A materialistic society is one in which a large share of its members equate personal success, happiness, and social standing with the accumulation of possessions and wealth. Researchers measure these values along three dimensions: believing material goods are central to life, believing they signal success, and believing they deliver happiness. The psychological evidence is fairly clear that this orientation, when it becomes dominant in a culture, carries real costs for individual well-being, relationships, and the environment, even as it delivers short-term social rewards that keep people coming back for more.
What Materialism Actually Means in Research
When psychologists talk about materialism, they are not describing the philosophical position that the physical world is all there is. They mean a specific set of personal values: placing possessions and money at the center of your life goals, treating wealth as a yardstick for how well you or others are doing, and expecting that acquiring things will make you happy. The most widely used tool for measuring these values is the Material Values Scale, which breaks materialism into those three factors: success, centrality, and happiness.1PubMed Central. The Japanese version of the Material Values Scale: construct assessment and relationship with age, personality, and subjective well-being A society does not need every citizen to score high on all three dimensions to qualify as materialistic. It just needs enough cultural infrastructure, from advertising to social norms, to make acquiring things feel like the default path to a good life.
Why People Become Materialistic
Materialism is not simply a personality quirk some people are born with. Research points to a tangle of interpersonal and intrapersonal forces that push people toward valuing possessions more highly. On the social side, three influences stand out: parents, peers, and media. On the psychological side, low self-esteem, a desire for power, a need to belong, and confusion about personal identity all play roles.2Consumer Psychology Review. Psychological causes, correlates, and consequences of materialism
The self-esteem connection is especially well-documented. People who feel bad about themselves tend to reach for material goods as a way to compensate. One study found that low self-esteem predicted higher materialistic values, but only for people who defined themselves primarily as individuals rather than in terms of their group memberships. When people already had a strong sense of belonging to a community, the link between low self-esteem and materialism weakened considerably.3PubMed Central. Considering the Self in the Link Between Self-Esteem and Materialistic Values: The Moderating Role of Self-Construal In other words, materialism tends to fill a void. People who already feel secure and connected have less need for what possessions promise.
How Kids Learn to Want More
Materialistic values do not emerge fully formed in adulthood. They take root early. In elementary school, children who experience peer rejection report stronger feelings of pressure to conform to peer-group norms around possessions and status. That pressure, in turn, predicts higher materialism, and the reason seems to be social: rejected children endorse material goals specifically because they believe possessions will help them fit in.4PubMed. Individual differences in children’s materialism: the role of peer relations
By adolescence, the picture gets more nuanced. A study of twelve- to eighteen-year-olds found that supportive parents and friends buffered teens against materialism by boosting self-esteem. The effect worked in both directions: warmth from parents and peers built up self-worth, and that higher self-worth reduced the appeal of material goods as a source of identity.5Journal of Consumer Psychology. Interpersonal influences on adolescent materialism: A new look at the role of parents and peers This is a consistent theme across the research: materialism tends to flourish where emotional needs go unmet.
Advertising accelerates the process. A longitudinal study of children found that advertising exposure had a direct positive effect on materialism over time, and that this effect was fully explained by increasing children’s desire for the specific products they saw advertised.6Communication Research. Children’s Advertising Exposure, Advertised Product Desire, and Materialism: A Longitudinal Study Socioeconomic background matters here too. Children from lower-income homes tend to score higher on materialism, partly because they watch more television and partly because they find ads more credible. But children from wealthier backgrounds are actually more susceptible to the reinforcing effect of advertising on materialistic values, while poorer children suffer more when materialism erodes their self-esteem.7International Journal of Market Research. TV adverts, materialism, and children’s self-esteem: The role of socio-economic status The upshot: advertising does not create materialism out of nothing, but it gives it a significant push, and the damage it causes is unevenly distributed.
The Well-Being Trade-Off
The most consistent finding in this literature is that materialistic people tend to be less happy. A meta-analysis pooling results across many studies found a clear negative association between materialism and personal well-being. The relationship was strongest for broad measures of materialistic values and beliefs and weakest for measures that only asked about the importance of money. The specific outcomes that suffered most were risky health behaviors, risky consumer behaviors, and negative self-appraisals, while life satisfaction and day-to-day mood were hurt less, though still detectably.8PubMed. The relationship between materialism and personal well-being: A meta-analysis
This does not mean every person who likes nice things is miserable. The effect sizes are moderate, not overwhelming. But the direction is remarkably consistent across studies: placing possessions at the center of your value system is associated with worse outcomes on almost every measure of psychological health researchers have tried.
Why Buying Things Stops Feeling Good
One of the mechanisms behind this well-being gap is hedonic adaptation. You buy something new, feel a burst of pleasure, and then the pleasure fades. Two pathways drive the fade: the positive emotions from the purchase gradually weaken, and your expectations for what counts as satisfying quietly rise.9Journal of Consumer Psychology. Happiness and thrift: When (spending) less is (hedonically) more You get used to the new car, and now the bar for what would make you excited is a slightly better car. This is not a character flaw; it is how human reward systems work. But it means that a strategy of pursuing happiness through possessions tends to put you on a treadmill.
