conspicuous consumption

A new study in the Journal of Consumer Research says that there may be an actual causal relationship between materialism and low self-esteem in teenagers. The study’s authors, Lan Nguyen Chaplin from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and Deborah Roedder John of the University of Minnesota, “studied children of different age groups and found that, generally, self-esteem increases from middle childhood (8-9 years) to early adolescence (12-13 years), but then declines during adolescence until the end of high school (16-18 years). This mirrors patterns in materialism, which increases in early adolescence but decreases in late adolescence during the transition into young adulthood,” says a press release about the study.