Marisa Franco built her career studying friendship and belonging. Her latest research pulled her somewhere unexpected: the connection between self-worth and net worth.

In her data, people with high self-worth and high SAT scores earned close to double the income of people with low SAT scores. People with low self-worth showed no such pattern — their test scores didn’t predict future earnings at all.

The gap, Franco found, has little to do with intelligence or family privilege and everything to do with a person’s relationship to their own emotions. Self-esteem is what someone says about themselves; self-worth is whether they still believe it when things get hard.

Personal finance has a common refrain: your net worth is not your self-worth. Franco’s research complicates that a little — self-worth and net worth turn out to be linked, just not in the direction people usually assume.

Marisa Franco joined the show to unpack that connection. She explains how self-worth and net worth actually relate, why chasing net worth alone won’t fix low self-worth, and what it actually takes to build the kind of self-worth that doesn’t depend on either one.

Listen on Apple Podcasts Listen on Spotify Watch on YouTube

Worth: The New Science of Self-Esteem and Secure Attachment Marisa Franco’s book, which explores the research behind self-worth and net worth featured in this episode. Get the book

Marisa Franco’s website Speaking engagements, articles, and more from Marisa. Visit drmarisagfranco.com