Research on hedonic consumption generally finds only a small and inconsistent link between spending on pleasurable goods and lasting well-being, precisely because of this adaptation effect.10PubMed Central. Does variety in hedonic spending improve happiness? Testing alternative causal mechanisms between hedonic variety and subjective well-being Materialistic societies, which treat consumer spending as the engine of both the economy and personal fulfillment, are effectively organized around a strategy that delivers diminishing returns for the individual while keeping the spending cycle going.
Status Signaling and Its Social Rewards
If materialism consistently undermines well-being, why does it persist? Part of the answer is that it works socially, at least in the short term. Across a series of seven experiments, researchers found that displaying luxury goods, even just wearing clothes with visible high-end brand labels, led to preferential treatment from others. People were more cooperative, more compliant, and even more financially generous toward those who signaled wealth through their possessions.11Evolution and Human Behavior. Social benefits of luxury brands as costly signals of wealth and status The logic mirrors costly signaling in biology: the willingness to spend money on something impractical acts as a hard-to-fake signal of resources, and other people unconsciously adjust their behavior in response.
The nature of status signaling has evolved. Early research focused on obviously expensive and flashy goods, but the marketing literature has shifted. Status signals now include inconspicuous consumption and nonconforming choices. A person signaling wealth might do so through understated brands that only other affluent people would recognize, or through conspicuously rejecting mainstream consumer norms altogether.12Journal of Business Research. Conspicuous consumption research: Thematic evolution, theoretical structure, and future directions This broadening of what counts as status consumption means that materialism in a society is not always obvious from the outside. It can look like minimalism if the minimalism itself becomes a status marker.
What Materialism Does to Relationships
Beyond its effects on individual well-being, materialism measurably damages relationships. A series of three studies involving nearly 1,400 participants found that materialistic people hold higher standards for romantic partners, especially around achievement and physical appearance. Those inflated expectations were linked to more conflict and lower satisfaction in relationships.13PubMed Central. Unpacking the effects of materialism on interpersonal relationships: A cognitive approach The mechanism makes intuitive sense: if you believe that success is about accumulating wealth and that attractive possessions reflect a person’s worth, you are likely to apply those same metrics to the people around you. Your partner is not just someone you love; they are another marker of how well your life is going. That is a heavy burden for any relationship to carry.
The Brain’s Response to Shopping Cues
For some people, the pull of material acquisition goes beyond a cultural orientation and starts to resemble addiction. Brain imaging research has found that individuals with buying-shopping disorder show increased activity in the dorsal striatum, a brain region associated with habit formation and reward processing, when exposed to shopping cues. Activity in the ventral striatum, which is tied to anticipation of reward, correlated with symptom severity in affected individuals but not in controls.14PubMed. Dorsal and ventral striatum activity in individuals with buying-shopping disorder during cue-exposure: A functional magnetic resonance imaging study These patterns mirror what researchers see in substance addiction and behavioral addictions like gambling, suggesting that the reward circuitry underlying compulsive buying can be hijacked in much the same way.
The financial consequences are concrete. Research on the pathway from materialism to compulsive buying found that poor credit management mediates the relationship: materialistic people are more likely to mismanage credit, shop to regulate their emotions, and believe that purchases will transform their lives, and those three tendencies together fully explain why they buy compulsively.15IDEAS / RePEc (Journal of Economic Psychology). Sadness, identity, and plastic in over-shopping: The interplay of materialism, poor credit management, and emotional buying motives in predicting compulsive buying A materialistic society does not just encourage spending; for vulnerable individuals, it creates an environment where spending can become genuinely compulsive.
Social Media as an Accelerant
Social media has supercharged many of the forces that feed materialism. Platforms built around visual sharing, like Instagram, are used heavily by materialistic individuals for displaying personal achievements and physical appearance. The highly visual, curated nature of these platforms makes them natural venues for conspicuous consumption.16Elsevier. Vanity fair on Instagram: The roles of vanity, materialism, social comparison, Instagram usage intensity, and market mavenism in social commerce
Cross-national research adds another layer. A study comparing samples from Turkey, Iraq, and Indonesia found that social media addiction increased feelings of personal relative deprivation, the sense that you are unfairly worse off than people like you, which in turn fed materialistic tendencies. But the study also found that macro-level factors like income inequality and per capita income were more influential in shaping materialism than individual social media use.17Yeni Medya Dergisi. A Comparative Analysis of the Relationship between Social Media Addiction, Personal Relative Deprivation, and Materialistic Personality: Evidence from Türkiye, Iraq, and Indonesia Social media amplifies materialism, in other words, but the structural conditions of a society matter more.
