Tired of spending sprees?

Feel grateful, increase your life satisfaction and start saving!

These long lines...

Imagine a person whose life goes around material things, preferring expensive clothes, perfumes, high-end tech gadgets and luxury cars, among others. Does the life of such a person appear to be filled with a lot of gratefulness, or rather with envy, as there always could be someone who owns better, newer, or more luxurious items?

Recent research (McCullough et al., 2002; Polak & McCullough, 2006) showed that materialism is negatively correlated with gratitude, thus people who feel grateful appear to be pursuing less materialistic goals. It seems that being materialistic and grateful at the same moment is mutually exclusive. However, what gratitude – defined by Emmons as ”the recognition and appreciation of an altruistic gift” – has in common with materialism, the devotion to material needs and desires, to the neglect of spiritual matters, a way of life, opinion or tendency based entirely upon material interests? Should we start searching for something that connects these two?
 
This question was recently considered by the researchers at Florida State and William Paterson University. The researchers began with the idea that life satisfaction can possess qualities important for both the level of gratitude and materialism one has. Being grateful results in perceiving the world as a better place, thus in more life satisfaction. Life satisfaction in turn appears to decrease materialistic values, as materialism often stems from negative feelings and anxiety, and is seen as a way of coping with them. The researchers concluded that triggering gratitude will increases life satisfaction, thus lessening materialistic attitude displayed by participants.
 
To check this assumption they run two studies. In the first of them participants filled a few surveys at an online platform. Results confirmed that life satisfaction mediates the relationship between gratitude and materialism. However, to be able to say anything about causality the researchers performed an experimental study, in which they created two separate groups: a high and low gratitude (envy) condition. The first group was obligated to close their eyes, concentrate on a warm feeling of appreciation for what they have in life and later to write about this experience. In contrast, the participants in the second group were asked to focus on one or more situations when they felt envious of another person, how they felt at those times and to write about these experiences. This manipulation was performed to trigger the sense of comparison with others. The first group should feel good about their life and being grateful for what they have, whereas the second group should feel worse off, concentrated on what they lack. These primed feelings should be observable as a difference on the Satisfaction With Life score, which was indeed the case. Results of this study further displayed that people with induced gratefulness were less materialistic than those with induced jealousy. Also, it was reconfirmed that inducing sense of gratitude reduces materialism by increasing one’s satisfaction with life: a point very important for patients with depression and decreased moods. For all of us who would like to be more satisfied with life and not living by cherishing money, from one spending spree to another.

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At BeyondThePurchase.Org we are researching the connection between people’s attitudes toward materialism, happiness and gratitude. To learn about the values you care about, how much happy are you and whether you feel grateful, first Login or Register with Beyond The Purchase, then take a few of our surveys (Materialistic Values Scale, our Gratitude Scale, and our Satisfaction with Life Scale). We think you may learn a lot about your attitude toward your happiness and your life in general.