Luxury beliefs are ideas and opinions that confer status on the upper class, while often inflicting costs on the lower classes. For example, if you ra

Rob Henderson's Newsletter

submited by

Style Pass

2022-07-04 23:30:02

Luxury beliefs are ideas and opinions that confer status on the upper class, while often inflicting costs on the lower classes.

For example, if you randomly give a pen to someone and offer them the chance to exchange it for the other one, more often than not, the person chooses to keep the one they were given.

Other studies have found that if you show a person a coffee mug and ask how much it’s worth, they will assign it a lower value than if you give them the coffee mug first and then ask them how much they’d sell it for.

In a 1986 paper titled “Beliefs are like possessions,” the Yale psychologist and political scientist Robert Abelson described this idea.

As the cognitive linguist George Lakoff and others have found, people often use analogies from the physical world to describe abstract concepts.

We say things like “climbing the ladder of success,” a “rising young executive,” and “reaching the top.” Addicts talk about hitting the “bottom.”