Are American Friendships Materialistic?

In response to my last post, Val, an immigrant from Eastern Europe, made an interesting comment. While expressing the view that Americans do not see others as "human beings with whom they can form deep and real relationships," the comment placed primary responsibility on "the materialist culture and some form of deep selfishness formed as a result."

I am always inclined to give special weight to the perceptions of people not originally from this culture, since they are less subject to ethnocentric bias. The problem here, for both my view and Val's, is one of inferring causation from correlation. In my last post, I argued that American individualism and a mobile labor force (leading to briefer relationships) were responsible for a form of friendship that seems superficial to people from more rooted cultures. Val argues instead that American materialism is the cause. Of course, it could be all three; but I am inclined to disagree with Val for the following reason.

Back in the 1960s--a period of social change leading to the end of de jure segregation, voting discrimination, and laws against intermarriage--American youth was idealistic and engaged with activities beyond their immediate self interest. This was the period when the Beatles sang "All you need is love." Annual surveys of the values of entering U. S. college students in the late 1960s showed that about 85% rated "developing a meaningful philosophy of life" as very important or essential, while only about 40% gave that rating to "being very well off financially." (Note that both of these goals are individualistic.) From then until the late 1980s the former figure gradually declined, while the latter gradually increased, until the two percentages were roughly reversed (about 45% and 75% respectively) and stabilized through 2006 at their new levels.

I remember presenting these survey results to an undergraduate class a few years ago, and the students agreed that they seemed accurate. "What about love?" I asked. One student answered, "If you have enough money, you can have anyone you want."

This was not a student response that I could have imagined in 1969. However, back in 1969, friendships in the U. S. also formed and dissolved more rapidly than in other parts of the world. So I would argue that an increase in materialism over the past 40 years might have made American friendships more materialistic, but that they remained culturally more or less equally easy to form and dissolve during the same period of time.

Key words: friendship, individualism, materialism, values, survey research

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