The effect of materialistic social models on teenagers’ materialistic aspirations: Results from priming experiments

The aim of the present research was to examine the influence of situational priming of materialistic social models on adolescents’ materialistic and non-materialistic life aspirations. Three experimental studies were conducted on students aged 13-16 years. Each study used a different means of cuing materialism (scrambled sentences, questions concerning events, and images with materialistic themes) and tested the effects of four distinct social models (mother, father, peer, and media). Life aspirations were measured with the Aspiration Index. The results indicated that activation of materialistic social models increases the importance that adolescents place on financial success (Studies 1, 2, 3) and image (Study 3) aspirations, but does not generally affect popularity or non-materialistic aspirations (Studies 1, 2, 3). Effects were typically of the same magnitude across the four social models examined. A meta-analysis of the three studies confirmed these conclusions.