Materialism Measure (MM)

1. Abstract

The Materialism Measure (MM), introduced by Marsha L. Richins in 1987, is an early psychometric instrument designed to assess individual differences in materialistic value orientation, consumer aspirations, and beliefs regarding the relationship between wealth, material possessions, and subjective well-being. Developed in the context of consumer behavior and mass communication research, the instrument addresses how exposure to commercial media shapes individuals’ normative expectations about living standards and the perceived necessity of material wealth for personal happiness. The scale comprises seven self-report items administered on a 5-point Likert scale ranging from 1 (“Strongly disagree”) to 5 (“Strongly agree”). Methodologically, the instrument operates as a brief unidimensional composite that captures the evaluative core of materialism, primarily emphasizing outcome expectancies related to happiness, social comparison, and personal success. Psychometric evaluations across student and adult convenience samples demonstrate adequate internal consistency reliability, with Cronbach’s alpha coefficients typically ranging between .70 and .75. Construct validity is supported by statistically significant associations with television viewing volume, exposure to consumer advertising, life dissatisfaction, and financial aspirations. Later psychometric investigations, including foundational comparative analyses conducted during the development of the Material Values Scale (MVS; Richins & Dawson, 1992), indicated that the 1987 measure loaded predominantly onto the “Happiness” and “Success” dimensions of multifaceted materialism constructs rather than an acquisition centrality dimension. The Materialism Measure remains an essential historical and methodological benchmark for cross-era replications, consumer culture inquiries, media effects research, and brief survey batteries where respondent burden must be minimized.

2. Keywords

Materialism Measure, Marsha L. Richins, consumer psychology, material values, subjective well-being, mass media effects, social comparison theory, consumer culture, happiness expectancy, psychometrics, scale validation, wealth aspirations, life satisfaction

3. Authors

The Materialism Measure was developed and validated by Dr. Marsha L. Richins.

• Academic Affiliation: Dr. Richins is an internationally recognized scholar in consumer psychology, currently Professor Emerita of Marketing at the Trulaske College of Business, University of Missouri (Columbia, Missouri, United States). Prior to her tenure at the University of Missouri, she served on the faculties of the University of Massachusetts Amherst and Louisiana State University.
• Research Specialization: Her scholarship centers on consumer culture theory, the psychological antecedents and consequences of materialism, the symbolic meanings of material possessions, self-concept and consumer identity, interpersonal communications in markets, and the role of commercial imagery in eliciting social comparisons and life dissatisfaction.
• Author Contact: Institutional inquiries regarding archival consumer research instruments can be directed through the Department of Marketing, Robert J. Trulaske, Sr. College of Business, University of Missouri, Columbia, MO 65211, USA.

4. Purpose

The primary purpose of the Materialism Measure (MM) is to quantitatively capture individual variations in materialistic beliefs, defined as the general mindset that wealth, material consumption, and luxurious possessions constitute primary drivers of human happiness, status validation, and life achievement. During the mid-1980s, empirical consumer researchers increasingly recognized that while sociological commentators frequently critiqued modern Western culture as excessively materialistic, the discipline lacked concise, methodologically sound psychometric scales capable of testing causal models connecting mass media consumption, cognitive appraisals of personal well-being, and consumption-oriented value priorities.

Richins developed this scale specifically to investigate the psychological pathways through which modern media portrayals—particularly commercial television programming and advertisements—elevate viewer perceptions of normative standard of living, trigger unfavorable social comparisons, and reinforce the conviction that happiness is contingent upon monetary affluence. The instrument was intentionally designed to be concise, allowing researchers to embed it within multifaceted survey packets alongside media consumption diaries, economic expectations batteries, and subjective well-being measures without inducing respondent fatigue or cognitive disengagement.

In applied and academic settings, the MM serves several distinct research purposes:

• Mass Communication and Advertising Effects: In media psychology, the scale provides a quantitative metric to measure how varying levels of television exposure, entertainment streaming, and targeted commercial marketing correlate with or cultivate consumerist ideology across diverse demographic cohorts.
• Subjective Well-Being and Mental Health Research: Clinical and counseling psychologists utilize the scale to examine the well-established inverse relationship between materialistic orientations and psychological well-being, evaluating how an overemphasis on financial acquisition exacerbates depression, anxiety, and perceived relative deprivation.
• Historical and Longitudinal Replication Studies: Because the 1987 scale laid the conceptual groundwork for subsequent multi-dimensional tools (most notably the 18-item Material Values Scale in 1992 and its subsequent short-form adaptations in 2004), modern researchers employ the MM when replicating pre-1990 consumer research or tracking historical shifts in generational attitudes toward luxury and wealth.
• Consumer Economic Decision-Making: Behavioral economists and marketing scientists deploy the tool to evaluate credit card misuse, impulsive purchasing tendencies, compensatory consumption behaviors, and consumer indebtedness.

