Twenty-Five Years of Materialism: Do the US and Europe Diverge?

A typical example refers to the popular argument that democracies are more reluctant to engage in wars compared to dictatorships. Provided that less wars is a desirable goal, this argument considers democracies as a better form of political organization for instrumental reasons, i.e. the capacity to lead to more desirable decisions, and not for intrinsic motives. The emphasis on political participation related to post-materialistic priorities obviously implies a preference for democracy in the dictatorship/democracy antinomy.

In some cases materialism is observed through survey questions asking the respondent to state how much he or she agrees with statements such as “Some of the most important achievements in life include acquiring material possessions”, “I would rather buy something I need than borrow it from someone else”, “I like to own things that impress people” and “I like a lot of luxury in my life” (Belk 1985; Richins and Dawson 1992). In some other cases, respondents are directly asked to state how much importance they attach to issues such as spirituality, family, hedonism and conformity. Subsequently, the answers are collected and aggregated into indexes to summarize how much being “financially successful”, having “a lot of expensive possessions”, being “admired by many people” and keeping up “with fashions in clothing and hair” is important to the respondent (Kasser and Ryan 1993, 1996, 2001). Alternatively, some studies have assessed the degree of people’s materialism by asking to freely list people’s goals and subsequently to rate how much each goal is important to achieve various kind of “possible futures”. In this case, some of the possible futures feature materialistic outcomes (Sheldon and Kasser 1995, 1998, 2001). Finally, more sophisticated methods involve computer-assisted techniques to measure the relative speed with which people associate the words “I” and “me” with words recalling expensive (e.g., diamonds) and inexpensive (e.g., flowers) goods (Solberg et al. 2004).

The percentage identifying “having a lot of money” as a part of the good life, grew from 38 to 55 % and those identifying “a job that pays much more than average” increased from 45 to 60 %. Instead, those indicating a “happy marriage” as an ingredient of the good life dropped from 84 to 77 % and an “interesting job” from 69 to 63 % (Schor 1998).

http://​www.​worldvaluessurve​y.​org.

http://​www.​europeanvaluesst​udy.​eu.

WVS and EVS are freely available on line as well as instructions on how to integrate the two data-sets. For more details, please refer to: http://​www.​wvsevsdb.​com/​wvs/​WVSData.​jsp.

Sampling methods in the WVS–EVS change from country to country. In general samples are drawn from the entire population of 18 years and more—without upper age limit—to compose a sample of minimum 1000 people. However, stratification is not uniform across countries and waves: normally, statistical regions, districts, census units, election sections, electoral registers or voting stations are used in a first stage random selection of sampling points. However, it is also possible that individuals are drawn from national registers. For more details, please, refer to: http://​www.​worldvaluessurve​y.​org/​WVSContents.​jsp?​CMSID=​FieldworkSamplin​g.

Bruni and Stanca (2008, p. 6).

Please refer to Tables 4 and 5 in the Appendix 1 for a detailed description of data available, sample sizes and percentages of missing data.

The complete list of variables with the respective wordings is available in Appendix 3.

The WVS/EVS includes another question with a very similar semantic content, namely how important is the family to the respondent. We did not include this variable because its time-series is shorter than that of the question about putting more emphasis on family life. Moreover, the idea that these two variables capture the same content is reinforced by the fact that for the period when the two variables were jointly observed (1990–2006), the two trends turn out to be highly consistent across countries.

Another way to consider the question on the importance of a job that meets one’s abilities is to look at it as mirroring what self-determination theory call the basic psychological need of competence (Deci and Ryan 2002). Competence refers to the need to interact effectively with one’s environment (Ryan and Guardia 2000).

Maslow described human needs as hierarchically ordered. “Need for Self-actualization” stands at the top of the hierarchy and occurs when individuals are engaged in achieving their full potential. At the bottom of the hierarchy are the “Basic needs or Physiological needs” of a human being: food, water, sleep and sex. Superior needs can be satisfied only when inferior needs have been satisfied (Maslow 1954).

The variables concerned are those about the desirability of future change (where the value 3 is set to “good thing”) and those concerning important aspects in life (where 4 is set equal to “very important”).

Questions concerning aspects that are considered important in life have been observed in wave 2, 3, 4 and 5 for an overall sample of more than 40,000 observations. Questions about important aspects in a job are observed on more than 24,000 individuals over the first two waves. The item “good pay” is the only exception being available up to the fourth wave. In this case about 41,300 observations are available. Answers about the desirability of future changes are observed in the first two waves for an average of more than 24,000 observations. Finally, the question about the desirability of having more emphasis on family life is available up to the fifth wave for a total of about 49,000 observations. As reported in the last column of Tables 4 and in 5, the percentage of missing data both in the pooled data-set and across waves are very low and do not raise any risk of biasing our estimates. There is only one case that is worth mentioning. In the third wave France and Italy were not observed and this is why the percentages of missing data appear curiously high if compared with other waves. However, this aspect does not raise any concern of bias for our estimates because the two countries were not observed by design (Allison 2001; Schafer and Graham 2002; Saunders et al. 2006).

Another hypothesis to explain this discrepancy is that the answers to the question on the desirability of putting less emphasis on money and material possession might be biased by the social stigma of greed, leading to an under-estimation of materialism.

The figures supporting this and all the following comments on the comparison of levels of materialism across countries are omitted for brevity, and they are available upon request to the authors.

The tables with results are omitted for brevity and they are available upon request to the authors.

In particular, the trends of the importance in life of friends (Fig. 11) suggests that, between 1990 and 2006, materialism decreased in the US, even though less than in Europe. Two out of five variables observed between 1980 and 2000, the importance in a job of a good pay (Fig. 7) and not having too much pressure (Fig. 8), suggest a generalized increase in materialistic values. Further three variables of the period 1980–2000, namely having an interesting job (Fig. 9), a job that meets one’s abilities (Fig. 4) and the desirability of less emphasis on money and material possession (Fig. 12) point towards a decrease of materialism. Finally, the remaining two variables confirm the mentioned divergence. These are the desirability of putting more emphasis on family life (Fig. 1), the only variable covering our entire period of observation (1980–2006), and the importance in life of leisure (Fig. 10) covering the period 1990–2006.

The graphs summarizing the trends of each variable in each sub-period are available upon request to the authors.

The validity of subjective well-being data has been tested in a number of experiments. For example, subjective well-being data are well correlated with objective measures of well-being such as the heart rate, the blood pressure, the duration of the Duchenne smiles as well as with the neurological activity of the brain (Blanchflower and Oswald 2004; Reekum et al. 2007). Moreover, subjective well-being measures are highly correlated to each other (Schwarz and Strack 1999; Wanous and Hudy 2001; Schimmack et al. 2010) and with the evaluations about the respondent’s well-being as given by friends, relatives or clinical experts (Schneider and Schimmack 2009; Kahneman and Krueger 2006; Layard 2005). Finally, happier people have been found to have better memories of past positive events and to cope better with stress.