Tim Kasser’s research while affiliated with Knox College and other places

The present study examined how adolescents' materialism relates to interpersonal materialism role models (i.e., mothers', fathers', siblings', and peers'), media exposure, and family socioeconomic status (SES). We obtained our data from the adolescent, his/her mother and father, and one each of his/her siblings and peers. The results showed that mother's, father's, sibling's and peer's', materialism are approximately equally strong predictors of adolescents' materialism. Further analyses, using structural equation modeling, revealed that interpersonal materialism role models and media exposure both positively predicted adolescents' materialism; in contrast to past literature, family SES was also significantly positively related to adolescents' materialism. Limitations and implications of the current project are discussed.

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.

Given that economic growth is typically associated with ecological destruction and little improvement in human happiness, alternative indicators of progress have been developed to provide decision-makers with additional non-economic information that might better protect the environment and promote human well-being. However, to our knowledge, no experimental evidence exists which demonstrates that the use of such alternative indicators actually causes changes in behaviors. We therefore asked participants to pretend that they were the mayor of a small city that had the opportunity to develop natural land on its borders. Participants were randomly assigned to receive either standard indicators (consisting of only economic information) or alternative indicators (consisting of economic, ecological, and well-being information) as they made decisions over the course of their “term” as mayor. Participants who received alternative indicator feedback developed significantly fewer acres of the natural land than did those who received standard indicator feedback (Cohen’s d = .52). The effect of indicator type did not significantly interact with gender, ethnicity, or value orientation, but participants low in need for cognition were more sensitive to the type of indicator provided than were those high in need for cognition. The results provide the first experimental evidence supporting the claim that alternative indicators can cause decision-makers to focus less on economic outcomes and to prioritize well-being and ecological outcomes.

Healthy democracies require civic engagement (e.g., voting) from their citizens. Past research has suggested that civic engagement is positively associated with self-transcendence values of care and concern for the welfare of others, and negatively associated with self-enhancement values of self-interest, dominance, and personal success. However, research has yet to address whether people's perceptions of others' values are related to civic engagement. Across three studies with nationally representative samples in the UK and US (Ns ≥ 1,000), we explored how civic engagement relates to (a) perceptions of national values, (b) perceptions of the values of one's typical compatriot, and (c) perceptions of the values encouraged by social and cultural institutions. Study 1 showed that the tendency for British citizens to perceive British culture as valuing self-transcendence was associated with an increased likelihood of voting in the 2015 general election. These findings were replicated for “a typical British person” (Study 2) and “a typical American person” (Study 3); Studies 2 and 3 also found that perceived self-enhancement values of typical compatriots were negatively correlated with reported voting. We also examined how perceptions of others' values relate to cultural estrangement—the feeling of not fitting in one's culture or of being atypical. Like civic engagement, those who perceived less self-transcendence and more self-enhancement in their culture felt more culturally estranged. Mediation analyses in Studies 2 and 3 revealed that estrangement helped to explain the relationship between perceptions of others' values and voting. In sum, the extent to which Brits and Americans perceive that self-transcendence values are strongly held by other citizens is associated with feeling less estranged and with reports of being more civically engaged. In contrast, the perception that these targets hold or promote self-enhancement values is positively associated with feelings of estrangement, to the detriment of civic engagement. Implications for future research and democratic processes are discussed.

Studies show that people's proclivity to apologize is positively associated with dispositional guilt and negatively associated with dispositional shame, but apologizing in those studies was assessed via self-report. The current study therefore developed a means of systematically coding participants’ apologizing behavior in a laboratory-based situation that provided participants with an opportunity to actually apologize (or not). Specifically, after completing measures of dispositional guilt and shame, undergraduates were deceived into thinking that they were late to the study; two observers then coded the extensiveness of the participants’ apologizing behaviors. Apologizing behavior was significantly positively correlated with dispositional measures of both Guilt-Repair and Guilt-Negative-Behavior-Evaluation, was marginally positively correlated with Shame-Negative-Self-Evaluation, and was unrelated to Shame-Withdraw. These findings provide further support to theories which propose that guilt motivates apology, but raise questions about the role of shame in apologizing behavior.

