How to deal with material girls - Your Life

Tired of being around a friend or co-worker who talks endlessly about her new Beemer, her dozen Kate Spade bags, her ocean-view condo? While such materialism can be annoying, new research shows that such people actually deserve sympathy and understanding. Robert Arkin, Ph.D., a professor of psychology at The Ohio State university in Columbus, measured 416 college students' levels of self-doubt and their feelings about their possessions and found that chronic self-doubters tend to define their success in terms of their possessions.

Ignoring the often-annoying behavior of a person with such tendencies may help you put up with them, Arkin says. "However, understanding the reasons they act this way may work better."

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