Materialistic happiness menaces people’s meaning in life: A serial double mediation model reflecting the roles of basic psychological needs satisfaction and subjective well-being
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Background: People are holding stronger materialistic belief than before, especially in some developed regions in the world. Materialism refers to beliefs that equate materialistic possessions with happiness, success, and make it central to life. Extant research has widely shown that materialism threatens people’s well-being. Nevertheless, the evidence on how materialism influences meaning in life is less well-established. Within the realm of this area, we examined the relationship between materialism and meaning in life, as well as its potential mechanisms, under the framework of Self-Determination Theory.Methods: Two cross-sectional online survey studies have been conducted to test the hypothesized serial double mediation model. In this model, we measured four constructs including people’s materialistic values, basic psychological needs satisfaction, subjective well-being, and meaning in life. In Study 1, we collected data from a Chinese sample (N=190). In Study 2, we tried to replicate the findings from Study 1 by collecting a non-Chinese different-age Prolific sample (N=767).Results: The results from Study 1 and Study 2 are consistent. We found that the relationship between materialistic happiness and meaning in life is serially mediated by basic psychological needs satisfaction and subjective well-being. The results confirm that materialistic happiness frustrates basic psychological needs, which threatens people’s subjective well-being then meaning in life. Nonetheless, same serial multiple mediation model is not observed from other two materialistic dimensions including materialistic centrality and materialistic success.Conclusions: Materialistic happiness threatens people’s sense of meaning in life. This relationship can be explained under the framework of Self-Determination Theory. Issues such as how different types of happiness facilitate the constitution of meaning in life, and new investigation directions on materialism and meaning in life research have been discussed.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.015 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".