Hoarding too much money, is it good or bad?

The world’s eight richest individuals have as much wealth as the bottom half of the world.

So, is that immoral or not? The answer is a lot more complex than that, a new study shows.

The study shows that people in Russia, Switzerland  and Ireland held the strongest moral opposition to having too much money. On the other hand, people in Peru, Argentina and Mexico were least likely to show moral objections to having excessive wealth.

All national cultures, on average, found excessive wealth to be between “not wrong at all” and “moderately wrong,” according to the study, indicating that few people might hold the belief that possessing excessive wealth is extremely unacceptable from a moral standpoint.

The study was published June 24, 2025, in PNAS Nexus, the sibling journal to the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the official journal of the US National Academy of Sciences.

“People’s moral judgment of excessive wealth should not necessarily be the same as their moralization of economic inequality,” says the study’s co-writer, Jackson Trager of the Brain and Creativity Institute University of Southern California (USC). “One might think of economic inequality as morally wrong but still find excessive wealth morally permissible.”

“While inequality is recognized as a moral issue in many societies, it is not clear whether people hold similarly negative views about individuals with excessive wealth,” says Trager, a behavioral researcher at USC’s   Department of Psychology.

“Our research investigates the moralization of inequality and the immorality of excessive wealth,” says co-writer Mohammad Atari of the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, University of Massachusetts Amherst. “The immorality of excessive wealth might vary substantially based on people’s moral intuitions, cultural background, socioeconomic status, and the structural economic systems they live in.”

The researchers examined how people’s various moral concerns predict the moral judgment of excessive wealth across 20 nations, complemented with a survey in the United States further examining the relationship between moral concerns and other types of excess such as excessive knowledge and excessive anger) as well as attitudes toward different ways of excessive wealth acquisition and expenditure.

The study involved demographically stratified samples with 4,351 participants  mirroring demographics in terms of gender, education and age (and political ideology in the United States) across Argentina, Belgium, Chile, Colombia, Egypt, France, Ireland, Japan, Kenya, Mexico, Morocco, New Zealand, Nigeria, Peru, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Switzerland, United Arab Emirates and the United States.

When looking at overall wealth, the study found that countries with high GDP per capita (richer countries like Ireland and Switzerland) were more likely to find excessive wealth immoral than countries with lower GDP per capita (Nigeria or South Africa).

It also found that when controlling for religiosity, conservatism, moral attitudes toward wealth acquisition, moral attitudes toward wealth spending, and other moral values, the endorsement of authority and age still had a significant negative relationship with the immorality of excessive wealth, partially similar to the main study’s findings.

“Hence, older people and those high on authority have less severe moral objections to having too much money,” says Trager, the study’s first author. “The moralization of benevolent spending, exploitative spending, and benevolent acquisition of wealth were all significantly positively associated with the immorality of excessive wealth.”

The correlation between acquiring and spending wealth as immoral and viewing excessive wealth in general as immoral suggests that people seem to morally evaluate not just the existence of excessive wealth, but the paths through which it is obtained and used, Atari says.

Many people in the study appear to agree that having too much money is not immoral, but this view is not universal. “Left-leaning individuals, people living in egalitarian societies, those who highly value equality, people in higher socio-economic status, and people who value purity appear to think of excessive wealth as more objectionable,” Trager says.

The study concludes “that moral condemnation of excessive wealth is not just about harm or different flavors of justice; rather, it may have a more complex moral underpinning.

“To many, possession of excessive wealth may be disgusting and unnatural due to the degrading nature of excess, suggesting there is more of a psychological truth to the term filthy rich than merely being an American metaphor.”