Construct · 3 fields · 5 citations
One name. Different field. Different construct. One map.
● jingle · one word, three constructs Nearest construct by meaningdialecticcompare the meaningsEvery construct on the map is compared with every other by the meaning of its definitions, and the closest one is surfaced here. The nearest construct to materialism is dialectic.
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In consumer research, materialism is a set of values that place importance on acquiring and owning material goods. Richins and Dawson, in their 1992 A Consumer Values Orientation for Materialism, defined it through three components: treating possessions as central to one's life, judging one's own and others' success by what they own, and believing that acquiring things brings happiness. Belk's earlier 1985 Materialism: Trait Aspects of Living in the Material World framed it instead as a cluster of personality traits, namely possessiveness, nongenerosity, and envy. Both treat the referent as a measurable difference between individual consumers, scored by self-report questionnaires. Later work, such as Dittmar and colleagues' 2014 meta-analysis, has linked higher materialism to lower personal well-being. The object here is a person's orientation toward goods, not a claim about the nature of mind or a theory of history.[1][2][3]
In philosophy, materialism, now often called physicalism, is the position that everything that exists is ultimately physical, including the mind. On this view there are no purely mental substances or properties standing apart from the physical world; thoughts, sensations, and consciousness are held to be physical states or processes. Smart's 1959 Sensations and Brain Processes argued for one version, the identity theory, on which sensations simply are brain processes rather than something merely correlated with them. The debate concerns what kinds of things exist and how mind relates to matter, a question in metaphysics. It is settled, if at all, by argument rather than by measurement. This referent is a claim about the fundamental nature of reality, unconnected to how much a shopper values possessions or to any account of economic history.[4]
In social and political theory, historical materialism is Marx's view that the material conditions of economic life, above all the mode of production, are the main driver of historical and social change. In the 1859 preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Marx set out the claim that the economic structure of society forms a base on which legal, political, and ideological forms rest, and that social existence shapes consciousness rather than the reverse. Historical change is explained by tensions between the forces of production and the existing relations of production. The referent is a framework for explaining how whole societies develop over time, applied to social formations rather than to individuals. It is developed and assessed through historical and theoretical analysis, not by a questionnaire or by a metaphysical argument about the mind. The word it shares with the other fields carries none of their content.[5]
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