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 cloaks to show their nobility and class. In modern times, wealth and success are often presented through status symbols. Imagine someone arriving at an event in their new sports car or wearing a sweatshirt that shows off their fancy university. But how are others likely to judge or evaluate them?
A consistent pattern, the researchers found, is that wearing a visible status symbol can have benefits, such as showing that one is more educated, more competent, or has a higher social class. But wearing a status symbol can also have negative consequences, making others perceive the wearer as less warm or likable. So while people may be impressed by the success of a person who arrives in their new sports car, they may be less likely to actually want to be friends with them.
But something was missing from that previous research, he says Jesse D’Agostinowho completed her PhD at the Kellogg School in 2026. In conversations with Derek Ruckersocial psychologist and marketing professor at Kellogg, realized that previous studies had largely looked at easily decodable status symbols—signals that are loud, visible, and hard to miss. In everyday life, however, many status symbols take a more subtle form. For example, many people may not recognize the lines of a Porsche peeking out of a cropped photo, or that the suit a person is wearing is from 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 being viewed less favorably by others. but if they do not draw attention to the symbol, others may not notice it at all.
So the researchers considered another possibility: What if someone else — a bystander — drew attention to the symbol on behalf of consumers?
While previous research has largely looked at these status-signaling interactions between just two people, real-life social situations are often more complex. Bringing status symbols and even an extra person into the mix could fundamentally change the message someone communicates through their status symbol.
Indeed, through a series of experiments, D’Agostino and Rucker found that the words of a bystander can greatly enhance the messages conveyed by status symbols—and how the people wearing them are perceived.
“This work adds a whole new level to how we should study symbols,” says Rucker.
Warmth protection
For their study, D’Agostino and Rucker built on the previous finding that wearing a status symbol can make a person appear less warm or likable. But they suspected that if “someone elsewhere tick the status symbol, then it won’t necessarily hurt how warm or likable you are perceived to be [to be]says D’Agostino.
To test this idea, the researchers conducted six experiments, including fake social media posts. They focused on social media in several of their experiments because people already use it frequently to share status symbols. When you’re trying to get people’s natural reactions, you don’t want examples that are too weird or confusing. “It was important to think of scenarios or contexts [study participants] it was like, ‘Yeah, I’ve seen this before,'” says D’Agostino.
In the first four experiments, D’Agostino and Rucker created social media posts where the person in the post wore or highlighted some distinctive status symbol, such as an Armani suit or Harvard cufflinks. These were subtle because, based on the image alone, most people couldn’t tell which brand of suit or which university they represented.
Importantly, during these experiments, different groups of participants saw slightly different social media posts. About a third of the participants saw a post where the poster explicitly called out their status symbol. For example, the caption read: “I feel like I’m going to slay my interview in this Armani suit.” Another third of participants saw a post in which someone else tagged the status symbol in the comments section: “You’re going to kill it in that Armani suit!” The final third of participants saw posts in which no one recognized the status symbol. Some of the experiments also changed how loud or subtle the symbol was, or asked participants additional questions, such as what they thought the person’s motivations were for posting.
The researchers then asked the participants to rate their perceptions of the person’s condition as well as their warmth or likeability on numerical scales.
D’Agostino and Rucker found that drawing attention to a distinctive status symbol on social media gave viewers the impression that the person in the post had a 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 hot (he lost a little more than half a point). Conversely, when a viewer drew attention to the status symbol, the person in the post received the benefit of looking high-status without significantly knocking their hotness.
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 produces knowledge and introduces new questions,” says Rucker.
In fact, even in that original paper, the researchers found conditions where heat 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 expected warmth to be important. In a control condition, about 80 percent of participants said 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% of participants chose to read the candidate’s resume. When a bystander reported the car instead, it increased the percentage to 50 percent, mitigating some, but not all, of the damage from being tied to a luxury car.
Furthermore, the researchers found that the protective effect of bystander recognition disappeared when the symbol was already strong and in your face. Imagine, for example, a shirt with “Gucci” written on it in ten-inch-high letters. “Despite [such status symbols] Being so powerful, symbols still provide people with a status advantage,” Rucker says. “But for warmth, the observer no longer had this moderating effect.”
In this case, the user received about the same hotness ratings regardless of who showed the symbol. “We think that’s because there’s already a connotation with status that leads to low hotness, and they couldn’t override it when it’s so widely displayed,” says D’Agostino.
Future research could focus on these nuances and exceptions, discovering when bystanders help protect warmth and when they don’t.
But before anyone runs off to coordinate social media comments with their friends, Rucker notes that it’s important to remember that context matters. “In some cases, signal rank can be much more important than warmth,” he says. “Take it to the army. At least in some cases, the most important thing may be to show competence and that others should follow your orders. It matters much less if you like them as a person.”
But if you value perceptions of warmth, the next time you want to share a subtle status symbol, be aware that it can come at a cost, D’Agostino says. “If you want to skip it, you could ask your friend to mention the symbol.”
