You are what you watch? A new study posits that your choice of television shows affects how you think about wealth and the people who have it or don’t. More specifically, the study, published in the journal Media Psychology, explores the hypothesis that both short-term exposure to and regular consumption of “materialistic media messages,” or MMMs, would make a person more materialistic and less caring of poor people.
The study builds on the author’s previous research. “Irrespective of class, gender, ethnicity and national upbringing, my participants who consumed more mainstream commercial media were also consistently more materialistic and less supportive of welfare benefits and sympathetic to the conditions of the impoverished,” says Rodolfo Leyva, the author of the study and fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science’s department of media and communication, via email.
[See: Basic Money Lessons You (Probably) Missed in High School.]
To investigate short-term effects, study participants were exposed to five-second bites of various pieces of media content, including advertisements, news headlines and photos. One group was shown luxury- and celebrity-centric media while the other was shown financially neutral images. They were then asked questions to measure their attitudes about wealth, success, welfare programs and impoverished people.
Participants were also asked to report about whether and how frequently they consume certain materialistic media content. The television shows specifically chosen to represent MMMs include “The Apprentice,” “Keeping Up With the Kardashians” and “X Factor.” Selected magazines include Vogue, Cosmopolitan, GQ and Esquire.
The results are not all that surprising: More exposure to MMMs, even quick bursts, corresponds with greater materialistic and anti-welfare attitudes. The short-term effects may be more surprising to laypeople, but Leyva’s results fall in line with previous research from others. Such past experiments found that even momentary exposure to materialism-related images, such as pictures of money, and language, such as the words “buy” and “expensive,” can lead you to be more focused on your own self-interest and less concerned with others and society at large.
That’s because, unfortunately, human beings seem to have a limit on how much they can care about various things. “People are on sort of a pendulum where if you swing more toward self-interest, that tends to reduce your interest in helping others,” says Roger Dooley, author of “Brainfluence: 100 Ways to Persuade and Convince Consumers With Neuromarketing.”
He notes, too, that even if you can open your heart enough to care infinitely about both yourself and others, your finances are typically more finite. “If you’re spending more on yourself, you won’t have as much left to donate,” he says.
[See: Dear Younger Me: 12 Financial Truths We Wish We Knew Earlier.]
Materialism can harm your finances more personally, too. For example, you might find yourself focusing on spending today rather than saving for the future. And MMMs can exacerbate that problem as they inject highfalutin lifestyles into people’s average daily lives and encourage overspending. “This is speculation on my part, but if you sort of normalize spending a lot of money on stuff and clothes, you might tend to internalize that behavior and let it become part of your own behaviors,” Dooley says. “That can obviously have negative effects on your finances.”
But you can’t put all the blame for your spending habits on the media. Actually, your attitudes about money and welfare may influence what you choose to watch regularly, not the other way around. “People who regularly watch these shows are drawn to them. And what draws them are their beliefs about money, which are known in financial therapy as money scripts,” says Richard Kahler, a registered investment advisor and founding board member of the Financial Therapy Association, a professional trade group for this emerging field of finance, in an email. “While it is unlikely viewing the show created these beliefs, it probably reinforced them.”
Media consumption may contribute, in part, to a person’s money scripts, he says, but the far more common and strongest influences: mom, dad or other caregivers. “As young toddlers and children, we gather information about money by what our caregivers say about money and what they don’t say about it. We gather information around what they do with money and what they don’t do with it,” Kahler says. “It’s rare that a client will trace a money script back to a television show or a movie. It’s almost always a caregiver early in life.”
In fact, Kahler argues that rather than media influencing people’s money mentalities, the opposite has a stronger case: “It’s more probable that our collective attitudes toward money affect the media more than the media affects us,” he says. “The media plays to what their viewers find instinctive and attractive.”
[Read: Fight Back: How to Combat Racial Wealth Inequality.]
That line of thinking goes along with the well-known economic theory of supply and demand. After all, if people weren’t interested in the lives of celebrities, nobody would publish magazines or produce TV shows about the subject. So, as a consumer, if you’re interested in limiting the abundance of materialistic media, a powerful move can be not consuming it.
Of course, much of the media people encounter is not by choice. “In many societies, but particularly in those with advanced market economies such as the U.K. or U.S., people are regularly exposed to materialistic media messages whether they want to be or not,” Leyva says, pointing to ads on the street or on social media and television, as well as messages in music and articles. “When this exposure happens, it can subliminally and automatically orient people to materialistic mindsets, which can in turn lead them to prefer a greater distance from others and to be less helpful and empathetic toward them.”
Given that, simply being aware of your own money mentality, as well as how media can work to influence it, can help you combat issues with materialism or personal financial problems. And you don’t even have to give up the Kardashians.
“I would agree that the types of reality television shows identified in my study can be escapist fun, and completely understand that after a hard and stressful day of work, these shows may function as a form of self-care,” Leyva says. “So it’s certainly not my intent to offend anyone or to tell them what media to consume. I simply want to inform people of some of the ways that these shows can negatively influence their conceptions of reality and corresponding behaviors.”
Kahler agrees that awareness is key to overcoming MMMs: “As one becomes aware and begins the healing process, a person becomes better able to take the external influences in stride and brush them aside,” he says.
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How Your Media-Viewing Habits Impact Your Thoughts About Money originally appeared on usnews.com
