For the majority of the 20th century, the behaviors that indicated affluence were the ones linked to leisure time: extended lunches, unhurried afternoons, a calendar with available space. A 2017 study published in the Journal of Consumer Research, by marketing scholars Silvia Bellezza, Neeru Paharia, and Anat Keinan, investigated whether this trend has reversed in American society, revealing substantial experimental evidence that it indeed has.
In one study, 307 individuals were presented with a collection of Facebook posts from a fictional character, with participants randomly assigned to either a busy narrative, “Oh, I’ve been working non-stop all week!”, “Still at work!”, or a leisurely narrative, “I haven’t worked much this week, had a lot of free time!”, “Done with work!” Those who encountered the busy narrative rated the individual as possessing significantly greater social status, increased perceived wealth, and higher income compared to those who read the leisurely narrative, despite the posts providing no direct details regarding the person’s actual employment, salary, or finances.
The reasoning behind the perception of busyness as a signal
The researchers examined not only the occurrence of this trend but also its underlying reasons. Their findings indicated two interrelated assumptions: a busy individual is believed to possess valuable human capital, competence, ambition, and marketable skills, while a busy person is thought to be scarce, meaning their time is deemed valuable enough that competition exists among others and organizations for it. Collectively, busyness starts to resemble how a luxury handbag has traditionally been perceived: not valuable due to its production cost, but valuable due to the scarcity it represents regarding the holder.
This presents a significant shift from the traditional narrative of conspicuous consumption, where idleness was the status symbol as only the affluent could afford not to engage in work. Thorstein Veblen, writing in 1899, characterized “conspicuous abstention from labor” as the signifier of superior status. The 2017 study suggests that this inference has partially reversed in modern American society: rather than the scarcity of goods indicating wealth, the scarcity of an individual’s time now serves some of that signaling purpose.
An early indication discovered by the researchers
Prior to conducting controlled experiments, the researchers performed a smaller pilot study analyzing actual social media posts from prominent individuals. They gathered and categorized 1,100 recent self-deprecating public comments, which reflect the kind of humblebragging that has developed its own online communities, finding that approximately 12 percent involved specific grievances about being overloaded with work and lacking free time: a director referring to back-to-back rehearsals and meetings, an athlete discussing an overly packed schedule, an actor expressing apologies to fans for being too busy to update his blog. This observation was not experimental, so it cannot definitively prove anything about status inferences in isolation. However, it provided the researchers with a real-life indication that public expressions of busyness are already a recognizable trend among status-aware, famous individuals, which partly inspired the subsequent controlled experiments.
A finding that adds complexity to any absolute assertion
Another experiment in the same study serves as a caution against classifying “busyness signals wealth” as an unchangeable principle of human status perception. The researchers contrasted 98 Italian participants with 112 American participants, all reviewing an identical profile of a hypothetical 35-year-old who either had a demanding work schedule, or lived a leisurely life without any work. Americans identified the busy, working scenario as having a higher status compared to the leisurely, non-working scenario, confirming the initial finding. In contrast, Italian participants exhibited an opposite response, rating the non-working, leisurely scenario as higher status than the busy one.
The researchers correlate this cultural divergence to different beliefs about social mobility. Americans in their study generally believed that effort can advance or regress someone on the income scale, making visible busyness a credible indicator of ambition and potential rewards. Conversely, Italian participants more frequently accepted the idea that individuals are relatively fixed within their social standing, which would cause busyness to seem less like a sign of potential and more like merely working out of necessity.
Implications for accurately interpreting “wealth habits”
This does not imply that every busy individual is financially struggling, nor that every relaxed individual is secretly wealthy; the study assessed perceived status, which reflects what an observer deduces from a signal, rather than actual income or wealth, which the researchers did not verify for any real person. What the findings do indicate is that busyness itself has evolved into a culturally specific status signal, one that heavily relies on the country’s beliefs regarding mobility and effort that an individual is navigating. A behavior signaling unmistakable wealth to an American audience—a tightly booked calendar and constant unavailability—might not serve as a universal status indicator. In the researchers’ data, the same behavior elicited the inverse status perception from a European sample.
What this does not establish
Both primary experiments depended on concise, artificial scenarios.