Inequality Feeds the Cycle
The relationship between inequality and materialism runs in both directions. Across five studies, researchers found that personal relative deprivation, the resentful feeling that you deserve more than you have compared to your peers, is a strong and unique predictor of materialistic values, independent of actual income, self-esteem, or emotional uncertainty. People who habitually compare their abilities and outcomes to those of others are more likely to feel deprived, and that deprivation drives them toward material goals.18PubMed Central. Social comparison, personal relative deprivation, and materialism In one experiment, people who were told they had less discretionary income than similar peers immediately reported a stronger desire for more money. In another, those higher in relative deprivation spent more of a windfall on personal wants rather than paying off debts.
This creates a troubling feedback loop in unequal societies. Greater visible inequality triggers more social comparison, which increases feelings of deprivation, which fuels materialism, which drives consumption and debt, which can deepen inequality. The advertising and social media ecosystems described earlier amplify every step of the cycle by making wealth more visible and comparison more constant.
Death Anxiety and the Urge to Acquire
One of the more surprising findings in the materialism literature comes from terror management theory. The basic idea is that awareness of mortality creates a deep anxiety, and people manage that anxiety partly by investing in cultural value systems that give life meaning. In consumer cultures, one of the most accessible value systems is the pursuit of wealth. When researchers experimentally reminded people of their own death, subjects reported higher financial expectations for themselves fifteen years in the future and said they expected to spend more on pleasurable items like clothing and entertainment.19PubMed. Of wealth and death: materialism, mortality salience, and consumption behavior In a follow-up, death reminders made people greedier and more resource-consumptive in a simulated resource-management game.
The implication is that materialism is not just about greed or shallow values. It serves a psychological function: reinforcing the cultural worldview that gives life structure and buffering against existential dread.20Journal of Consumer Psychology. The Urge to Splurge: A Terror Management Account of Materialism and Consumer Behavior A materialistic society, in this framing, is partly a collective coping mechanism. The more a culture makes wealth the primary marker of a life well-lived, the more its members lean into acquisition when reminded that their time is limited.
Experiences Versus Possessions
If buying things delivers diminishing happiness, is there a better way to spend money? The research points fairly consistently toward experiences. Spending on trips, meals with friends, classes, or outdoor recreation tends to produce more lasting satisfaction than spending on material goods. The happiness from experiences extends across a broader time course: you enjoy anticipating them, being in them, and remembering them afterward.21PubMed. The unmatchable brightness of doing: Experiential consumption facilitates greater satisfaction than spending on material possessions
Several mechanisms explain why experiences outperform things. Experiences are more open to positive reinterpretation: the camping trip where it rained becomes a funny story over time. They are more resistant to unfavorable comparisons: you are less likely to feel jealous of someone else’s vacation than of someone else’s car. And experiences tend to strengthen social bonds in ways that possessions do not.22Review of General Psychology. Experientialism, Materialism, and the Pursuit of Happiness For individuals living in a materialistic society who feel uneasy about the treadmill they are on, shifting discretionary spending from having toward doing is one of the most actionable findings in the well-being literature.
Gratitude as a Counterweight
Beyond changing spending habits, there is evidence that cultivating gratitude can directly reduce materialistic values. In experimental studies, gratitude interventions reduced people’s belief that material wealth brings happiness and signals success. Parents who regularly expressed gratitude perceived their children as less materialistic.23PubMed Central. Gratitude as an antidote to materialism in young consumers Separate experiments confirmed that various gratitude exercises consistently reduced the desire for money, and the effect seemed to operate by increasing feelings of social connectedness and what researchers call self-transcendence, the ability to see beyond your own narrow interests.24European Journal of Social Psychology. Grateful Hearts, Lighter Wallets: Gratitude Diminishes the Desire for Money Through Social Connectedness and Self‐Transcendence
The minimalism movement applies similar logic at a lifestyle level. Research on millennials who adopt minimalist practices found that reducing clutter and intentionally consuming less was associated with improved well-being, mediated by a greater sense of fulfillment. Having fewer things meant more time and space for family and personal interests.25PubMed Central. Goodbye materialism: exploring antecedents of minimalism and its impact on millennials well-being These interventions are individually meaningful, though they are swimming against a strong current in a society whose institutions, media, and reward structures are built around consumption.
The Environmental Footprint of Materialistic Values
The ecological dimension of a materialistic society is both expected and more complicated than it first appears. A structural analysis found that people scoring high on materialism do tend to show lower environmental concern and higher greenhouse gas emissions. But the connection to emissions was not coming from the places you might guess. It was traceable primarily to air travel, not to larger homes or more expensive cars, which are the traditional status symbols people associate with excess consumption. The status-oriented materialists in the sample appeared to focus less on possessions and more on lifestyle experiences like travel.26Journal of Environmental Psychology. Should environmentalists be concerned about materialism? An analysis of attitudes, behaviours and greenhouse gas emissions
This finding complicates the neat narrative that environmentalism and anti-materialism are natural allies. It suggests that as status signaling shifts from conspicuous goods to conspicuous experiences, the environmental costs may shift along with it. A person who rejects consumer culture and embraces “experiences over things” could still generate a substantial carbon footprint through frequent flights. The environmental problem with a materialistic society may have less to do with what people buy and more to do with the underlying orientation toward acquiring, displaying, and consuming, whether the currency is objects or experiences.