With Status Symbols, Let Someone Else Do the Bragging

This practice, which he referred to as “conspicuous consumption,” has been going on for millennia. Studies of Neolithic societies, for example, show evidence of elaborate headdresses to mark their leaders. Medieval kings wore mantles to demonstrate their nobility and rank. In modern times, wealth and success are often presented via status symbols. Picture someone who arrives at an event in their new sports car or who wears a sweatshirt displaying their fancy university. But how are others likely to judge or evaluate them?  

One consistent pattern, researchers have found, is that wearing a visible status symbol can have benefits, like conveying that someone is more educated, is more competent, or occupies a high social class. But wearing a status symbol can also have negative consequences, making others perceive the wearer as less warm or likable. Thus, even though people might be impressed by the success of an individual who arrives in their new sports car, they may be less likely to actually want to be friends with them. 

But something felt missing in that previous research, says Jesse D’Agostino, who completed her PhD at the Kellogg School in 2026. In conversations with Derek Rucker, a social psychologist and professor of marketing at Kellogg, they realized that past studies had largely looked at easy-to-decode status symbols—signals that are loud, visible, and difficult to miss. In everyday life, however, many status symbols are subtler in form. For example, many people might not recognize the lines of a Porsche peeking out of a cropped photo, or that the suit a person is wearing is by Armani. Such situations create a potential dilemma for people who want to display a status symbol: if they draw attention to their status symbol, they risk having other people see them in a less-favorable light; but if they don’t draw attention to the symbol, others might not notice it at all.  

So, the researchers considered another possibility: What if someone else—a bystander—calls attention to the symbol on behalf of consumers? 

While prior research largely examined these status-signaling interactions between just two people, real-life social situations are often more complex. Introducing subtle status symbols and even a single additional person to the mix could meaningfully alter the message someone communicates through their status symbol. 

Indeed, through a series of experiments, D’Agostino and Rucker found that a bystander’s words can significantly boost the messages that status symbols convey—and how the people wearing them are perceived. 

“This work adds an entirely new layer of how we should be studying symbols,” says Rucker.  

Warmth protection 

For their study, D’Agostino and Rucker built upon the prior finding that donning a status symbol can make a person seem less warm or likable. But they suspected that, if “someone else pointed out the status symbol, then you wouldn’t necessarily damage how warm or likable you are perceived [to be],” says D’Agostino. 

To test this idea, the researchers ran six experiments, including mock social-media posts. They focused on social media in several of their experiments because people already often use it to share status symbols. When you’re trying to get people’s natural reactions, you don’t want examples that are too outlandish or confusing. “It was important to think of scenarios or contexts where [study participants] were like, ‘Yeah, I’ve seen something like this before,’” D’Agostino says. 

In the first four experiments, D’Agostino and Rucker created social-media posts where the person in the post wore or highlighted some subtle status symbol, like an Armani suit or Harvard cufflinks. These were subtle because, based on the picture alone, most people could not tell which brand of suit or which university they represented. 

Critically, during these experiments, different groups of participants saw slightly different social-media posts. Roughly a third of the participants saw a post where the poster explicitly called out their subtle status symbol; for example, the caption read, “Feeling like I’m gonna kill my interview in this Armani suit.” Another third of participants saw a post in which someone else flagged the status symbol in the comment section: “You’re going to kill it in that Armani suit!” The final third of participants saw posts in which nobody acknowledged the status symbol. Some of the experiments also changed up how loud or subtle the symbol was or asked the participants additional questions such as what they thought the person’s motivations were for posting. 

Then the researchers asked the participants to report their perceptions of the person’s status as well as their warmth or likeability on numerical scales. 

D’Agostino and Rucker found that calling attention to a subtle status symbol on social media gave viewers the impression that the person in the post had higher status. In the Armani-suit experiment, for example, the poster ranked about half a point higher on a seven-point scale when they mentioned the suit. But it also made that person seem less warm (losing a bit more than half a point). In contrast, when a bystander drew attention to the status symbol, the person in the post received the benefit of looking high-status without taking a significant hit to their warmth. 

Exceptions to the rule 

The findings also raise the question, when does bystander recognition not work this way? “That’s a fun thing about research; when done right, it both generates knowledge and introduces new questions,” says Rucker. 

In fact, even in this initial paper, the researchers found circumstances where the warmth protection only went so far. For example, in a later experiment, they asked participants to imagine they were hiring someone to be an ambassador for a charity, a role where they anticipated warmth would be important. In a control condition, approximately 80 percent of participants indicated they would read the candidate’s resume. However, when the candidate simply mentioned on social media that they owned a luxury car, only about 36 percent of participants elected to read that candidate’s resume. When a bystander mentioned the car instead, it boosted the rate to 50 percent, mitigating some, but not all, of the damage from the association to a luxury car. 

In addition, the researchers found that the protective effect of bystander recognition dissipated when the symbol was already loud and in –your face. Picture, for example, a shirt with “Gucci” written in ten-inch-high letters. “Despite [such status symbols] being so loud, the symbols still afford people a status benefit,” says Rucker. “But for warmth, the observer didn’t have that buffering effect anymore.”  

In this case, the wearer received roughly the same warmth scores no matter who pointed out the symbol. “We think that’s because there’s already a connotation with status that results in low warmth, and they couldn’t bypass that when it’s so widely displayed,” says D’Agostino. 

Future research could focus on these nuances and exceptions, figuring out when bystanders help protect warmth and when they do not. 

But before anyone runs out to coordinate social-media comments with their friends, Rucker notes that it’s important to remember that context matters. “In some cases, signaling rank may be far more important than warmth,” he says. “Take the military. At least in some situations, the most important thing might be to signal competence and that others should follow your orders. It’s far less about whether you are liked as a person.” 

Still, if you value perceptions of warmth, the next time you feel like sharing a subtle status symbol, be aware that it might come at a cost, says D’Agostino. “If you want to bypass it, you could have your friend mention the symbol instead.”