Abstract: Materialism is generally defined as a personal value stressing the importance of owning material possessions. It has emerged as a topic of great interest among scholars across a broad range of disciplines. This paper firstly introduces the concept, the structure and the measurement of materialism, and then expounds its causes and consequences, especially its effect on well-being, and the cross-cultural studies. Future researches should take socially desirable responding bias into account when measuring materialism with scales or try to develop implicit measurement. The methods used to study the relationship between materialism and well-being are also needed to improve. Besides, more studies based on the Chinese culture are needed

Key words: materialism, insecurity, well-being