Masters of Degrowth: Week 13.2 Materialism and happiness

 

Positional consumption and well-being

What is positional consumption?

• Consumption to mark your social status (large houses, expensive clothes or cars) or your personal brand ( hard working, successful...)
• Thanks to cheapening and credit, positional and conspicuous consumption is increasingly accessible

According to a research done by Solnick and Hemenway (1997), 50% of respondents prefer less real income, and more relative income.

Alpizar et al. (2005), found that on average about half of the ‘utility’ obtained from an additional dollar comes from relative concerns, and that this share was higher for private cars and housing (between 0.5 and 0.75).

Carlsson et al. 2007 indicate that income and cars are highly positional on average

Modern consumer markets offer ladders up to the previously unreachable goods. Robert Frank’s argues that this encourages ‘luxury fever’: people at every income level aspire upwards, and focus their efforts on relative consumption (size of homes, cars, designer clothes)

Changes in materialism, changes in psychological well-being:Evidence from three longitudinal studies and an interventionexperiment

Kasser and Ryan (1993, 1996) have shown that people for whom ‘extrinsic goals’ such as fame, fortune and glamour are a priority in life tend to experience more anxiety and depression and lower overall well-being than people oriented towards ‘intrinsic goals’.

People with extrinsic goals tend to have shorter relationships with friends and lovers, and relationships

characterized more by jealousy and less by trust and caring.

Kasser (& colleague) have also demonstrated significant correlations between materialistic values and social alienation.

Kasser et al. found that the more that people prioritized values and goals for money and possessions, relative to other aims in life, the lower they scored on outcomes such as life satisfaction, happiness and other parameters.

The authors conducted four studies to longitudinally examine how individual changes in well-being may be related to individual changes in the priority placed on materialistic values and goals.

Study 1

Study 1 reports a 12-year longitudinal study of a heterogeneous group of US late adolescents/early

adults, many of whom were at risk for developing psychopathology (hence a study assessing

psychopathology)

The results showed that to the extent individuals placed relatively less importance on financial success goals between age 18 and 30, their mental health improved,

Whereas to the extent such goals became relatively more important, their mental health declined.

Study 2

A longitudinal study that followed college seniors for 2 years as they transitioned into their adult lives.

The study revealed that shifts in well-being over 2 years were predictable on the basis of initial materialism measures.

• Those individuals scoring relatively high in materialism during their senior year of college reporte greater decrements in well-being over the next 2 years.
• When individuals became relatively less oriented towards materialistic aspirations over a 2-year period, they reported increased satisfaction of their psychological needs (autonomy, competence, and relatedness), and had higher scores on well-being over time.

Study 3

Explored SWB in a context of economic collapse and social upheaval: Iceland 2007 (in two time periods within 6 months).

The RQ asked: Did the majority of the citizens increase their focus on materialistic aims as a result of the economic crisis & bank collapse?

Results indicated that a significant majority of Icelandic respondents placed increasing priority on materialistic concerns.

The changes in materialism (brought by the economic collapse & associated sense of insecurity) were associated with changes in wellbeing as follows:

• respondents’ materialism scores at T2 were significantly negatively associated with their SWB;
• individuals who became less oriented toward materialism over time experienced an increase in SWB; or responding to the crisis by diminishing focus on financial wealth (if able to afford it) is associated with higher well-being

Nevertheless : Changes in well-being were not consistently predictable on the basis of initial measures of materialism. Financial success aspirations are more closely associated with aspirations for image and popularity among wealthy nations, but they are associated with physical health and safety aspirations in poorer nations Grouzet et al. (2005)

Study 4

RQ: Can changes in materialism lead to changes in well-being?

• A randomized trial experiment using a financial education program designed to help families orient their adolescent children away from ‘spending’’ and towards ‘‘sharing’’.
• A control and a treatment group, psychological well-being and materialism measured
• Prediction is that the well-being for adolescents in the treatment group would increase more for those who initially had high levels of materialism.
• The interventions included: keeping a diary of the advertising messages encountered, reflection on the extent to which their spending decisions are influenced by their emotions, reflections on sharing and saving activities; interviews with people who model good sharing and good saving behaviors.
• First, the results showed that it is possible to intervene in adolescents’ lives so as to decrease the priority they place on materialistic goals.

• Secondly, an increases in self-esteem (the only significant well-being variable) was noted for adolescents who began the study with strong materialistic aims in life.

Take aways

The first three studies show that when people orient away from materialistic values/goals over time, their well-being could improve; whereas increases in the relative priority of materialistic values/goals over time is associated with declines in well-being declined (over 6 months, 2 and 12 years).