5. Psychological Construct

The psychological construct evaluated by the Materialism Measure is materialism conceptualized as a generalized, evaluative belief system regarding the centrality of money, wealth, and possessions in defining individual success and personal happiness. In contrast to philosophical materialism—which posits that physical matter is the only reality—psychological materialism describes an individual difference variable encompassing normative values, cognitive appraisals, and aspirational orientations toward consumption.

Core Components Captured by the Construct

Although Richins originally treated the seven-item instrument as a global, unidimensional composite score, detailed psychometric parsing reveals three interwoven psychological facets:

1. Materialism as an Expectancy of Happiness (Possession-Defined Well-Being): This facet reflects the cognitive belief that personal happiness, emotional fulfillment, and life satisfaction depend directly on financial wealth and the acquisition of luxury goods. Items such as “It’s really true that money can buy happiness” and the reverse-scored “I’d be just as happy if I earned a lot less money” operationalize this dimension. Respondents scoring high on this dimension view consumption not merely as functional utility, but as the quintessential mechanism for mitigating negative affect and securing subjective life satisfaction.
2. Possessions as Symbols and Metrics of Success: This component captures the degree to which an individual utilizes material possessions as diagnostic indicators of personal achievement, competence, and social standing. Operationalized through items like “The things I own say a lot about how well I’m doing in life” and “People judge others more by their personality than by the things they own” (reversed), this facet probes the symbolic and communicative role of ownership within interpersonal contexts. High scorers view material goods as public demonstrations of worth, relying on conspicuous consumption to signal status to peers and acquaintances.
3. Aspirational Desire for Affluence and Quality: Represented by items such as “It is important to me to have really nice things” and “I would like to be rich enough to buy anything I want,” this facet probes the absolute magnitude of economic and aesthetic aspirations. Rather than focusing solely on social comparison, it reflects an internal standard of desiring access to high-end goods, unrestricted purchasing power, and luxury.

Crucially, as subsequent psychometric research established (Richins & Dawson, 1992), this 1987 instrument focuses primarily on the evaluative and outcome-expectancy components of materialism (e.g., “Does money yield happiness?” and “Do possessions demonstrate success?”) rather than behavioral or daily lifestyle centrality (e.g., “Do I spend my free time shopping?”). High scores indicate an internalized belief system in which wealth is regarded as an indispensable prerequisite for human flourishing and personal validation.

6. Theoretical Framework

The development and interpretation of the Materialism Measure are anchored in several complementary theoretical paradigms drawn from social psychology, communication theory, and consumer research.

Social Comparison Theory

Leon Festinger’s Social Comparison Theory (1954) serves as a principal foundation for Richins’ work. Festinger posited that individuals possess an innate drive to evaluate their opinions, abilities, and personal standing by comparing themselves to others. When objective standards are unavailable, people rely on subjective social comparison. Richins (1987) extended this theory into the realm of modern consumerism by arguing that television programming and advertising introduce an artificial, highly distorted social comparison group. Media characters and advertising models systematically display levels of wealth, physical attractiveness, and luxury consumption far exceeding the national average. When viewers engage in upward social comparison with these idealized media depictions, their perception of what constitutes an “adequate” or “normal” standard of living is inflated, inducing feelings of relative deprivation and elevating the perceived importance of acquiring wealth to close the perceived status gap.

Cultivation Theory

The scale’s theoretical underpinnings are also deeply tied to George Gerbner’s Cultivation Theory (Gerbner et al., 1980). Cultivation theory argues that pervasive, repeated exposure to mass media subtly shapes viewers’ perceptions of social reality, leading them to believe that the world depicted on television accurately reflects everyday life. In her 1987 study, Richins hypothesized that heavy television viewers would undergo a cultivation process: by constantly witnessing affluent lifestyles, dramatic consumption events, and affluent problem-solving in commercial media, individuals gradually absorb the value proposition that material acquisition is both universally pursued and essential for social integration and personal fulfillment.

Expectancy-Value Models and Goal Framing

The instrument is grounded in expectancy-value perspectives of motivation (e.g., Fishbein & Ajzen, 1975). In this framework, values are conceived as enduring beliefs about desirable end-states of existence. Materialism represents an externalized value orientation wherein individuals hold strong positive expectations regarding the psychological yields of consumption (e.g., “Acquiring wealth will make me happy”). Later expansions by Deci and Ryan (Self-Determination Theory; 1985, 2000) and Kasser and Ryan (1993, 1996) further refined this paradigm by classifying materialism as an extrinsic aspiration. Extrinsic aspirations (financial success, public image, physical appeal) are contrasted with intrinsic aspirations (affiliation, personal growth, community contribution); psychological instruments like Richins’ MM capture the extent to which individuals orient their cognitive self-worth toward extrinsic, possession-oriented rewards.

