Abstract
In our daily lives, some people tend to use the same material goods more extensively than other people. It would appear that people like this consume fewer material inputs, other things being equal. Our research question is whether they are also happier in terms of life satisfaction. To study this, we first hypothesized that they are happier due to the endowment effect, prosocial or pro-environmental motivations, or income and substitution effects. We show that income and substitution effects are positive for people who use products for longer. Using a reduced form model that incorporates these four effects together, and empirical data originally collected from rural areas in Vietnam, we divide consumption into material consumption and residual consumption and demonstrate that, in general, increased material consumption is not associated with increased well-being; however, for those who take better care of their possessions, this effect is reversed, and material consumption does increase well-being. Our study shows that for people who take better care of their possessions, increased consumption is linked to increased well-being. This finding has a useful policy implication for developing countries to improve their well-being by promoting economic growth alongside responsible consumption.
Highlights
There have been increasingly urgent calls to transform the current material-intensive economy to a circular economy [1,2]
This study explores how attachment to goods is related to life satisfaction, an oft-cited aspect of subjective well-being (SWB)
This possible conversion brings us on the right track to alleviating poverty in low-income countries, but without decoupling material consumption and income, it may run the risk of exacerbating fears of increasing environmental burdens through over-consumption
Summary
There have been increasingly urgent calls to transform the current material-intensive economy to a circular economy [1,2]. There exists vast literature on attachment theory, including psychological studies that focus on interpersonal relationships, that is, the intimate emotional bonds between people, such as those between parents and children (e.g., [4]). According to [7], place attachment can be categorized as either “social attachment”, which includes institutional ties, social activity, and local intimates; or “affective attachment” in which the satisfaction is with the neighborhood itself [5] Following this categorization, we use the term attachment to goods in the latter sense—namely, we focus in this paper on material possession attachment [8]. We hypothesize the following four relationships between longer use of goods and SWB
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