Materialism has two distinct definitions that often get tangled together. In philosophy, it refers to the view that everything in the universe is made of physical matter and that mental states, consciousness, and abstract ideas ultimately reduce to physical processes. In everyday life and in psychology, it describes a value system centered on acquiring wealth, possessions, and status as paths to happiness and success. These two meanings share a word but address very different questions, and understanding where each one applies clears up a surprising amount of confusion.
The Philosophical Meaning
Philosophical materialism is one of the oldest positions in Western thought, stretching back to ancient Greek atomists who argued that reality consists entirely of tiny indivisible particles moving through empty space. In its modern form, this idea is often called “physicalism,” a term introduced in the 1930s by members of the Vienna Circle, a group of philosophers, scientists, and mathematicians based in pre-war Vienna.1Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Physicalism The core claim is straightforward: there is nothing over and above the physical. Your thoughts, your emotions, your sense of self are all the products of neurons firing and chemicals flowing. There is no separate, non-physical “mind stuff.”
The two labels, materialism and physicalism, are sometimes used interchangeably in academic philosophy, but they carry different baggage. “Materialism” suggests a world made of solid, tangible matter. “Physicalism” is broader and accommodates the discoveries of modern physics, where “matter” includes fields, forces, energy, and quantum phenomena that do not resemble the lumps of stuff the ancient atomists imagined. Some philosophers prefer “physicalism” precisely because modern physics has shown that the universe’s fundamental building blocks are far stranger than classical “material” implies.2Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Physicalism
This philosophical version of materialism is not about greed or shopping. A philosophical materialist could live in a cabin in the woods and own almost nothing. Their commitment is to a claim about the nature of reality, not to any particular lifestyle. When someone in a philosophy seminar says “I’m a materialist,” they mean they think the physical world is all there is. When someone at a dinner party says “our culture is too materialistic,” they mean something entirely different.
The Everyday and Psychological Meaning
The meaning most people encounter first is the psychological one. In research psychology, materialism is defined as a set of values and goals focused on wealth, possessions, image, and status.3PubMed. Materialistic Values and Goals People with a strong materialistic value orientation tend to believe that acquiring more money and expensive possessions will improve their well-being and social standing.4PubMed. Materialistic value orientation and wellbeing This is not about buying groceries or paying rent. It is about placing material acquisition at or near the center of what makes life worthwhile.
Researchers typically break materialistic values into a few overlapping dimensions. One is acquisition centrality, where shopping and owning things take up a large share of a person’s mental energy and identity. Another is the belief that possessions define success, so that a person’s worth is judged by what they own. A third is the conviction that the right purchases will bring happiness. Most people hold some mix of these attitudes to varying degrees; materialism is treated as a spectrum, not a binary category. Someone who checks their phone for flash sales every morning and feels a genuine mood lift from unboxing a package sits higher on the scale than someone who buys only when they need something and feels indifferent about brands.
Why People Become More Materialistic
One of the more consistent findings in the research is that materialism is not purely a personality trait baked in at birth. It responds to circumstances. Feelings of insecurity appear to be a major driver. Studies consistently show that materialism can function as a coping strategy for people dealing with low self-esteem, where acquiring possessions serves as a way to shore up a fragile sense of self-worth.5PubMed Central. Considering the Self in the Link Between Self-Esteem and Materialistic Values: The Moderating Role of Self-Construal If you feel uncertain about who you are or whether people respect you, a visible purchase can feel like concrete evidence of your value.
Loneliness pushes in the same direction. Research testing the “material trap” hypothesis found that materialism and loneliness feed into each other over time, creating a cycle. Loneliness makes people reach for possessions as a substitute for social connection, and a materialistic orientation can, in turn, erode relationships. Of the two directions, loneliness was the stronger driver of materialism, not the other way around.6Journal of Consumer Research. Bidirectional Dynamics of Materialism and Loneliness: Not Just a Vicious Cycle That finding reframes the common narrative. Materialistic people are not simply shallow; many are filling a social gap with the most available substitute.
Childhood circumstances matter too. Research on children found that those from more deprived backgrounds tended to be more materialistic than children from affluent homes, partly because they had higher exposure to advertising and were more likely to believe advertising claims.7International Journal of Market Research. TV adverts, materialism, and children’s self-esteem: The role of socio-economic status That finding is counterintuitive. You might expect that growing up surrounded by wealth would make someone materialistic, but the evidence suggests it is the experience of scarcity, combined with constant messaging about what you lack, that plants the seed.
