MATERIAL/ECONOMIC SELF

• According to William James, the “Me” self has three components namely: Material Self, Social Self, and Spiritual Self.
• Material Self – Consist of things that belong to us or that we belong to. Things like family, clothes, our body, and money are some of what make up our material selves.
• People had a “material self” in the words of William James, the Harvard psychologist and giant of the American intellectual scene in the late nineteenth century. A “man’s self is the sum total of all that he can call his,” James wrote in 1890. This Included his body, family and reputation but also his “clothes and his house… his lands and horses and yacht and bank-account.” If they grew, their owners felt triumphant. If they faded, people felt a part of themselves was dying (Trentman, 2016).
• Curtis (2017) manifested that cash can have serious bearing on one’s belief regarding the way of a person views himself/herself.
• Component of the Material Self

  1. Body
  2. Clothes
  3. Family
  4. Home
• Body

  ·        We are directly attached to this commodity that we cannot live without. We strive hard to make sure that this body functions well.

  ·        Any ailment directly affects us.

  ·        We have certain preferential attachment or intimate closeness to certain body parts because of its value to us.
• Clothing is a form of self-expression. We choose and wear clothes that reflect our self.
• Clothes

  ·        The fabric and style of the clothes we wear bring sensations to the body to which directly affects our attitudes and behaviour.
• Family

  ·        When an immediate family dies, part of our self dies too. When their lives are in success, we feel their victories as if we are the one holding the trophy. We also share their failure and shame. We care, love and protect our immediate family.
• Home - It is where our heart is.
• Heyman and Ariely (2004) surmised that there are two motivations for completing a given task, social value and business value.
• By recognizing a task’s social value, a person sees it as a worthy investment of time and a part of his/her duty, and he/she is usually happy to help out. When money is offered as the motivation, however, people then start thinking less of the social aspect and more about the business value.
• money-conscious individuals are more self sufficient than their peers, particularly when money is made the focus.
• Self-View

  The amount one earns could have an effect on how he/she views both himself/herself and others. The wealthiest people are those with the deepest sense of class essentialism.
• Class essentialism – the idea that differences between classes are based upon identity and genetics, rather than circumstances.
• Ethics

  Those who perceive themselves to be in higher class were the most likely to engage in unethical behavior, particularly when a symbol of wealth was introduced, such as cutting off a pedestrian when in a luxury car, for example.
• Piff, in his study labelled the behavior, “self-interest maximization,” an idea that suggest those who have the most money or occupy higher classes are more likely to take a “what’s in it for me?” attitude. They actively work toward the most benefit for themselves (Piff, 2012).
• Many addictions begins because a person gets a positive response from a certain type of behavior. This is called “behavioral or process addiction” a compulsive behavior not motivated by dependency on an addictive substance, but rather by a process that leads to a seemingly positive outcome.
• Possessions and the Extended Self - The premise that people regard their possessions as parts of themselves is not new. If possessions are viewed as part of self, it follows that an unintentional loss of possessions should be regarded as a loss or lessening of self.
• The result of this systematic substitution of standardized “identity kits” for former possessions is an elimination of uniqueness (Snyder and Fromkin, 1981), and a corresponding and often traumatic lessening of the individual’s sense of self.
• Another instance in which nonvoluntary loss of possession may bring about a diminished sense of self is when possessions are lost due to theft or casualty.
• There is a connection between wealth and well-being, a belief that feeds what Juliet Schor (1998) calls the “cycle of work and spend” – work more to buy more. The level of consumption is set mainly by people’s choices about how much to work, and therefore how much income to earn. The individual chooses between hours at work (which yield income) and leisure (a “good” in itself, but a costly one because it entails foregoing income).
• Collections (“I Shop, Therefore I Am”)

  As Belk (1982) notes, humans and animals once primarily assembled collections of necessities for future security, but today humans more often assemble collections of non-necessities for distinction and self-definition.
• Collecting has become a significant activity in our consumer society as it has become more widely affordable through the discretionary time and money available to the general population rather than just to the wealthy elite (Masson, 1981).
• To some extent, a compulsive tendency urges them the increasing desire to collect as much as they could which gives them a greater feeling of security, and therefore becoming a basis of the sense of self and identity – “I shop, therefore I am; I have, therefore, I am”.
• Pets are regarded commonly as representative of self and studies show that we attempt to infer characteristics of people from their pets (Foote 1956; Heiman 1967).
• Levinson (1972) and Robin and Bensel (1985) found that pets are so instrumental to self-identity that they are often useful as transition objects (surrogate parents) for children and as surrogate children for adults. These observations and popular treatments suggest that pets can be therapeutic in expanding the self of children, hospital patients, and the elderly.
• Body Parts - Are among the most central parts of the extended self.
• Cathexis involves the changing of an object, activity, or idea with emotional energy by the individual.
• Body parts are expected to be more strongly cathected than material possessions that can be more easily acquired and discarded.
• loss of body parts is tantamount to losing one’s identity and one’s very being.
• material self refers to all of the physical elements that reflect who a person is which includes his/her body, possessions and home.
• Materialism refers to the theory or belief that nothing exist except matter, its movements and its modifications; the theory or belief that consciousness and will are wholly due to material agency; a tendecy to consider material possessions and physical comfort as more important than spiritual values.