How Being Materialistic Can Actually Make You Happy

What does that mean in practice? "If you buy a couch and it looks bad in your living room, you get over and adapt to that happiness faster than, say, a terrible vacation," says Goodman.

4. How materialistic are you? But not all people feel the same way about what they buy. The study also tries to take into account people who are biased to prefer materialistic things. So Goodman gave his participants a test to determine how important materialistic values are to them. The people who answered those questions the same way had other things in common in the results of the experiment. The more materialistic things mattered to a person, the less those people made a distinction between material and experiential purchases. "When a positive experience happens to them, they don't seem to be any happier than with a material purchase," says Goodman. So for highly materialistic people, it's not necessarily true that buying experiences is riskier for their happiness.

5. Think twice before you buy. So what's the lesson for the average consumer? Stop before you spend money on a trip to see a long-lost relative or on concert tickets for an old band's reunion. "Before you make the purchase, ask yourself, 'How likely is this to turn out negatively?' " says Goodman. Maybe there's a reason you haven't seen the relative in a while. Maybe what was once your favorite band now isn't as good as it once was. If the risk of the purchase turning out bad is high, you might be better off giving into your materialism and spending that money on a new tangible luxury good.