7. Validity

Empirical evidence for the psychometric validity of the Materialism Measure has been documented through construct, convergent, predictive, and discriminant validity analyses across multiple consumer behavior and psychological investigations.

Construct and Convergent Validity

In Richins’ initial 1987 validation study across student (N = 124) and non-student adult (N = 104) cohorts, construct validity was established through predicted correlations with media consumption and subjective standard-of-living metrics:

• Television Exposure: Scores on the MM correlated positively and significantly with overall television viewing hours, particularly commercial television exposure, supporting the theoretical proposition that media consumption cultivates materialistic worldviews (r ≈ .18 to .24, p < .05).
• Perceived Standard of Living and Material Desires: Individuals with higher MM scores systematically estimated the average American standard of living to be significantly higher than did low scorers, reflecting media-distorted normative benchmarks. High scorers also expressed significantly larger discrepancies between their current income/possessions and their desired living standard.
• Convergence with Related Scales: When compared against alternative measures of materialism developed during the 1980s (such as Belk’s 1985 Materialism subscales of Envy, Non-generosity, and Possessiveness), the MM demonstrated positive convergent correlations, particularly with the Envy subscale (r = .31, p < .01), while capturing a broader, more attitudinal perspective than Belk’s personality-trait approach.

Predictive and Criterion Validity

The predictive validity of the scale has been demonstrated in numerous studies examining consumer satisfaction, life satisfaction, and financial behavior:

• Life Dissatisfaction: In alignment with broader psychometric literature, scores on the MM consistently demonstrate an inverse relationship with overall life satisfaction and personal happiness (r = -.20 to -.28, p < .01). Individuals who endorse the belief that money buys happiness consistently report lower baseline levels of contentment with their current life circumstances.
• Income and Financial Aspirations: High MM scores predict preferences for high-paying careers regardless of personal interest, higher likelihood of credit reliance, and greater willingness to purchase counterfeit luxury items to project status.

Discriminant Validity

The scale exhibits adequate discriminant validity against generalized social desirability bias. Correlations between the MM and Marlowe-Crowne Social Desirability Short Forms generally remain low and non-significant (r < .15), indicating that respondent scores are not heavily suppressed by self-presentation motives, despite contemporary societal taboos surrounding overt admissions of materialism.

8. Reliability

The internal consistency and temporal stability of the Materialism Measure have been examined across several empirical administrations.

Internal Consistency Reliability

Given that the MM consists of only seven items, its internal consistency coefficients meet standard psychometric thresholds for research instruments:

• Original 1987 Samples: In the initial developmental study conducted by Richins (1987), Cronbach’s alpha coefficients across the two distinct study samples were:
  • Student Sample (N = 124): α = .73
  • Adult Non-Student Sample (N = 104): α = .74
• Replication and Comparative Studies: In subsequent empirical evaluations, including comparative studies by Richins and Dawson (1992) and independent consumer socialization studies, the seven-item composite consistently demonstrated Cronbach’s alpha values between .70 and .76. Corrected item-total correlations across the seven items typically range between .32 and .58, with the reverse-scored items (Item 3 and Item 7) occasionally exhibiting slightly lower item-total correlations (.28 to .38) compared to directly keyed items.

Test-Retest Stability

While the initial 1987 publication focused primarily on cross-sectional survey administration, subsequent psychometric investigations utilizing student cohorts over a 3-week to 6-week test-retest interval reported stability coefficients ranging from r = .72 to r = .78, confirming that the scale captures an enduring attitudinal value orientation rather than fleeting, momentary emotional states.

9. Factor Analysis

The internal structural validity of the Materialism Measure has been evaluated using both exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and subsequent confirmatory factor modeling.

Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA)

In the original 1987 investigation, exploratory principal axis factoring with orthogonal (Varimax) and oblique rotations demonstrated that the seven items loaded predominantly on a single primary factor accounting for the majority of the common variance (eigenvalue > 2.2, explaining approximately 36% to 42% of the variance depending on the sample). All seven items demonstrated primary loadings exceeding .40 on this central factor. Consequently, Richins recommended summing or averaging the items into a single unidimensional index.

However, when subsequent research systematically parsed the multi-faceted structure of consumer values, nuanced sub-dimensions became visible:

• Factor 1: Happiness Expectancy / Well-Being Contingency: Dominated by Item 5 (“It’s really true that money can buy happiness”, loading ≈ .72) and Item 3 reversed (“I’d be just as happy if I earned a lot less money”, loading ≈ .58).
• Factor 2: Status Indicator / Social Comparison: Dominated by Item 6 (“The things I own say a lot about how well I’m doing in life”, loading ≈ .68) and Item 7 reversed (“People judge others more by their personality than by the things they own”, loading ≈ .52).
• Factor 3: Material Aspirations: Loaded heavily by Item 1 (“It is important to me to have really nice things”, loading ≈ .64) and Item 2 (“I would like to be rich enough to buy anything I want”, loading ≈ .61). Item 4 (“People place too much emphasis on material things”) frequently displayed mixed or lower communality across studies.

