Feeling rich or looking rich? Self-perceived vs socially-perceived relative income

Individuals may care about status both because of how they view their own position and because of how others perceive it. We compare these two dimensions using five hypothetical discrete-choice experiments that separately vary absolute outcomes, self-perceived standing, and socially-perceived standing in the domains of income, academic performance, and car safety. The analysis sample includes 4934 U.S. respondents and two elicitation tasks: a non-incentivized own-choice task and an incentivized coordination game in which respondents are rewarded for predicting the modal choice. Across four of the five experimental conditions, socially-perceived standing enters positively, while self-perceived standing is either negative or statistically indistinguishable from zero. The exception is the income own-choice condition, where the pattern reverses—a result that warrants further research.