This may also result in mental conditions like hoarding and self-esteem issues, which may require professional help. Consumerism is basically a theory and a social and economic order that encourages the acquisition of goods and services in increasing amounts.
According to this theory, increasing the consumption of goods is economically desirable. It describes the tendency of people living in a capitalist economy to engage in a lifestyle of excessive materialism, which revolves around wasteful or conspicuous overconsumption. Therefore, there is a very close connection between materialism and consumerism. Consumerism can be seen in many economically developed countries. Mass production of luxury goods, rising levels of personal debts, and saturation of media with promotions for branded products are some indicators of an increase in consumer spending.
A rise in consumer spending can lead to an increase in production as well as economic growth. Separate analysis of respondents low and high in materialism found no significant differences, although consumers low in materialism appear to be somewhat more likely to experience excitement and anticipation concerning the purchase than those high in materialism.
All respondents could readily describe purchases that made them happy, but the differences between low and high materialists in the products generating happiness and the types of emotions experienced were very small. The things that make one happy appear to be idiosyncratic and perhaps situation specific. Failure to find differences by materialism level may have been due in part to the type of purchase situation covered in the questionnaire in that respondents were asked to describe a happy consumption experience.
Study 2 was carried out to examine purchases that were not self-selected for the happiness they induced. Instead, in Study 2 respondents were asked to describe an important purchase" they had made, and the affect associated with these purchases was examined.
The questionnaire used for data collection included both open-ended items and items with fixed response alternatives. Respondents were first asked to "think of any important purchases you've made within the last month or so" and described several characteristics of the purchase.
If they hadn't made an important purchase in this time period, they were asked to respond for their most recent important purchase. Respondents were then shown a list of 24 emotions. This set was chosen from the lists provided by those who have assessed the structure of affect de Rivera ; Shaver et al. Respondents were asked to indicate the extent to which the product made them feel each of the emotions in the first few weeks after purchase using a response scale that ranged from 0 not at all to 5 very much.
Three versions of the questionnaire in which the order of the emotion items varied were used. Data were collected from a convenience sample of adult consumers who were approached in a variety of settings similar to those of Study 1. Demographic characteristics of the sample are shown in Table 1. As in Study 1, analyses were first carried out for the sample as a whole and then on the low and high materialism subgroups.
Types of Products for Important Purchases. As might be expected from the marketing literature on product importance e. Electronic equipment television sets, stereos, personal computers was mentioned most frequently Subsequent analyses compare low and high materialists with respect to the affect experienced following purchase. If the two groups differ in the kinds of products or consumption experiences they are describing, however, any observed differences in affect may be due to the different products involved rather than their degree of materialism.
An examination of Table 4 reveals that there were no differences between low and high materialism respondents in terms of the type of product involved in the purchase reported. Purchase-related Emotions. Table 5 shows the percentage of respondents who reported they had experienced each of the 24 emotions with respect to the product that is, they assigned the emotion a value greater than zero on the response scale.
Positive affect predominated, with happiness, excitement, and pleasure experienced most frequently. Negative emotions were less common, with nervousness experienced most frequently The positive and negative emotions reported concerning the "important" purchases of Study 2 are consistent with those described in Study 1 for happiness-inducing purchases.
When comparing intensity of affect, however, several significant differences occurred. Because of the increase in experiment-wide error rate that accompanies multiple t-tests, a second approach was used to examine affective responses in which the 24 emotion items were subjected to a principal components analysis. Loadings are shown in Table 5. The first factor has high loadings for 14 negatively valenced emotions, the second factor has high loadings for 10 positively valenced emotions.
This dimensional representation is consistent with that obtained in several other studies of affect e. Summed scores were created from responses to the 14 negative and to the 10 positive affect items; coefficient alpha for the negative and positive emotion scales were. The correlation between materialism and the positive affect scale was. Because the negative affect scale was highly skewed, a square root transformation was used; the correlation between materialism and negative affect was.
Rather than experiencing more positive affect than non-materialists, consumers high in materialism seem to experience more negative affect following acquisition.