Scenario planning and the use of alternative futures have been used successfully to assist organisations, communities and countries to move towards desired outcomes (Dator, 2009). In this study we used a unique combination of scenario planning and a national public opinion survey to explore preferred futures for Australia in 2050. The approach used four future scenarios for Australia in 2050 as the basis for an online national public opinion survey entitled Australia: Our Future, Your Voice. Scenario development was based on a review of a broad range of scenarios for Australia and globally. We then developed four synthesis scenarios based on two axes of individual versus community orientation, and national focus on GDP growth versus a focus on well-being more broadly defined. The scenarios were labelled: (1) Free Enterprise (FE); (2) Strong Individualism (SI); (3) Coordinated Action (CA); and (4) Community Well-being (CW). We created a website that described each of these scenarios and invited people to complete a survey after they had reviewed the scenarios. The survey engaged 2575 adults in two groups: (1) a targeted statistically representative national sample (n = 2083) and (2) a self-selected sample (n = 492). Results from both groups and across all demographic categories revealed that a majority of participants preferred the Community Well-being (CW) scenario. 73% (Representative) and 61% (Self Select) ranked this scenario as 1 st or 2 nd . We also asked which scenario Australia was headed toward. 32% of the Representative sample and 50% of the Self-Selected sample participants ranked the Free Enterprise (FE) scenario as the most likely future. CW was ranked least likely to be ‘where Australia is heading?’ The dissonance between the future Australians want and where they thought the country is headed has clear policy implications, which we discuss. This extension of scenario planning to include public opinion surveys is novel and this approach can be used to improve thinking, discussion, planning and policy about the future of Australia, as well as potentially other countries and regions.

We investigated factors that promote successfully pursuing collaborative activist pro-environmental goals. Undergraduate students were randomly assigned to undergo a single session of Motivational Interviewing or a directive, control intervention; immediately afterwards, they set two collaborative, activist pro-environmental goals and rated how self-determined and self-efficacious they felt about those goals. Approximately 7 weeks later, they reported their progress on the goals and re-rated how self-determined and self-efficacious they had felt about the goals while they were pursuing them. Self-determined motivation both prospectively and concurrently predicted goal progress. Motivational Interviewing helped the goal progress of those participants who, at pre-screening, reported engaging in many individual pro-environmental behaviors, but the more directive approach worked better for those participants who were less ready to change. These results suggest the importance of attending to motivational variables if one hopes to increase people's engagement in collaborative, activist pro-environmental behaviors.

Psychobiography, the intense study of a particular person, has long existed at the fringes of mainstream psychology. This special section is comprised of two articles that take important steps to integrate psychobiography into the mainstream of psychology. Schultz and Lawrence (2017) do so by reviewing recent examples of how contemporary psychobiographers have used empirically supported methods and theories to reach conclusions about the individuals under study. Ponterotto and Reynolds (2017) do so by articulating important ethical issues relevant to the practice of psychobiography, a topic on which the American Psychological Association's current ethical code provides little guidance (American Psychological Association, 2017). This introduction closes by proposing that mainstream psychology might better appreciate how psychobiography contributes to psychological knowledge and practice if psychobiographers also clearly articulated their criteria for "good science," better explained how psychobiographical methods complement more mainstream methodological approaches, and empirically tested whether training in psychobiography helps clinicians better understand and treat their clients.

Individual differences that might moderate processes of value shifting during and after deliberating one's own death remain largely unexplored. Two studies measured participants' openness and relative intrinsic to extrinsic value orientation (RIEVO) before randomly assigning them to conditions in which they wrote about their own death or dental pain for 6 days, after which RIEVO was assessed again up to 12 days later. When participants confronted thoughts about their own death over a sustained period, high openness to experience helped them shift towards intrinsic values. Implications for understanding openness' role in value reorientation from existential deliberation processes are discussed.

The idea that human well-being (WB) can be supported and even enhanced by using, producing, buying, selling and consuming less ‘stuff’ is anathema to many living under consumer capitalism. Yet a growing research literature actually finds that frequent engagement in pro-ecological behaviours (PEBs) is positively correlated with personal WB. This paper reviews data relevant to three possible explanations for the apparent compatibility of PEBs and WB: (i) engaging in PEBs leads to psychological need satisfaction, which in turn causes WB; (ii) being in a good mood causes people to engage in more prosocial behaviours, including PEBs; and (iii) personal characteristics and lifestyles such as intrinsic values, mindfulness and voluntary simplicity cause both PEBs and WB. Because each explanation has some empirical support, I close by reflecting on some relevant interventions and policies that could strengthen each of these three pathways and thereby promote living both well and sustainably. This article is part of the themed issue ‘Material demand reduction’.