Materialism in psychology refers to a value orientation in which people place high importance on acquiring material possessions as indicators of success, status, and happiness. Unlike the philosophical concept (which is about whether the physical world is all that exists), psychological materialism is about how much weight a person gives to “stuff” in defining who they are, how well their life is going, and what will make them feel fulfilled. Decades of research show it has measurable effects on well-being, relationships, and behavior.
The Three Dimensions of Materialism
Psychologists Marsha Richins and Scott Dawson provided the foundational framework in 1992, defining materialism as a consumer value with three distinct components.
Acquisition centrality means possessions occupy a central role in a person’s daily life and identity. A materialistic person organizes significant time, energy, and attention around buying and owning things. A laptop isn’t just a tool; it symbolizes accomplishment.
Possession-defined success means judging your own worth, and other people’s worth, by the quantity and quality of what’s owned. If you instinctively size someone up by their car, watch, or neighborhood, that dimension is at work.
Acquisition as the pursuit of happiness is the belief that the next purchase will deliver lasting satisfaction. People high on this dimension treat buying as a primary strategy for feeling good, and they tend to feel a persistent gap between what they have and what they believe they need.
How Psychologists Measure It
The standard tool is the Material Values Scale (MVS), a 15-item questionnaire covering all three dimensions with five questions each. Respondents rate statements on a five-point scale, from “strongly disagree” to “strongly agree.” Nine items are positively worded (“I admire people who own expensive homes, cars, and clothes”) and six are reverse-worded (“I try to keep my life simple, as far as possessions are concerned”), which helps catch people answering on autopilot. Scores on the three subscales can be examined separately or combined into one overall materialism score. The MVS has been translated and validated across multiple cultures and languages.
The Link Between Materialism and Unhappiness
One of the most consistent findings in this area is that higher materialism is associated with lower life satisfaction. A meta-analysis of studies conducted over more than two decades found that materialistic values correlated with significantly lower subjective well-being, with a mean effect size of r = −0.205. That negative relationship held across different ways of measuring well-being, whether researchers looked at life satisfaction alone (r = −0.197) or combined it with measures of positive and negative emotions (r = −0.202).
These aren’t enormous effects, but they’re remarkably stable. The pattern appears across cultures, age groups, and income levels. Materialism doesn’t just fail to deliver the happiness it promises; it actively works against it.
One reason is hedonic adaptation. People adjust quickly to new possessions. The thrill of a new phone fades within weeks, resetting expectations and fueling the desire for the next upgrade. Research comparing experiential purchases (concert tickets, vacations, meals out) to material purchases (furniture, electronics, jewelry) consistently finds that experiences produce more lasting satisfaction. Experiences become part of your identity and your social stories in a way that objects typically don’t, and they resist the rapid “getting used to it” effect that plagues material goods.
What Drives People Toward Materialism
Materialism isn’t random. It tends to intensify under specific psychological conditions, and low self-esteem is one of the strongest predictors. Studies consistently show that materialism functions as a coping strategy: when people feel insecure about who they are, they reach for possessions to fill the gap. This aligns with symbolic self-completion theory, which holds that when people feel deficient in some aspect of their identity, they seek external symbols to compensate.
The experimental evidence is striking. When researchers made participants feel socially excluded, materialism went up. When people received positive feedback about their personal traits, materialistic values went down. When researchers threatened participants’ sense of competence by giving them low scores on a cognitive test, their desire for high-status products increased. Three different types of threat (existential, economic, and interpersonal) all produced the same result: stronger desires for money, attractiveness, and popularity.
How you define yourself matters too. People who see themselves primarily as independent individuals tend to respond to self-esteem threats with self-enhancement, reaching for flashy purchases to restore a sense of personal worth. People who define themselves more through their relationships and social groups may channel the same insecurity differently, pursuing possessions for belongingness rather than status.
Social Comparison and the Digital Amplifier
The “keeping up with the Joneses” dynamic is central to materialism, and social media has supercharged it. Upward social comparison, measuring yourself against people who appear to have more, is one of the primary drivers of materialistic values. When you see someone with a nicer apartment, a better vacation, or a more curated wardrobe, the natural response is to perceive a gap between your life and theirs. Materialistic thinking fills that gap with a simple formula: more stuff equals higher status.
On social networking sites, this process runs constantly. College students are particularly susceptible. They compare themselves to peers and influencers who present idealized versions of life, which increases the sense that material wealth defines success. Research has found that this cycle doesn’t stop at desire. It predicts compulsive buying behavior. Users who engage in frequent upward comparison develop stronger materialistic values, and those values drive impulsive and conspicuous purchasing, often of flashy products they’ve seen influencers showcase.
Influencer content plays a specific role here. People don’t just compare themselves to friends; they compare themselves to curated personalities whose entire brand revolves around consumption. The interaction with social media influencer content positively mediates the path from materialism to problematic buying patterns, including impulse purchases and buying primarily for the purpose of being seen.
How Materialism Affects Relationships
High materialism doesn’t just correlate with personal dissatisfaction. It predicts lower quality in nearly every close relationship a person has: romantic partners, parents, and siblings. The pattern is consistent across multiple studies.
One reason is that materialistic people hold higher ideal standards for the people around them, particularly around achievement (ambition, career success) and positive image (attractiveness, style). When real people inevitably fall short of those ideals, the result is greater perceived discrepancy between who someone is and who you want them to be. That discrepancy predicts more conflict.
The empathy problem compounds this. An observational study of couples found that materialistic individuals invested the same amount of self-disclosure and emotional energy in conversations with their partners as anyone else. They weren’t checked out. But they were significantly less empathetic and understanding in their responses. They shared; they just didn’t listen well. The correlation between materialism and interpersonal conflict appeared across multiple studies, while the correlation with relational satisfaction was consistently negative.
Materialism as a Trait vs. a State
Psychologists treat materialism as both a relatively stable disposition and something that fluctuates with circumstances. Some people score high on the MVS year after year, reflecting deep-seated values shaped by upbringing, cultural messaging, and personality. But the experimental research on insecurity and threat shows that materialism also spikes situationally. A bad day at work, a social rejection, or financial anxiety can temporarily push anyone’s materialistic thinking higher.
This distinction matters because it suggests materialism isn’t simply a character flaw. It’s a psychological response with identifiable triggers. The same person might score differently on a materialism measure depending on whether they just scrolled through Instagram for an hour, received a compliment from a friend, or got passed over for a promotion. Understanding those triggers is what separates the psychological view of materialism from the moral one. Psychology isn’t asking whether wanting nice things is wrong. It’s mapping when and why that wanting intensifies, and what it costs when it becomes a person’s primary strategy for feeling okay about themselves.