Consumption and Well-Being in the Material World

Miriam Tatzel is a social psychologist, Columbia University Ph.D. She worked with Stanley Schachter on studies of obesity and eating behavior, and she did her dissertation on self-esteem and attitude change under the sponsorship of William J. McGuire. Following a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, she joined the Social Science Research Council, where she assessed government-sponsored early education programs; she co-authored a volume on these programs with Eleanor Maccoby, the developmental psychologist. In the 1970’s, she was an Assistant Professor of Psychology at Hunter College of the City University of New York. Her next move was to an innovative institution, Empire State College, State University of New York, which matched her growing interest in alternative education, and where she has now been a long-time Professor. Her research has concentrated on psychological aspects of consumption, as well as studies of the educational process. In the consumer area, she has done research on clothes shopping and successful vs. troubled shoppers. An interest in money and how people spend it led her to develop a typology of consumers based on whether they are cautious with money or not, and whether they have high material aspirations or not. She is working on identifying pathways to well-being among different approaches to consumption.