… But will it make
You Happy?

Can’t buy me love,” sang The Beatles. “Say you don’t want no diamond rings. … Tell me you want the kind of things that money just can’t buy.” But the Fab Four might have been wrong about what makes people feel good, according to Evan Weingarten, an assistant professor of marketing who wants scholars to reexamine recent scholarly conclusions about happiness.

Thanks to the boom in wellness and self-care in recent years, research into happiness has become popular as well. Many studies have found that people get more life satisfaction from experiences, not material goods—things like vacations, the research says, make people feel better than jewelry.

Weingarten, however, doubts that is universally true. His research leads him to conclude that happiness from material and experiential are challenging to compare. “Does the material quality of a swimming pool mean it brings less happiness than an immaterial beach vacation? Is a cruise superior to a snowmobile, and a pedicure more enjoyable than a new gadget?” he asks in his paper “What Makes People Happy? Decoupling the Experiential-Material Continuum,” which was published in the Journal of Consumer Psychology earlier this year.

Many scholars believe the extent to which a purchase is a material possession or an experience is on a sliding scale. As a result, when material happiness intrudes, a trade-off happens, and it must, as Weingarten puts it, “dilute and detract” from experiential happiness.

Weingarten calls for a more nuanced view: He contends material possessions and experiences exist in separate unipolar dimensions, and we must evaluate them independently. To explain the principle, he uses the example of a swimming pool. “It’s a very material thing. It takes up space. You have to buy things for it, but the use of it is experiential. There are different pieces of what creates happiness from it, depending on how you think about it. Yet, the literature forces there to be a relationship and makes it seem that more experiential is good, while more material is bad,” he says.

On the contrary, Weingarten’s research found that sometimes happiness from material things can exceed the pleasures of experiences. Consumption that blends “high-material” and “high-experiential” aspects creates more happiness than pure experiential happiness from things such as concerts or hikes.

“Consumption opportunities high on material and experiential qualities, such as smartwatches, hot tubs, and paddleboards, often provide some of the highest levels of happiness,” he writes, noting that test subjects report they experience little or no trade-off when the two qualities combine.

Weingarten’s findings come from two online studies he and his co-authors conducted. In the first, 598 participants recalled four recent happiness-boosting purchases, such as a blanket, an iPhone, or a car, and rated the purchases on bipolar or unipolar scales. The resulting data showed a mild negative correlation between material and experiential consumption, and both material and experiential qualities positively predict happiness. A second study asked 1,186 participants to report anticipated happiness for certain goods and services. It revealed similar results.

“The gist is that the scholarly pendulum has swung perhaps too far in one direction,” Weingarten says. “Perhaps experiences do create more happiness than material things, but it’s unfair to weigh them against each other so directly. These things aren’t on opposite ends where they have to be negatively related. They can both contribute to well-being.”

Weingarten, who earned his PhD in marketing and psychology at the Wharton School of Business, hopes other researchers will devote more effort to looking at these components separately to analyze their advantages and disadvantages. “We are only at the first step in kicking it forward,” he says.

— George Spencer