Materialism and Life Satisfaction
The relationship between materialistic values and happiness is one of the most studied questions in consumer psychology. The overall picture is fairly bleak for materialism. A three-wave longitudinal study found a negative association between materialism and life satisfaction that runs in both directions: being more materialistic predicts lower life satisfaction later on, and being less satisfied with life predicts increased materialism later on.8Journal of Consumer Psychology. Materialism and life satisfaction relations between and within people over time: Results of a three‐wave longitudinal study The bidirectional nature makes this particularly hard to escape. Unhappiness fuels the desire for more stuff, and the desire for more stuff fails to deliver lasting happiness.
This does not mean every purchase makes you miserable. The problem is specifically with placing possessions at the center of your value system. Someone who enjoys a new pair of shoes and then moves on with their day is in a different psychological position from someone who believes the shoes are what makes them worthwhile as a person. The research targets the latter mindset, not the occasional pleasure of buying something nice.
Experiences Versus Things
One of the more practical outgrowths of materialism research is the finding that spending money on experiences tends to produce more lasting satisfaction than spending on physical goods. Trips, concerts, classes, and meals out generally make people happier over time than equivalent spending on objects, and this advantage holds across the anticipation phase, the experience itself, and the memory afterward.9PubMed. The unmatchable brightness of doing: Experiential consumption facilitates greater satisfaction than spending on material possessions
There is an important caveat, though. The advantage of experiences over things depends on the experience going well. When purchases turn out positively, experiences outshine material goods. But when purchases turn out badly, experiences offer no benefit over material possessions, and for some people, a bad experience actually produces more unhappiness than a bad material purchase. The reason seems to be that people adapt more slowly to experiences, good or bad. A terrible vacation lingers in memory longer than a disappointing appliance.10Journal of Consumer Research. Happiness for Sale: Do Experiential Purchases Make Consumers Happier than Material Purchases? The popular advice to “buy experiences, not things” is largely sound, but it glosses over the fact that a disastrous experience can sting more than a mediocre product.
Cultural Variation in Materialistic Values
Materialism is not distributed evenly across the globe. Cross-cultural research comparing Canadian and Chinese participants found that materialism was higher among the Chinese on most dimensions, a result that surprised the researchers given stereotypes about Western consumerism. The difference was partially explained by cultural values: Chinese participants scored higher on several cultural dimensions, including collectivism, and the interplay between cultural norms and materialistic values differed across the two countries.11Asia Pacific Journal of Marketing and Logistics. Cultural dimensions and materialism: comparing Canada and China
The link between self-worth and materialism also shifts across cultures. A study comparing Chinese and Dutch students found that the connection between externally based self-worth and materialistic values was stronger for the Chinese participants. In both groups, the underlying processes were similar: a need to belong and a need for self-enhancement both predicted materialism. But the strength of the relationship varied, suggesting that cultural context amplifies or dampens the extent to which people turn to possessions for identity support.12PubMed. “Me”, “We”, and Materialism: Associations between Contingent Self-Worth and Materialistic Values across Cultures
These findings complicate the idea that materialism is simply a “Western problem” or a product of capitalism. Rapid economic development, urbanization, and exposure to global media all appear to accelerate materialistic values in societies that were traditionally less consumer-oriented. The particular flavor of materialism may differ, with some cultures emphasizing status goods for family honor rather than personal identity, but the underlying psychological machinery seems to operate across borders.
The Postmaterialist Shift
In political science, the concept of “postmaterialism” offers a counterpoint. The political scientist Ronald Inglehart proposed that societies which achieve a baseline of economic security tend to see a generational shift in priorities. People raised in conditions of physical safety and material comfort begin to care more about self-expression, quality of life, environmental protection, and personal autonomy than about economic growth and physical security. Inglehart’s hypothesis, tested extensively across Western democracies, found support for the idea that postwar affluence produced an intergenerational move from materialist to postmaterialist values.13American Political Science Review. Post-Materialism in an Environment of Insecurity
This use of “materialism” and “postmaterialism” is yet another layer of meaning. Here, “materialist” values refer not to shopping habits but to prioritizing economic and physical security at the national level: stable jobs, low crime, strong defense. “Postmaterialist” values prioritize individual freedom, environmental quality, and democratic participation. A person can hold postmaterialist political values while still owning plenty of stuff, or hold materialist political values while living frugally. The terminology overlaps with the psychological definition just enough to cause confusion, but the concepts are distinct.
