions can be important stores of social
memories, tools of social protection, connection, or production. People may cherish particular possessions for such sociocentric motivations, but they may
also cherish possessions in general for these motivations, and this could
directly improve their social relationships. Both academic research and brand positioning on this possibility would
provide new insights about the virtuous, positive sides of materialism, and it
would contribute to a different, more holistic outlook on people’s material and
social relationships, for a better future.
