Flashing Status Symbols Won’t Impress New Friends

Trying to keep up with the Joneses isn’t a very effective way of making friends. As The Outline reports, a recent study in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science suggests that flashing status symbols makes people less likely to want to be your friend.

While some may feel like sporting a luxury watch or designer clothes will draw people toward them, it actually does the opposite, making you a less attractive potential friend, according to a trio of researchers from Michigan, Singapore, and Israel. Over the course of six different experiments, the researchers found that study participants tended to think that high-status markers like fancy cars would help them make new friends. The trend stayed true across both participants recruited using Amazon Mechanical Turk and upscale shoppers stopped for a survey in a high-income suburb.

People thought that showing up to an outdoor wedding in a luxury car or going out to a downtown bar wearing a fancy brand-name watch would lead people to be more attracted to them as potential friends, compared to someone driving a basic car or wearing a generic watch. Yet participants also rated themselves as being more willing to befriend someone with generic clothes and cars than someone who flashed designer goods.

The paradox makes a little more sense if you go back to the idea of “keeping up” with our neighbors. People want to look high status in comparison to others. They don’t want to hang out with people who are flashing around luxury goods—they want to be the flashier ones.