Material self

• Hypothalamus


  Regulates body temperature, circadian rhythms, and hunger, helps govern the endocrine system
• Amygdala


  Involved in processing emotions
• Prefrontal cortex


  Involved in judgement and decision making
• Limbic system components


  • Hypothalamus
  • Pituitary Gland
  • Amygdala
  • Hippocampus
• Sigmund Freud: 'We are pleasure seeking organisms'
• Conspicuous consumption


  Performed to demonstrate wealth or mark social status
• Maslow's hierarchy of needs

  • Self-actualization
  • Esteem
  • Love/Belonging
  • Safety
  • Physiological
• Abraham Harold Maslow was a psychologist who studied positive human qualities and the lives of exemplary people
• In 1954, Maslow created the hierarchy of human needs and expressed his theories in his book, Motivation and Personality
• Self-actualization


  A person's motivation to reach his or her full potential
• Classical conditioning


  We may be conditioned to buy by advertisements, sales, and other promos
• Operant conditioning


  We may be conditioned to buy things we found effective or rewarding
• Motivations to buy


  • Extrinsic (for external gains such as fame, popularity)
  • Intrinsic (for internal gains such as fulfillment or satisfaction)
• Knowingly or unknowingly, intentionally or unintentionally, we regard our possessions as parts of ourselves
• Defining ourselves by our possessions can contribute to feelings of well-being as well as feelings of emptiness and vulnerability
• Materialism


  The importance a consumer attaches to worldly possessions
• At the highest levels of materialism, possessions assume a central place in a person's life and are believed to provide the greatest sources of satisfaction
• Don DeLillo: 'The dead have faces, automobiles. If you don't know a name, you know a street name, a dog's name, "He drove an orange Mazda." You know a couple of useless things about a person that become major facts of identification.'
• Possessions seen as most a part of self

  • Perfume
  • Jewelry
  • Clothing
  • Foods
  • Homes
  • Vehicles
  • Pets
  • Religious icons
  • Drugs
  • Gifts
  • Heirlooms
  • Antiques
  • Photographs
  • Souvenirs
  • Collections
• Men tend to value possessions for self-focused and instrumental reasons, while women tend to emphasize expressive and other-oriented reasons for feeling attachment to possessions
• Possessions are reminders of our past, present and future
• We make things a part of self by creating or altering them
• Purchasing objects offers a means for investing self (more symbolically) in possessions
• Objects in our possession can literally or symbolically extend self
• Emphasis on material possessions tends to decrease with age, but remains high throughout life as we seek to express ourselves through possessions and use them to seek happiness, remind ourselves of experiences, accomplishments, and other people in our lives, and even create a sense of life after death
• Our accumulation of possessions provides a sense of past and tells us who we are, where we have come from, and perhaps where we are going
• Adolescents increasingly seek identity through acquiring and accumulating selected consumption objects
• During preretirement adulthood, emphasis shifts from defining oneself by what one does to defining self through what one has
• 40 to 50 year olds were the most likely of all age groups to cite social power and status as reasons to own personal possessions
• The objects we possess and consume are wanted because they tell us things about ourselves that we need to hear in order to keep ourselves from falling apart
• Ways to extend self beyond death

  • Through one's children
  • Through belief in a life after death
  • Through one's works
  • Through identification with nature
  • Through experiential transcendence
  • To have one's possessions (especially those in collections one has created) "live on" through heirs or museums