Materialism and Environmental Attitudes
One practical consequence of materialistic values that gets less attention than the happiness link is the effect on environmental behavior. Research using causal modeling found that materialism has a negative effect on environmental beliefs, and that those beliefs, in turn, influence environmental concern and environmentally responsible behavior.14Journal of Business Research. How materialism affects environmental beliefs, concern, and environmentally responsible behavior In other words, a strong orientation toward acquiring possessions does not just affect personal happiness. It tends to weaken the beliefs that motivate people to recycle, reduce consumption, or support environmental policy.
The mechanism is intuitive. If your value system tells you that more stuff equals a better life, then messages asking you to buy less or consume differently are in direct tension with your core goals. Environmental action often requires restraint, delayed gratification, or acceptance that economic growth has costs, all of which conflict with a worldview where acquisition is a primary good. This does not mean materialistic people are incapable of environmental concern, but the two orientations push in opposite directions, and research suggests the materialistic pull often wins.
What Happens in the Brain
Neuroscience has started to map the brain activity involved in the desire to acquire things. Research examining decisions to acquire and discard everyday goods found that all such decisions engaged the orbitofrontal cortex, a region involved in evaluating rewards and making value-based judgments. More telling was what happened with the nucleus accumbens, a brain area associated with reward and motivation. It was selectively engaged during personal acquisition decisions, and its activation scaled with the degree of problematic hoarding tendencies in the individual. Even common, low-value items could acquire a kind of motivational pull for people high in acquisitiveness, making them harder to resist.15PubMed Central. The neural bases of acquisitiveness: decisions to acquire and discard everyday goods differ across frames, items, and individuals
This finding is worth sitting with. The same reward circuitry that responds to food or social approval lights up when acquisitive people consider adding an item to their collection, even if the item is a free promotional pen. For the brain, the act of acquiring can be its own reward, independent of the object’s usefulness. That helps explain why materialism can feel compulsive for some people: the drive is not purely rational or status-motivated but is wired into the same neural systems that handle other basic rewards.
Spirituality as a Counterweight
Some researchers have explored whether spiritual or transcendent orientations function as a natural opposite to materialistic values. The concept of spiritual transcendence, defined as the capacity to step beyond immediate personal experience and view life from a broader perspective, has been positioned as fundamentally at odds with materialism. Where materialism focuses on possessing and deriving satisfaction from possessions, spiritual transcendence directs attention away from objects and toward meaning, connection, or purpose that does not depend on what you own.16Graphy Publications. Spiritual Transcendence, Mortality Salience and Consumer Behaviors: Is Spirituality Really Opposite to Materialism?
This framing does not require religious belief. Secular mindfulness practices, awe experiences in nature, and philosophical reflection can all foster the kind of perspective shift that reduces the grip of materialistic values. The research in this area is still developing, but the general pattern fits with what the loneliness and self-esteem findings suggest: when people feel psychologically secure and connected to something beyond themselves, the appeal of possessions as a source of identity diminishes. Materialism, in this view, thrives in the gap where meaning and belonging should be.
Why the Definitions Keep Colliding
Part of what makes “materialism” such a confusing word is that the philosophical and psychological definitions are not just different but can point in opposite directions. A philosophical materialist might argue that understanding the physical basis of consciousness is one of the most profound intellectual pursuits possible, entirely unrelated to whether you care about designer handbags. Meanwhile, someone who is psychologically materialistic might have no opinions whatsoever about whether the mind reduces to the brain. The two uses of the word share a Latin root (materia, meaning matter or substance) but they diverge almost completely in what they say about how a person lives.
Even within everyday language, the word slides between a neutral description and a moral judgment. Saying “she’s materialistic” usually carries disapproval. But saying “he values material comfort” sounds more neutral, even though the underlying attitude may be similar. Researchers have tried to separate the concept from its moral overtones by using more precise terms like “materialistic value orientation,” but in casual conversation, the judgmental edge remains. If someone asks you whether you are materialistic, they are almost certainly not asking about your position on the mind-body problem. They are asking whether you care too much about stuff, and the “too much” is doing a lot of work in that question, since no one agrees on where the line sits.