This video attempts to answer the question: What is the relationship between materialism and personality disorders (especially Cluster B) or personality theory? I've actually received a number of questions on materialism, which ask about the relationship between materialism and not only personality disorders, but other mental disorders and materialism as a philosophy. Materialism is desiring wealth and material goods to an excess degree. Related conditions or constructs include oniomania, compulsive buying, impulse buying, addictive buying, excessive buying, and even consumerism.
I'm going to focus on in particular the cluster B personality disorders and kind of demonstrate how there's a lot of similarities between materialism and those disorders. We see that there are four Cluster B personality disorders: antisocial, narcissistic, borderline, and histrionic.
Antisocial personality disorder doesn’t have much overlap except perhaps with the impulsivity. Narcissistic personality disorder (and pathological narcissism, grandiose, vulnerable narcissism) have a lot of overlap with materialism. Fantasies of success, wealth, and power have a strong overlap. Borderline personality disorder and histrionic personality disorder have some overlap with materialism.
Watson, D. C. (2015). Materialism and the five-factor model of personality: A facet-level analysis. North American Journal of Psychology, 17(1), 133–150.
Otero-López, J. M., & Villardefrancos, E. (2013). Five-Factor Model personality traits, materialism, and excessive buying: A mediational analysis. Personality and Individual Differences, 54(6), 767–772.
