One of the main human goals is to achieve the state of happiness. Almost all people ask themselves the question of how to attain this goal. For thousands of years, philosophers and spiritual leaders and, nowadays, researchers representing various disciplines of social sciences, have been searching for the right answer to this question. One of the dilemmas intertwined in the debate about the essence of happiness relates to the tension expressed by the question “to be or to have”; the tension between the spiritual and the material world; between sacrum and profanum. Can accumulation of money and material possessions make us happy? Starting with the message passed on by a German psychoanalyst Erich Fromm in his essay “To Have or to Be” and the wisdom derived from the classic philosophical and religious works, I will attempt to define the relation between the state of happiness and the attachment to money and possessions or the attachment to social and transcendent values. This difficult, yet crucial, problem will be analyzed in the context of the current psychological knowledge related to the emotional and cognitive consequences of taking a materialistic approach to life. Erich Fromm and other thinkers who had lived hundreds of years before him, suggested that greed and pursuit of material possessions did not appease the human longing for happiness. The latest experimental research, conducted by psychologists, economists and scholars representing other disciplines of science, seem to strongly confirm these assumptions.

Building upon Gasiorowska and Zaleskiewicz's (2021, 2023), we explored how a control threat and attachment style influence social relationship preferences. This experiment aimed to investigate how experiencing a control threat affects individuals with secure, anxious, and avoidant attachment patterns when they can choose between seeking assistance from the market, asking a close person for help, or coping with the situation alone. Participants with different attachment styles were randomly assigned to either the lack of control condition ( n = 290) or the having control condition ( n = 277). Individuals with an anxious attachment were more inclined to choose the market-exchange option and less likely to select the agentic and communal options when faced with a control threat. Meanwhile, those with an avoidant attachment exhibited a higher tendency to choose the agentic option, while their preference for noncontingent help decreased after exposure to the control threat. Surprisingly, secure attachment individuals showed an increased preference for noncontingent help and decreased preferences for market exchange and self-reliance when exposed to the control threat compared to when they had control. These findings suggest that participation in market relationships may meet vital psychological needs and serve as a safeguard against attachment insecurities.

We conducted pre-registered replications of 15 effects in the field of judgment and decision making (JDM). We aimed to test the generalizability of different classical and modern JDM effects, including, among others: less-is- better, anchoring, and framing to different languages, cultures, or current situations (COVID-19 pandemic). Replicated studies were selected and conducted by undergraduate psychology students enrolled in a decision-making course. Two hundred and two adult volunteers completed an online battery of replicated studies. With a classical significance criterion (p < .05), seven effects were successfully replicated (47%), five partially replicated (33%), and three did not replicate (20%). Even though research materials differed from the originals in several ways, the replication rate in our project is slightly above earlier reported findings in similar replication projects. We discuss factors that may underlie replication results (success vs. failure). We also stress the role of open science practices such as open data, open research materials, pre-registration, and registered reports in improving the replicability of results in the JDM field.