1. The Social Psychology of
Consumption
Chapter 2
John Bradford, Ph.D.

2. Consumption and Materialism
• “The world has enough for
everybody’s need, but not for
everybody’s greed”- Gandhi.
• Today, aside from the very poor,
nearly everyone consumes more
than is necessary to survive.
Why?
– Relates to all three central issues
of environmentalism: i)
sustainability, ii) environmental
justice, iii) beauty of ecology

3. Materialism
• “The worker can create nothing
without nature, without the
sensuous external world”- Karl
Marx.
• Who would disagree with
this!?!
• All people everywhere have to 1818-1883
produce their means of
‘subsistence’ (livelihood). We
all depend on our
environments.

4. Marx’s Historical Materialism
• Human beings form ideas under the influence of material or environmental
circumstances. Such ideas then compel them to change circumstances.
There is free will, but history is not determined by these freely willed
intentions. The point of theory is to predict results, not intentions.
• Every society produces a surplus, and has different rules for determining
how this surplus wealth is distributed.
• Marx says that people’s way of producing a surplus influences (or
‘determines’) their ideas about how to distribute the surplus.
Material
Ideas
Circumstances

5. Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs
• Aesthetics
• Knowledge &
Understanding
Self-
Actualize
Esteem
Belonging and Abraham Maslow
Love 1908 - 1970
Safety
Physiological

6. The Original Affluent Society?
• Time allocation studies suggest that a typical
adult hunter-gatherer only needs to ‘work’ for
2 to 5 hours per day!
Uncontacted Tribes, Brazil, 2009

7. Uncontacted Tribes
Peru 2011

8. Before the Industrial Revolution
• Difficult to generalize, but based on historical
record, we can safely assume the following:
1. There was more leisure and less work
2. There was much less etiquette than
today

9. Leisure time
• Working hours under capitalism
(at their peak) increased by more
than 50 percent from Medieval
period.
• Work was intermittent, depended
on season:
breakfast, lunch, afternoon
nap, dinner breaks
• General pace was far slower and
more leisurely- (based on
evidence of caloric intake)
• Consciousness of time was
radically different: there were no
clocks!

10. Leisure time
• Medieval Europe
– In Medieval England, about 1/3rd of
the year devoted to leisure
– In Medieval France, 52 Sundays
off, 90 guaranteed rest days, 38
holidays
– In Medieval Spain, 5 months per
year were devoted to vacation
• Antiquity
– Athenians had 50-60 holidays
annually
– By mid 4th century, Roman
calendar designated 175 official
public festival days

11. Conspicuous Consumption
• What is conspicuous
consumption? Why do we do
it?
• We are motivated not only be
interests, but also by what Thorstein Veblen
Veblen calls ‘sentiments’ 1857 - 1929
– Goods distinguish us from others
in a hierarchy, and also show that
we belong to one group (and not
another)

12. The Treadmill of Production
• Why are we stuck on this
treadmill? Can we get off?

13. The Treadmill of Production