I’m a professor of psychology at Knox College, Illinois. My primary interest concerns people’s values and goals, and how they relate to quality of life. Over the last decade I have been especially focused on studying ‘materialistic values,’ i.e., being wealthy, having many possessions, being attractive, and being popular.
My colleagues and I have found that when people believe materialistic values are important, they report less happiness and more distress, have poorer interpersonal relationships, contribute less to the community, and engage in more ecologically damaging behaviors. My research has recently been investigating how values relate to well-being in various nations around the world, as well as what leads some people to become especially focused on different types of values.
