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Although people living in consumer-based cultures such as the U.S. often believe that they will be happier if they acquire more money, the findings of a newly published paper by a University at Buffalo research team suggest that there may be downsides to this pursuit.<\/p>\n
The pursuit of money in and of itself is not bad, but there are risks to consider when it is fueled by a desire to boost self-esteem. When people tie their self-worth to the pursuit of financial success, they are more vulnerable to negative psychological consequences<\/strong>, according to Lora Park, an associate professor of psychology at UB and the study’s lead author.<\/p>\n Specifically, basing self-esteem on financial success predicted making more financially-based social comparisons with others, feeling less autonomy and control over one’s life, and experiencing more financial hassles, stress and anxiety<\/strong>. These findings were evident even after accounting for other variables, such as financial status, materialistic values and importance of financial goals.<\/p>\n “People don’t often think of the possible down sides of wrapping their identity and self-worth around financial pursuits, because our society values wealth as a model of how one should be in the world,” says Park. “It’s important to realize these costs because people are gravitating toward this domain as a source of self-esteem without realizing that it has these unintended consequences.”<\/p>\n Park’s paper, with UB graduate student Deborah Ward and UB assistant professor of psychology Kristin Naragon-Gainey, appears in the latest issue of the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin<\/em>.<\/p>\n Working with samples of 349 college students and a nationally representative group of 389 participants, the researchers first developed a scale to measure Financial Contingency of Self-Worth (CSW), or the degree to which people base their self-esteem on financial success, and then conducted a series of experiments to examine the effects of threatening people’s sense of financial security.<\/p>\n “When we asked people to write about a financial stressor, they experienced a drop in their feelings of autonomy<\/strong>,” says Park. “They also showed more disengagement from their financial problems<\/strong> — they gave up searching for solutions. We didn’t find this in people who didn’t tie their self-esteem to financial success or among those who were asked to write about an academic stressor.”<\/p>\n In those essays, the researchers also coded the type of language participants used to describe their financial problems.<\/p>\n “We found that people who highly based their self-worth on financial success used more negative emotion-related words, like sadness and anger<\/strong>,” says Park. “This demonstrates that just thinking about a financial problem generates a lot of stress and negative emotions for these individuals<\/strong>.”<\/p>\n But Park says this effect is eliminated if you get people to self-affirm by giving them an opportunity to think about their personal strengths<\/strong>.<\/p>\n “This suggests that self-esteem concerns emerge when people are thinking about financial problems, but if you can repair their self-esteem by having them think about their strengths, then there is no reduction in feelings of autonomy.”<\/p>\n A final study found that people who based their self-esteem on financial success — and were led to believe that they would experience financial instability in their future — became more cautious when it came to extravagant spending decisions. This could be interpreted as a desire of these individuals to protect their self-esteem following this financial threat, suggests Park.<\/p>\n This research also has implications beyond finances and self-esteem and has many possible future directions, such as the effects of financially contingent self-worth on close relationships, group dynamics and organizational settings.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" From the University at Buffalo press release: Although people living in consumer-based cultures such as the U.S. often believe that they will be happier if they acquire more money, the… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[5,334,338],"tags":[123,326,91,12,167,98,62],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20706"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20706"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20706\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20740,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20706\/revisions\/20740"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20706"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20706"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20706"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}