Do I look rich to you?
From quiet luxury to fake private jet photoshoots – exploring how wealth perception shapes our identity more than our actual bank accounts...
Photo: H. Armstrong Roberts/ClassicStock/Getty Images (The Cut)
This week I caught myself doing something embarrassing: I hesitated before telling someone where I lived because I was worried about how they'd perceive my financial status.
It wasn't that I thought they'd think I was poor. It was the opposite. I worried they'd make assumptions about my income that would create an awkward social dynamic. So I found myself doing this strange verbal dance, speaking in flowery humble language that no one asked for.
Afterward, I couldn't stop thinking about it. Why did I care so much about a stranger's perception of my financial status? Why do any of us?
Welcome to the first installment of a three-part series. Over the next three weeks, I’ll examine how money shapes our identity — often in ways we don't recognize. Today, we're starting with perception: how we see others' wealth, how others see ours, and why it matters so much to us.
Here’s my thesis: Our financial reality matters less than we think — it's the perception of our wealth, both by ourselves and others, that fundamentally shapes our identity and behavior.
The status signaling paradox
In a recent study, researchers at the University of Toronto showed participants photos of strangers and asked them to guess their income levels. Participants were surprisingly accurate — about 68% of the time they could correctly identify whether someone was high or low income based solely on appearance.
We're constantly engaged in what sociologists call "status signaling" — using visual and behavioral cues to communicate our social position. And we do this across all income levels, just in different ways.
Research in the Journal of Consumer Psychology found that buying material things triggers activity in brain regions associated with reward and self-concept — essentially, they make us feel good about ourselves and reinforce our identity.
But why do we do this? Is it just to feel good about ourselves?
I’d actually argue it’s because we want other people to feel good about us.
It may be because we simply want other people to like us.
Do you like my money?
The desire to maintain, improve, and signal our status is a huge part of how our society functions.
We want to fit in — and social comparison plays a huge part in how we understand community networks and find our place in the world. It motivates us to show a positional advantage so we can feel good about ourselves when other people compare us. Today, most of us do this through consumption.
Since signaling status is often adaptive, so it’s possible that people will believe that exhibiting status signals will also be an effective way to make new friends.
However, here’s where the paradox comes in: When making new friends or connections, people tend to think that displaying “high-status” markers of themselves (ex. a BMW, a Rolex watch) will make them more attractive to others than “neutral” markers (ex. a Honda, a generic brand watch).
However, from the perspective of would-be friends, individuals who display high-status markers are found to be less attractive as new friends than those with neutral status markers.
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Constant social signaling can also create a background anxiety about whether we're effectively communicating our "perceived financial identity."
On top of this, perceived identity often has lesser correlation with actual net worth. I know people who appear wealthy but are drowning in debt, and others with substantial assets who deliberately downplay their financial status.
So how accurately can we assess how rich someone is?
Not very, it turns out. (There’s a reason why the book is called the Millionaire Next Door).
We consistently overestimate others' wealth while underestimating their financial constraints due to our cognitive biases and social comparisons. This is because:
People often associate certain lifestyles or behaviors with wealth, leading to assumptions about others' financial situations. Someone who spends a lot on material goods may be seen as wealthy, while someone who is very frugal may seem poor, even if the reverse is true.
Talking about money is still somewhat taboo and people keep their financial information private, making it difficult for someone to truly assess other people’s situations. You may see someone’s home, clothes, or other material possessions and make assumptions about how much money they have, even though you have no idea what their bank accounts say.
As I mentioned before, we tend to compare ourselves to those around us, and this can lead to a skewed perception of wealth and financial stability. Wealth is relative, so if you’re making $100,000 a year and only hanging out with millionaires, you may feel pretty poor in comparison.
Some people may deliberately attempt to appear as if they belong to a different economic class. This isn't just about trying to look rich when you're not; it also includes wealthy people who downplay their affluence to fit into certain social circles or avoid uncomfortable dynamics.
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This perception gap doesn't just affect how we feel — it can actually impacts our relationships. When we misperceive others' financial reality, we make judgments about their character, values, and choices that may be completely unfounded.
As I’ve talked about before, money affects how we view and interact with our friends, and misalignment or miscommunication around money can lead to resentment.
Logos are out, old money is in?
For six months I carried around my $900 IPhone 13 with no phone case because I was too lazy to buy one and I liked the red backing (read: There was no real reason). I joked with my friends that I was embracing “quiet luxury”.
Not having to worry about protecting your expensive electronics, according to the Internet, is what rich people do. My phone cracked about a week later after I dropped it on the ground.
