Women’s Luxury Products as Signals to Other Women

We present two preregistered replications of the paper by Wang and Griskevicius (2014), which reported that women flaunt luxury products to signal their partners’ devotion, thereby guarding their relationships from rivals. In Study 1, which was a conceptual replication with real luxury brands, we did not observe an effect of luxury products on partner devotion but found that women assumed that male partners contribute financial resources to women’s luxury possessions. In Study 2, which was a direct replication with designer products, we observed a small-sized effect in the opposite direction, such that perceived partner devotion increased when women used nondesigner products. Similar to Study 1, perceived partner contribution to possessions was higher for designer products.