For most of the 20th century, the habits that signaled wealth were the ones associated with leisure: long lunches, idle afternoons, a calendar with room in it. A 2017 paper in the Journal of Consumer Research, by the marketing researchers Silvia Bellezza, Neeru Paharia, and Anat Keinan, tested whether that has actually flipped in American culture, and found real experimental evidence that it has.
In one experiment, 307 people were shown a set of Facebook posts from a fictional person, randomly assigned to read either a busy version, “Oh I have been working non-stop all week!”, “Still at work!”, or a leisurely version, “I haven’t worked much this week, had lots of free time!”, “Done with work!” Participants who read the busy version rated that person as having meaningfully higher social status, higher perceived wealth, and higher income than participants who read the leisurely version, even though the posts contained no direct information about the person’s actual job, salary, or bank account.
Why busyness reads as a signal at all
The researchers tested why this happens, not just whether it happens. Their data pointed to two connected inferences: a busy person is assumed to have valuable human capital, competence, drive, in-demand skills, and a busy person is assumed to be scarce, meaning their time is valuable enough that other people and organizations are competing for it. Put together, busyness starts to function the way a luxury handbag traditionally has: not valuable because of what it costs to produce, but valuable because of what its scarcity is assumed to signal about the person holding it.
This is a meaningful reversal of the classic account of conspicuous consumption, in which idleness itself was the status symbol precisely because only the wealthy could afford not to work. Thorstein Veblen, writing in 1899, described “conspicuous abstention from labor” as the mark of superior status. The 2017 research suggests that inference has partly reversed in contemporary American culture: instead of scarcity of goods signaling wealth, scarcity of a person’s own time now does some of that signaling work.
An early clue the researchers found in the wild
Before running controlled experiments, the researchers ran a smaller pilot study looking at real social media posts by well-known people. They collected and coded 1,100 recent self-deprecating public statements, the kind of humblebragging that has its own dedicated online communities, and found that about 12 percent of them were specifically complaints about being overworked and having no free time: a director noting back-to-back rehearsals and meetings, an athlete describing an overloaded schedule, an actor apologizing to fans for being too busy with calls to update his blog. This was observational, not experimental, so it cannot prove anything about status inferences on its own. But it gave the researchers a real-world signal that publicly complaining about busyness is already a recognizable pattern among status-conscious, famous people, which is part of what motivated the controlled experiments that followed.
The finding that complicates any universal claim
A separate experiment in the same paper is the part that should stop anyone from treating “busyness signals wealth” as a fixed law of human status perception. The researchers compared 98 Italian participants and 112 American participants, all reading an identical description of a hypothetical 35-year-old who either worked long hours with a packed calendar, or did not work at all and lived a leisurely lifestyle. Americans rated the busy, working version as higher status than the leisurely, non-working version, replicating the first result. Italian participants showed the opposite pattern, rating the non-working, leisurely version as higher status than the busy one.
The researchers link this cultural split to differing beliefs about social mobility. Americans in their data tended to believe effort can move a person up or down an income ladder, which makes visible busyness a plausible signal of ambition and future reward. Italian participants in their data more often endorsed the view that people are relatively fixed within their social position, which would make busyness read less as promising potential and more as simply working because one has to.
What this means for reading “wealth habits” honestly
None of this means every busy person is secretly broke, or that every relaxed person is secretly rich; the study measured perceived status, what an onlooker infers from a signal, not actual income or wealth, which the researchers did not verify for any real person. What the research does establish is that busyness itself has become a culturally specific status signal, one that depends heavily on which country’s assumptions about mobility and effort a person is operating inside. A habit that reads as an unmistakable wealth signal to an American audience, a jam-packed calendar and constant unavailability, is not a universal marker of status at all. In the researchers’ own data, the identical behavior produced the opposite status judgment from a European sample.
What this does not prove
Both key experiments relied on brief, artificial vignettes, Facebook posts and short character descriptions, rather than observing real people’s actual wealth alongside their actual daily habits, so the research speaks to perception and inference, not to what genuinely wealthy people actually do with their time. The cultural comparison was limited to American and Italian samples specifically, not a broad survey of cultures worldwide, so it should be read as evidence of a real and specific cultural divide rather than a complete map of how busyness reads everywhere. What the research does support, clearly and through directly contrasting experiments, is that “the busy, no-time-for-anything lifestyle signals wealth” is not a fixed truth about status perception. It is a culturally contingent one, and in at least one comparison the same behavior was read by two different national samples in exactly opposite ways. Anyone reading a list of “habits that scream wealth” going forward is on firmer ground treating it as a description of what a specific audience, in a specific culture, at a specific moment, has been trained to associate with status, rather than as a timeless or universal truth about what wealth actually looks like.
