IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/soceco/v121y2026ics2214804326000297.html

“Luxury beliefs”: Signaling through ideology?

Author

Listed:
  • Samahita, Margaret

Abstract

The concept of “luxury beliefs”—ideological stances used to signal status—has attracted growing attention in public discourse. Using a set of statements commonly described as “luxury beliefs”, I conduct an online experiment with a nationally representative U.S. sample (n=715) to examine how widely these beliefs are recognized, whether they are associated with higher socioeconomic status (proxied by education and income), and whether individuals use them for status signaling toward relevant audiences. I find that: (i) Only 39% of the participants, primarily Republicans, report having heard of “luxury beliefs”. (ii) Agreement with luxury beliefs is not associated with higher education or income. (iii) There is little evidence of signaling behavior, aside from suggestive evidence that Independents express higher agreement with luxury beliefs when paired with a Democrat. These results indicate that luxury beliefs are not widely recognized or used as status signals in the general population.

Suggested Citation

  • Samahita, Margaret, 2026. "“Luxury beliefs”: Signaling through ideology?," Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly The Journal of Socio-Economics), Elsevier, vol. 121(C).
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:soceco:v:121:y:2026:i:c:s2214804326000297
    DOI: 10.1016/j.socec.2026.102538
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2214804326000297
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1016/j.socec.2026.102538?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to

    for a different version of it.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;

    JEL classification:

    • C90 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Design of Experiments - - - General
    • D83 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Search; Learning; Information and Knowledge; Communication; Belief; Unawareness
    • Z13 - Other Special Topics - - Cultural Economics - - - Economic Sociology; Economic Anthropology; Language; Social and Economic Stratification

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:soceco:v:121:y:2026:i:c:s2214804326000297. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.elsevier.com/locate/inca/620175 .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.