The DOI matches its Crossref record; 9 of the 9 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
To Do or to Have? That Is the Question.
Open accessAbstract
Do experiences make people happier than material possessions? In two surveys, respondents from various demographic groups indicated that experiential purchases-those made with the primary intention of acquiring a life experience--made them happier than material purchases. In a follow-up laboratory experiment, participants experienced more positive feelings after pondering an experiential purchase than after pondering a material purchase. In another experiment, participants were more likely to anticipate that experiences would make them happier than material possessions after adopting a temporally distant, versus a temporally proximate, perspective. The discussion focuses on evidence that experiences make people happier because they are more open to positive reinterpretations, are a more meaningful part of one's identity, and contribute more to successful social relationships.
Overview
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
Cites
Ryan, R. M., & Deci, E. L. (2000) · American Psychologist · doi:10.1037//0003-066x.55.1.68 · Cited by 54,599
Maslow, A. H. (1943) · Psychological Review · doi:10.1037/h0054346 · Cited by 21,563
Possessions and the Extended Self
Belk, R. W. (1988) · Journal of Consumer Research · doi:10.1086/209154 · Cited by 9,064
Ecological momentary assessment
Shiffman, S., Stone, A. A., & Hufford, M. R. (2008) · Annual Review of Clinical Psychology · doi:10.1146/annurev.clinpsy.3.022806.091415 · Cited by 6,454
A Measure of Subjective Happiness: Preliminary Reliability and Construct Validation
Lyubomirsky, S., & Lepper, H. S. (1999) · Social Indicators Research · doi:10.1023/a:1006824100041 · Cited by 4,071
Further Examining the American Dream: Differential Correlates of Intrinsic and Extrinsic Goals
Kasser, T., & Ryan, R. M. (1996) · Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin · doi:10.1177/0146167296223006 · Cited by 2,745
Influence of extraversion and neuroticism on subjective well-being: Happy and unhappy people
Costa, P. T., & McCrae, R. R. (1980) · Journal of Personality and Social Psychology · doi:10.1037/0022-3514.38.4.668 · Cited by 2,652 · cited 1×
“This assumption is substantiated by findings indicating that self-reported measures of happiness are internally consistent , stable, and converge with informant and spouse reports (Costa & McCrae, 1980; Lyubomirsky & Lepper, 1999).”
ResultDiener, E., & Seligman, M. E. P. (2002) · Psychological Science · doi:10.1111/1467-9280.00415 · Cited by 2,508
Materialism: Trait Aspects of Living in the Material World
Belk, R. W. (1985) · Journal of Consumer Research · doi:10.1086/208515 · Cited by 1,966
Cited by
(2006) · doi:10.1080/01449290500330331 · Cited by 3,026
Vansteenkiste, M., Lens, W., & Deci, E. L. (2006) · Educational Psychologist · doi:10.1207/s15326985ep4101_4 · Cited by 1,044
The relationship between materialism and personal well-being: A meta-analysis
Dittmar, H., Bond, R., Hurst, M., & Kasser, T. (2014) · Journal of Personality and Social Psychology · doi:10.1037/a0037409 · Cited by 890
“…measures of purchases made with the intention of acquiring material possessions (as opposed to obtaining experiences; Carter & Gilovich, 2012; Van Boven & Gilovich, 2003), or (e) measures of power values (which are primarily concerned with having dominance and status over other people;…”
InfluentialVansteenkiste, M., Niemiec, C. P., & Soenens, B. (2010) · Advances in Motivation and Achievement · doi:10.1108/s0749-7423(2010)000016a007 · Cited by 864
Vansteenkiste, M., Neyrinck, B., Niemiec, C. P., Soenens, B., De Witte, H., & Van den Broeck, A. (2007) · Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology · doi:10.1348/096317906x111024 · Cited by 750
Metadata
- Authors
- Van Boven, L., & Gilovich, T.
- Venue
- Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
- Published
- 2003
- Volume
- 85
- Issue
- 6
- Pages
- 1193-1202
- ISSN
- 0022-3514 (ISSN-L)
- 1939-1315
- OpenAlex
- W2119647950
- Cited by
- 1,195
- References
- 9
- FWCI
- 7.68
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
How to cite
Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.
- This page
- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: To Do or to Have? That Is the Question. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1037/0022-3514.85.6.1193
- The paper
- Van Boven, L., & Gilovich, T. (2003). To Do or to Have? That Is the Question. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.85.6.1193
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.