Like earlier studies of cable television and car purchases Westbrook and of impulse purchases Gardner and Rook , the two studies reported here found a wide range of both positive and negative emotional reactions to purchases. Although both of the earlier studies found negative emotions to follow a purchase, we were somewhat surprised at the high incidence of negative affect following purchase events that respondents described as particularly happy. The largest category of negative affect involved anxiety and related states.
The most surprising aspect of the research, however, concerns the relationships between materialism and consumption-related affect. Materialists expect acquisition to make them happier, and at least in the short run the first few weeks after purchase , they report experiencing happiness and other positive affect concerning the product.
However, the level of positive affect generated by the product is no greater for materialists than for non J -materialists. History will teach us that no matter what form of government is in place there will always be that certain class of men that aggrandize themselves or please themselves with several confederacies than one government. Raised in Westphalia, Candide was surrounded by greed and his life was ultimately affected by strength and wealth.
What Master Pangloss was trying to teach Candide was that with every cause there is an effect and that it is best of all possible worlds. For example, Candide stumbled upon a utopian society called El Dorado which was literally a city of gold.
What seemed like pebbles to the residents who lived there were actually gems and bits of gold to Candide. The evidence shows that Jackson wanted to benefit the rich class instead of the nation as a whole. By vetoing the B. S, it would create conflict which would weaken the nation. Consequently, many rich Americans believed in this view, and used it as an explanation of why some are poor and some are rich.
M Dent. Much like their personality, people during this time period could never settle because they always thought that more is better. Most of their decisions are based off personal benefit. At this time, people only thought about social status because that determined who you partied with and how much money you had.
In the context of power, this statement could not be any more truer. In history, we have seen countless examples of power-hungry figures who have only been detrimental to their societies.
The increase in party polarization that the United States sees today can be linked to a power-hungry society. Consumerism also helps shape some business practices. Planned obsolescence of consumer goods can displace competition among producers to make more durable products.
Marketing and advertising can become focused on creating consumer demand for new products rather than informing consumers. Economist Thorstein Veblen developed the concept of conspicuous consumption , where consumers purchase, own, and use products not for their direct-use value but as a way of signaling social and economic status.
As standards of living rose after the Industrial Revolution , conspicuous consumption grew. High rates of conspicuous consumption can be a wasteful zero-sum or even negative-sum activity as real resources are used up to produce goods that are not valued for their use but rather the image they portray.
In the form of conspicuous consumption, consumerism can impose enormous real costs on an economy. Consuming real resources in zero- or negative-sum competition for social status can offset the gains from commerce in a modern industrial economy and lead to destructive creation in markets for consumers and other goods. Advocates of consumerism point to how consumer spending can drive an economy and lead to increased production of goods and services.
As a result of higher consumer spending, a rise in GDP can occur. In the United States, signs of healthy consumer demand can be found in consumer confidence indicators, retail sales , and personal consumption expenditures. Business owners, workers in the industry, and owners of raw resources can profit from sales of consumer goods either directly or through downstream buyers. Consumerism is often criticized on cultural grounds. Some see that consumerism can lead to a materialistic society that neglects other values.
Traditional modes of production and ways of life can be replaced by a focus on consuming ever more costly goods in larger quantities. Consumerism is often associated with globalization in promoting the production and consumption of globally traded goods and brands, which can be incompatible with local cultures and patterns of economic activity. Consumerism can also create incentives for consumers to take on unsustainable debt levels that contribute to financial crises and recessions. Environmental problems are frequently associated with consumerism to the extent that consumer goods industries and the direct effects of consumption produce environmental externalities.
These can include pollution by producing industries, resource depletion due to widespread conspicuous consumption, and problems with waste disposal from excess consumer goods and packaging. Lastly, consumerism is often criticized on psychological grounds. It is blamed for increasing status anxiety, where people experience stress associated with social status and a perceived need to "keep up with the Joneses" by increasing their consumption.
Psychological research has shown that people who organize their lives around consumerist goals, such as product acquisition, report poorer moods, greater unhappiness in relationships, and other psychological problems. Psychological experiments have shown that people exposed to consumerist values based on wealth, status, and material possessions display greater anxiety and depression.
0コメント