As people placed increasing priority on materialistic values over time, they experienced decreasing satisfaction of their psychological needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness

Isham et al. 2022 find that materialistic values are negatively associated with sufficiency attitudes, mindfulness, and flow experiences (German students).

Schalembier et al. (2020) show that the impact of relative income is exacerbated for those who

exhibit high scores in materialism. Those who have low scores in materialism are barely negatively affected by earning less than the rest.

Living both well and sustainably: a review of the literature, with some reflections on future research, interventions and policy.

pro-ecological behaviour (PEB) is positively correlated with personal well-being (PWB). Kasser (2017) provide three possible explanations for this association:

(i) engaging in PEBs is associated with the satisfaction of psychological needs, and thus - > higher well-being;

• Some empirical work shows that people experience a variety of satisfactions when they engage in pro-env. behaviors.
• Self-Determination Theory (SDT)-based analysis suggests that if engaging in PEBs helps to satisfy people’s psychological needs (autonomy, competence, relatedness) higher levels of WB would result
• The PEBs most strongly correlated with life satisfaction were those involving more effort (e.g.making one’s own products) and more social interactions/relationships (e.g. attending environ. events). (Shmitt et al. 2016)
• Reading books is negatively related to materialism and positively to environmental values and behaviours.
• Playing sports is associated with higher well-being.
• Materialism is negatively associated with proenvironmental behaviour.
• Life satisfaction is higher among those with stronger environmental values and weaker materialism.

(ii) being in a good mood (higher well-being) causes people to engage in more prosocial behavior and PEBs;

• Happy people are more likely to volunteer, cooperate and help others (Lyubomirksy et al.)
• Individuals experimentally induced to be in a happy mood later behaved in more pro-social ways.
• Yet, no studies showing empirically that PEBs are actually caused by ‘happy moods’.

(iii) it is personal characteristics and lifestyles (intrinsic values, mindfulness and voluntary simplicity) cause both PEBs and PWB.

• Brown & Kasser’s (2005) empirically demonstrate that voluntary simplifiers are happier* than ‘mainstream Americans’, a result replicated by others (Boujbel and d'Astous 2012, and Rich et al. 2016)
• Other research has shown that focusing on ‘time affluence’ rather than ‘material affluence’ (through downshifting) is also associated with higher levels of PWB (Burke et al. 2009)
• Time poverty can also lead to cognitive overload and feelings of pressure that may interrupt one’s ability to be present in the moment (Brown and Ryan, 2003) and experience ‘‘flow’’ (Csikszentmihalyi, 1999), both of which facilitate happiness.
• The higher WB levels of those who downshift are explained in part by their reductions in consumer desires, their focus on intrinsic values, and their relatively high satisfaction of needs for autonomy, competence and relatedness.

Final reflections

Policies shall focus on increasing the sense of competence, relatedness and autonomy. They should also provide autonomy-supportive environment that helps people reflect and internally regulate their behavior.

Kasser defends the development of alternative indicators of progress.

The campaigning and communications strategies used by many environmental and governmental organizations need to be rethought (especially because guilt about one’s environmental behaviour fails to create a strong, sustained motivation for future PEBs).

Interventions and policies that help people focus on their intrinsic values, helping them move away from extrinsic goals, along with the promotion of mindfulness and voluntary simplicity.

There is a clear incompatibility with the maintenance of ‘the current economic order/hegemonic discourse’. The simultaneously promotion of PEBs and WB stems from intrinsic set of values, which clash with the goal of maximizing profit, wealth and economic growth (=extrinsic values).

“It is unlikely that those individuals and organizations highly invested in the current economic structure will embrace policies that deprioritize economic measures of progress, that reduce work hours, that increase the length of paid vacations, that provide excellent parental leave, that end corporate personhood, and that forbid advertising altogether.” (Kasser 2017)

Simply because these policies would confront directly corporate capitalism’s attempts to foster extrinsic

values: the values that encourage people to work, earn, spend and consume more, and be manipulated into striving for more material/status goods.

Time affluence exercise

Time affluence is about how much time one has to freely choose where to allocate their mind and feelings, without interruptions or pressures towards doing something else.

I would measure as the time that people report to their own care, caring for others voluntarely and also time engage in activities they find meaningful or joyfull.

My personal time affluence is moderate, I spend quite some time with family and friends, be able to take care about myself (sleep, rest, hobbies) and others (house and care work, ngos support, research and blogging), as well as have some time for my passions, which are reading, writing and being outdoors.

Geiger et a.2021 define it as sufficient time per activity, sufficient chances for planning, self determination of the conditions, sovereignity of time and harmonious synchroization with others.