Materialism is generally defined as a personal value stressing the importance of owning material possessions. It has emerged as a topic of great interest among scholars across a broad range of disciplines. This paper firstly introduces the concept, the structure and the measurement of materialism, and then expounds its causes and consequences, especially its effect on well-being, and the cross-cultural studies. Future researches should take socially desirable responding bias into account when measuring materialism with scales or try to develop implicit measurement. The methods used to study th...
