We live in a world of social media influencers and reality TV, where I sometimes feel like it’s more important to look rich than to be rich. As long as you look rich, people will think you are rich and treat you as if you are rich. Gone are the days of quiet luxury and understatement, when looking ostentatious is considered déclassé.
Well, it turns out the feeling I have is not just a hunch, but apparently a pretty good approximation of people’s preferences. A joint American-Japanese research team asked volunteers to answer a series of questions, as shown below. Which option would you choose?
Which option would you choose?
Source: Bottan et al. (2025)
I’ll let you keep your answer to yourself. Instead, let me tell you the three things the researchers discovered after asking 1,000 people:
People prefer higher incomes to lower incomes. Sherlock Holmes would be proud of this result. It’s amazing.
People prefer it when other people have a lower income than them. Okay, not too flattering, but not surprising either.
People prefer other people to think they are richer than they actually are than to actually be richer when other people think they are not.
The desire to appear richer to other people is about five times stronger than actually being richer. It’s not ‘fake it till you make it’. It’s ‘fake it, full stop’.
#Crazy #Rich #Asians #point