15 October 2026

What Research Says About the Money Myth Most Good People Believe

A lot of good people hold a belief about money that goes something like this: there's only so much to go around, so anyone who takes more than they need is taking it from someone else.

The finite cup

Good people who are unresolved around money tend to picture resources as a cup holding a fixed amount. So they take what they need and a little extra, enough for vacations, retirement, college and an emergency fund. For many of them, living well looks like taking home $500K to $1M a year.

Past that point, something stops them. Taking more starts to feel like taking from someone who has less.

The cup is vastly bigger than they realize

The problem is that wealth doesn't behave like a cup with a fixed amount in it. According to the UBS Global Wealth Report 2026:

• Global personal wealth grew by 10.8% in 2025.
• Nearly one million people became new millionaires that year.
• That works out to more than 2,600 new millionaires a day.

Wealth isn't a fixed amount being passed from hand to hand. It keeps growing. So why don't more good people see that?

The brain filters what people see

The brain filters what people see and hear based on what they believe. Researchers have studied this particular belief, that there's only so much to go around and one person's gain is another person's loss. They call it the fixed-pie bias.

Much of that research comes from negotiation, where two people are dividing value between them. In a 1990 study, Leigh Thompson and Reid Hastie found that "most negotiators enter negotiation expecting the other party's interests to be completely opposed to their own." Because of that expectation, "a substantial number of negotiators fail to realize when they have interests that are completely compatible."

One study shows how this plays out. Two people negotiated a deal, and on some points they both wanted the same thing. But each one assumed the other wanted the opposite, without even asking. 39% of pairs missed out on something they both wanted, because they just assumed the other person didn't want the same thing.

What they both wanted was available the whole time. The belief stopped them seeing it, so they settled for less. When Thompson and Dennis Hrebec later reviewed 32 experiments, they found the same result again and again: people settling for a worse deal than one that was available to both of them.

Money works the same way. When someone believes that more for them means less for someone else, they can't see the money that's available without taking it from anyone.

What the belief costs

In 2011, Brad Klontz, Sonya Britt, Jennifer Mentzer and Ted Klontz studied the money beliefs of 422 people. They called one group of beliefs "money avoidance." It included statements like these:

• "I do not deserve a lot of money when others have less than me."
• "It is not okay to have more than you need."
• "Rich people are greedy."
• "People get rich by taking advantage of others."

The people who agreed with these statements had lower incomes and lower net worth. The researchers noted that they couldn't tell which came first, the belief or the lower income. What they found was that the two went together.

Who takes what's left

While good people take only what they need, the people who do see the money left over come and scoop it out of the cup. Look at what they've done to the planet with it: wars, a changing climate, land and oceans stripped for profit, and people living isolated and unhappy lives.

Why good people need to claim more

More good people need to realize it's time to step up and claim their massive wealth. We aren't talking about $1M. We're talking about $50M, $100M, $1B.

Because if they don't, the only people left to claim it are the ones who did this to the planet in the first place.

Related: The research behind Strategic Stewardship