The impact of gratitude on adolescent materialism and generosity

ABSTRACT

Despite decades of research on materialism, there are few viable strategies for reducing materialism in younger consumers. In this paper, we present two studies conducted among over 900 adolescents that reveal a promising strategy for decreasing materialism: fostering gratitude. In Study 1, results from a nationally representative survey showed that children and adolescents with a grateful disposition were less materialistic. In Study 2, experimental evidence showed that an intervention designed to increase gratitude (i.e. keeping a gratitude journal) significantly reduced materialism among adolescents and also attenuated materialism’s negative effect on generosity. Using real money and donation as a behavioral measure, we found that adolescents who kept a gratitude journal donated 60% more of their earnings to charity compared to those in the control condition. We discuss the implications of our findings, offer some suggestions for putting our results into action, and provide an agenda for future research in this domain.

KEYWORDS:

• Adolescents
• materialism
• gratitude
• intervention
• generosity

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Demographics were obtained from Harris Interactive.

2. We acknowledge that the empirically validated Gratitude Questionnaire – 5 now exists for adolescents (Froh et al., 2011a). But our data were collected before the GQ – 5 was published, which is why we did not use it for our study.

3. Some might suggest that having a no-treatment control group is a limitation because this is the first known attempt at using a gratitude intervention to reduce materialism and increase generosity. As such, a no-treatment control group would have been warranted to determine the effects of gratitude journaling versus simply completing measures (i.e. no journaling whatsoever). We, however, purposely excluded a no-treatment control group because we wanted to increase our experimental rigor and control for demand characteristics and placebo effects.

4. Age and gender did not moderate these or subsequent findings.

5. Participants only completed this task at post-test because of potential reactivity effects (Shadish et al., 2002; Willson & Putnam, 1982); being conservative we controlled for self-reported generosity at pre-test and found the same effect F (1, 59) = 10.49, p < .01, d = .83.

Additional information

Funding

The authors thank the children and staff (who wish to remain anonymous) at summer camps in Arizona and Pennsylvania for their participation, as well as Rachel Gottlieb and Rachel Rose for their editorial help in the later stages of this manuscript. The authors also thank Harris Interactive for underwriting the cost of data collection for Study 1. This research was funded by research support from University of Arizona, University of Minnesota, University of Wisconsin, Villanova University and University of Illinois at Chicago.