What constitutes a "wealth signal" isn't static — it evolves across generations, cultures, and even social circles.
For many people, wealth signaling is wrapped up in "conspicuous consumption" — buying visible luxury goods that signal wealth. Think designer handbags, luxury cars, or that photo taken on a yacht in Miami.
As you move up the income ladder, signaling often becomes more subtle. Sociologist Elizabeth Currid-Halkett calls this "inconspicuous consumption" in her book The Sum of Small Things.
Instead of flashy logos, the truly wealthy often signal through less obvious markers: using obscure cultural references, engaging in “exclusive” experiences, or even engaging in conspicuous displays of health and wellness (the $36 SoulCycle class, the cold-pressed organic juice). This is where you see the rise in trends like “old money aesthetic” or “quiet luxury”.
I’ll be writing about consumption and how it affects our money psychology in a later issue. Stay tuned.
Perhaps the most dramatic transformation in wealth signaling comes from social media, which has created entirely new ways to display financial status. Today, you can literally rent a fake private jet to take photos in to post online.
You no longer even need the money to buy the thing — you just need enough money to buy an illusion of the thing, whatever that is.
But this creates another paradox: as wealth signals become more accessible to fake, they simultaneously become more important for those seeking authentic status markers. It now becomes less about spending the money and more about getting the “insider” knowledge or “access” to a brand, experience, or item.
This reflects what sociologist Pierre Bourdieu called "cultural capital" — the knowledge and taste that serves as a form of non-financial wealth.
Close your eyes and think of a rich person
We all carry stereotypes about wealthy people. Some positive: successful, hardworking, intelligent. Many negative: entitled, unethical, cold.
I asked ChatGPT to create what they thought a rich person would look like.
These stereotypes don't just exist in our heads — they shape how we interact with people we perceive as wealthy. A study in the Journal of Current Psychology found that participants treated individuals differently based solely on cues about their financial status, even when the cues are subtle or nonverbal. This includes their facial expressions, hairstyle, race, clothing or jewelry, and more.
People uses these cues to form preferences towards others and infer their competence and popularity. In other words, they may behave differently towards individuals they perceive as having higher or lower social status.
Children can form these perceptions at a very early age (as young as 4 years old) and by middle school age can become aware of their own subjective social status, primarily informed by their spending power, and are more likely to hold negative stereotypes of poor people.
Societal stereotypes are bad for a huge number of reasons — they can create division among people, become internalized by the group being stereotyped, and maintain inequalities (i.e. the status quo).
The reality-perception alignment
So what does a healthier relationship between financial reality and perception look like?
Research in positive psychology suggests that authenticity — aligning our public self with our private reality — is crucial for psychological well-being. This doesn't mean you need to broadcast your bank balance, but it does mean developing comfort with your actual financial identity rather than performing a false one.
Studies show that authenticity reduces status anxiety, improves relationship quality, and enhances overall life satisfaction. Here are some tips to help achieve this alignment:
Practice status ambivalence: I.e., acknowledging that others will form opinions about your financial status while deciding those opinions don't matter.
Build financial self-awareness: Understanding your own unconscious wealth signals and status-seeking behaviors is the first step to changing them.
Find like-valued communities: Research shows that status anxiety decreases when we're among people with similar financial values (not necessarily similar incomes).
Where do we go from here?
Our relationship with money is never just about the numbers. It's about how we see ourselves, how others see us, and the complex social dance created by those perceptions.
Wealth perception shapes everything from our consumer behavior to our social relationships to our mental health. The gaps between financial reality and perception create psychological stress, relationship challenges, and sometimes identity crisis.
Next week, I’ll build on this foundation by exploring what happens when wealth changes. How does gaining or losing money transform not just our financial reality but our fundamental sense of self? We'll examine the psychological impact of financial windfalls, inherited wealth, and sudden financial loss — and how these transitions reshape our identity in ways both expected and surprising.
Have you ever encountered Paul Fussell's book Class: A Guide Through the American Status System? https://bookshop.org/p/books/class-a-guide-through-the-american-status-system-paul-fussell/12829000
It will likely seem a bit dated now (Fussell wrote it in the early '80s) but it still offers incredibly keen insights on the way that social class and financial class aren't necessarily contiguous in American society. I'd suggest that what people respond to more than markers of financial success are actually markers of class distinction. (The Simpsons and King of the Hill are both incredibly adept at mining humor from this situation.)
I recently had someone refer to themselves as "comfortably poor" when I pointed out something they said had a heavy level of middle-class privilege. As someone who’s spent a fair portion of life paycheck-to-paycheck, you can imagine my reaction.