Are you applying for a place in a team where collaboration is high on the agenda? Leave that Rolex at home, American research suggests.

Showing that you have money to spend can certainly work in your favor. People then think that you are intelligent, competent and a hard worker, as previous psychological research has shown. So put on that jacket with a clearly visible expensive brand on it, you would say, when you go for a job interview.

Or… Not? New research by Shalena Srnaassistant professor of marketing at the University of Michigan, and colleagues shows that you are not seen as a team player if you show too much of your wealth.

Avatar with a Prada logo

Among other things, Srna had several hundred people participate in a variant of a classic experiment in psychology: the prisoner’s dilemma† This was about doing a boring task: filling out captchas. If both subjects independently chose to share that task, they each had to do 30 of them. If they both refused to share, they had to fill in sixty each. If one of them refused and the other didn’t, the first did nothing, while the second got 90 captchas on his screen.

The participants were not shown their partner, but an avatar that this partner had been allowed to design for himself. If that avatar had an exclusive branding on his or her clothes (from Prada, Gucci or Louis Vuitton, for example), 45 percent of the participants chose to share the task. With an avatar without a brand, that was 57 percent. Even if the subjects had been allowed to design their own avatar and put an expensive logo on it, they were less likely to trust someone else with a smartly dressed avatar.

First class to Madrid

In addition, Srna and her team conducted a number of experiments on social media profiles. For example, they had to find a team member who could work well together. Were they shown a profile of someone boasting, for example, of having flown first class to Madrid? Then they were less likely to nominate that person as a suitable team member.

And could you turn this around? In other words, are people less likely to display their wealth if they want to be seen as people to work with?

Yes, it turns out. Subjects who knew they were going to participate in a prisoner’s dilemma – where it is to your advantage if others see you as cooperative – chose an avatar with an expensive clothing brand much less often than subjects who had no idea what to expect. Also, participants opted for less boastful posts in their social media profiles if they needed to profile themselves as a team member who can work well together.

less hot

Show Kuppens, assistant professor of social psychology at the University of Groningen, believes that the studies by Srna and her team have been carried out well. He does not call the result surprising. “It has long been known that rich people are perceived as less ‘warm’ and ‘social’. ‘Less warm’ should then be interpreted as someone who has less good intentions for you – and who is therefore less cooperative, for example.”

Furthermore, Kuppens notes that all studies deal with a very specific form of status communication: displaying the possession of luxury goods. “But you can also communicate your high status in other ways. For example, I could emphasize my level of education. I suspect I would be charged a lot less for that.”

Other cultures

Another point that Kuppens mentions is that the research is mainly limited to the US. The researchers are also aware of this. “We rely on online participants who come mainly from Western countries,” they write. It would be good to repeat their research with subjects from other parts of the world, they continue. “It could be that collaboration doesn’t depend on signaling status in cultures where people don’t see consuming luxury items as immoral.”