Research suggests that when people grow up in unfortunate social situations--where they're not treated very nicely by their parents or when they experience poverty or even the threat of death, they become more materialistic as a way to adapt. A 1995 paper in Developmental Psychology (Vol. 31, No. 6) by Kasser and colleagues was the first to demonstrate this. Teens who reported having higher materialistic attitudes tended to be poorer and to have less nurturing mothers than those with lower materialism scores, the team found. Similarly, a 1997 study in the Journal of Consumer Research (Vol. 23, No. 4) headed up by Aric Rindfleisch, PhD, then a doctoral student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and now an associate professor of marketing there, found that young people whose parents were undergoing or had undergone divorce or separation were more prone to developing materialistic values later in life than those from intact homes. And in the first direct experimental test of the point, Kasser and University of Missouri social psychologist Kenneth Sheldon, PhD, reported in a 2000 article in Psychological Science (Vol. 11, No. 4), that when provoked with thoughts of the most extreme uncertainty of them all--death--people reported more materialistic leanings. Even if some materialists swim through life with little distress, however, consumerism carries larger costs that are worth worrying about, others say. There are consequences of materialism that can affect the quality of other people's and other species' lives. Corporate-driven consumerism is having massive psychological effects, not just on people, but on our planet as well.