Playing it down: the hidden game of income understating

Income is a sensitive yet common topic in conversations. When asked about their income in daily scenarios, do people tend to understate it, overstate it, or state the truth? Across five main experiments and two supplementary studies (N = 939), we consistently observed an income understatement effect across 15 conversational contexts involving 11 types of interpersonal relationships. The effect emerged both when participants responded to hypothetical income scenarios (Study 1 and Supplementary Studies 1–2) and when they discussed their actual self-reported income (Study 2). Guided by the theory of Sensitivity about Being the Target of a Threatening Upward Comparison (STTUC), we identified concerns about others’ envy and potential borrowing requests as key psychological mechanisms underlying this phenomenon (Studies 3–4), particularly under downward social comparison conditions (Study 5).