Few instincts are more thoroughly Nordic than the reluctance to show off what you have. It has a name here, or at least a close relative: Janteloven, the Law of Jante, the set of unwritten rules coined by the Danish-Norwegian writer Aksel Sandemose in his 1933 novel En flyktning krysser sitt spor. Its commandments all circle one idea, that you are not to imagine yourself better than anyone else, and its practical effect is a quiet social pressure against display of every kind, wealth included. It is easy to treat this as mere provincial modesty. What is more interesting is that consumer psychology has spent some years testing whether the instinct against flaunting is actually sound, and the answer is a genuinely divided one.
The uncomfortable part: flaunting works
Any honest account has to start with the evidence that cuts against the Nordic reflex. In a 2011 paper in Evolution and Human Behavior, the Dutch researchers Rob Nelissen and Marijn Meijers ran seven experiments in which the only thing that changed was whether a person’s clothes carried a visible luxury label. The results were not subtle. Across the studies, the same individual wearing a designer logo was treated more favourably than when wearing an unbranded version of the same garment: judged higher in status, trusted more in an interaction, more successful at soliciting help, and in one case able to elicit larger contributions.
The authors read this through costly signalling theory, the idea, borrowed from biology, that an expensive and hard-to-fake display can honestly advertise that you can afford it, and so earns you deference. On this evidence, conspicuous consumption is not irrational at all. It buys real social advantage from strangers, at least in the brief encounters these experiments captured. Anyone claiming that flaunting wealth simply never pays is arguing against the data.
The part the flaunter misses
The counterweight comes from a 2010 paper in the Journal of Consumer Research by Jonah Berger and Morgan Ward, titled “Subtle Signals of Inconspicuous Consumption.” Berger and Ward were interested in a puzzle the luxury market keeps producing: why the most expensive goods often carry the smallest logos, or none at all. Across four studies they found that people with the most cultural capital in a domain, the true insiders, prefer quiet signals precisely because they are hard to read. A subtle cue separates them from the mainstream and communicates only to others who are also in the know, while a loud logo, legible to everyone, is the tool of those still trying to be recognised.
This flips the meaning of display. If the subtlest signals belong to those most secure in their standing, then a loud one starts to carry the opposite message from the one intended. Conspicuous wealth can read less as I have arrived and more as I would like you to know I have arrived, which is the tell of the aspirant rather than the insider. The recent vogue for what fashion writers call quiet luxury is really this grammar surfacing in public: the point is no longer to be seen spending, but to be recognised, by the few who can tell, as not needing to be seen.
The Nordic reading
Put the two findings together and Janteloven looks less like insecurity dressed as virtue and more like a piece of social technology. Flaunting earns you quick deference from strangers who do not know you, exactly the currency the Nelissen and Meijers experiments measured. But it costs you something within a group that has to keep living with you, especially one whose whole ethic prizes not setting yourself above others. In a small, high-trust, relatively flat society, the loud signal buys the wrong thing. It wins the fleeting judgement of the passer-by at the price of the lasting regard of the community, and it broadcasts a striving that the culture reads as slightly anxious.
Seen this way, lagom, the Swedish notion of a considered, unshowy sufficiency, and its Danish and Norwegian cousins are not simply about restraint for its own sake. They encode a rather sophisticated bet: that the enduring benefits of being trusted and liked by the people around you outweigh the momentary advantage of impressing those who will never see you again. The instinct not to flaunt turns out to align with the behaviour of the highest-status consumers Berger and Ward studied, who arrived at the same conclusion by a different road.
What the evidence does and does not settle
Several limits keep this honest. Both key studies are experimental, run largely with Western and, in the Dutch case, European samples, and they measure short interactions and stated impressions rather than the slow accumulation of a reputation over years. Cultural capital is domain-specific, so a subtle signal only works where there is an audience able to decode it, and in a setting full of outsiders the loud logo may still do its blunt work. Costly signalling genuinely delivers, within its narrow range, so the choice is a real trade-off rather than a simple case of virtue versus vanity.
It is also worth saying that Janteloven has its critics at home, who find in it a flattening pressure toward conformity and a suspicion of anyone who stands out, achievement as much as ostentation. The research does not vindicate that harsher edge. What it does suggest is narrower and more useful. The advice not to flaunt your wealth is not merely a moral preference or a regional quirk. It happens to describe what the most secure people already do, and to trade a shallow, short-lived advantage for a deeper and more durable one, which is a reasonable bet in any language.