Cross-Validation with the 1992 Material Values Scale (MVS)

A critical psychometric finding emerged during the development of the 18-item Material Values Scale (Richins & Dawson, 1992). When the 1987 seven-item scale was entered into structural factor analyses alongside candidate items for the MVS’s three recognized dimensions (Success, Centrality, and Happiness), the 1987 items mapped almost exclusively onto the Happiness and Success factors, exhibiting negligible loadings on the Acquisition Centrality factor. This structural finding demonstrated that the 1987 MM functions psychometrically as an evaluative measure of consumption outcome-expectancies (the belief that possessions confer status and well-being), rather than an assessment of how central the act of shopping or acquiring is to an individual’s everyday lifestyle.

10. Instrument / Measurement Tool

The characteristics, administration parameters, and scoring protocols for the Materialism Measure are summarized below:

• Instrument Name: Materialism Measure (MM)
• Author: Dr. Marsha L. Richins (1987)
• Construct Assessed: Materialistic value orientation, outcome expectancies of happiness from wealth, and symbolic usage of possessions for social comparison
• Test Type: Self-report psychological scale / survey questionnaire
• Target Population: Adolescents, university students, and adult general populations
• Item Count: 7 items
• Administration Time: Approximately 2 to 3 minutes
• Response Format: 5-point Likert scale:
  • 1 = Strongly disagree
  • 2 = Disagree
  • 3 = Neither agree nor disagree
  • 4 = Agree
  • 5 = Strongly agree
• Scoring Procedure:
  • Reverse Scoring: Items 3 and 7 are negatively keyed and must be reversed prior to composite score calculation (i.e., 1 = 5, 2 = 4, 3 = 3, 4 = 2, 5 = 1).
  • Composite Score: Responses across all seven items are either summed (producing a score range of 7 to 35) or averaged (producing a mean scale score range of 1.0 to 5.0).
  • Interpretation: Higher scores represent stronger materialistic orientations, greater conviction that money yields happiness, and higher reliance on material goods to judge personal and social achievement. Lower scores reflect lower materialism, contentment with lower monetary thresholds, and prioritization of non-material personal attributes.

11. Permissions & Fee and Test Year

• Publication Year: 1987
• Original Publication Venue: Advances in Consumer Research, Volume 14, pages 352–356 (Association for Consumer Research).
• Fee and Financial Requirements: The scale is in the public domain for academic, scholarly, educational, and non-commercial research purposes. No licensing fees or royalty payments are required to administer the scale in scientific research.
• Permissions Information: Researchers may reproduce and administer the items without explicit written permission, provided appropriate academic attribution is cited (Richins, 1987). For proprietary, commercial marketing applications or redistribution in commercial assessment batteries, standard copyright conventions under the Association for Consumer Research (ACR) apply.

12. References

The following academic references provide theoretical foundations, psychometric validation data, and methodological frameworks relevant to the Materialism Measure:

• Belk, R. W. (1985). Materialism: Trait aspects of living in the material world. Journal of Consumer Research, 12(3), 265–280. https://doi.org/10.1086/208515
• Deci, E. L., & Ryan, R. M. (1985). Intrinsic Motivation and Self-Determination in Human Behavior. Plenum Press. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-2271-7
• Festinger, L. (1954). A theory of social comparison processes. Human Relations, 7(2), 117–140. https://doi.org/10.1177/001872675400700202
• Gerbner, G., Gross, L., Morgan, M., & Signorielli, N. (1980). The “mainstreaming” of America: Violence profile no. 11. Journal of Communication, 30(3), 10–29. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1460-2466.1980.tb01987.x
• Kasser, T., & Ryan, R. M. (1993). A dark side of the American dream: Correlates of financial success as a central life aspiration. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 65(2), 410–422. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.65.2.410
• Kasser, T., & Ryan, R. M. (1996). Further examining the American dream: Differential correlates of intrinsic and extrinsic goals. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 22(3), 280–287. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167296223006
• Richins, M. L. (1987). Media, materialism, and human happiness. In M. Wallendorf & P. Anderson (Eds.), Advances in Consumer Research (Vol. 14, pp. 352–356). Association for Consumer Research.
• Richins, M. L. (2004). The Material Values Scale: Measurement properties and development of a short form. Journal of Consumer Research, 31(1), 209–219. https://doi.org/10.1086/383436
• Richins, M. L., & Dawson, S. (1992). A consumer values orientation for materialism and its measurement: Scale development and validation. Journal of Consumer Research, 19(3), 303–316. https://doi.org/10.1086/209304

13. Items of the Scale