When director Oliver Stone released his 1987 film “Wall Street,” he meant it as a takedown of financial greed. Instead, the villain’s catchphrase, “Greed is good,” became a mantra on trading floors, and business school students started slicking back their hair like the crooked financier Gordon Gekko. The Financial Times later called the phenomenon “a bizarre case of life imitating art imitating life.”
Decades on, movies like “The Wolf of Wall Street” (2013) have pulled off a similar trick. Marketed as portraits of financial excess, they also work as glossy advertisements for the lifestyle they depict. A team of researchers wanted to know whether these popular stories actually shape the career ambitions of the people most likely to watch them: business students and sales professionals. Their answer, published in the Journal of Business Research, is that greedy characters tend to be seen as role models, even when the films around them claim to be critical.
A question about aspirations and art
Lead author Inge M. Brokerhof of Utrecht University, along with collaborators from Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and the University of Lincoln, wanted to investigate a gap in existing research. Plenty of scholars have written about the culture of greed on Wall Street, and many have argued that business schools themselves help normalize a profit-above-all worldview. But outside of anecdotes about slicked-back hair and Gekko imitators, no one had tested whether Wall Street movies actually nudge students toward specific career identities.
The researchers built their work around a concept called “future work selves,” which psychologists define as a person’s mental image of who they hope to become professionally. Earlier research has shown these imagined selves guide real career choices. If a vivid movie character can slip into that mental picture, stories become more than entertainment. They become blueprints.
The team also wanted to examine empathy. Psychology research has found that handling money, or even thinking about it, can make people more self-focused and less attuned to others. Wall Street narratives are soaked in money imagery, so the researchers wondered whether watching them would dial down empathy as well.
Three experiments, three angles
The team ran three separate experiments. In the first, 82 business students at a Dutch university were randomly assigned to watch one of three films in a darkened classroom. One group saw “The Wolf of Wall Street,” which glorifies the excess lifestyle of real-life fraudster Jordan Belfort. A second group watched “The Big Short,” which mixes criticism of the 2008 financial crisis with scenes of traders getting rich. A third group saw “Inside Job,” a documentary sharply critical of the industry.
Afterward, students rated on a five-point scale how much they saw the main character as someone they wanted to become. A week later, they wrote short essays about the scenes that stuck with them.
Students who watched “The Wolf of Wall Street” and “The Big Short” rated the main characters as significantly more desirable future selves than students who watched “Inside Job.” In their essays, nearly half of the students in the first two conditions described the protagonist through what the researchers labeled a “winner frame,” praising self-made success, wealth, and the thrill of rising from nothing. Critical reflection on fraud or exploitation was far less common. Only students who watched the documentary, which focused on systemic harm, wrote mostly about moral failures.
Winners, victims, and empathy
The second experiment, conducted online with 125 business students, swapped films for written texts. One group read a chapter from Belfort’s memoir told from his winning perspective. Another read a New York Times article about people who had lost their homes and, in some cases, taken their own lives after the financial crisis. A third group read an unrelated article about wildlife conservation as a control.
Participants then answered how much they wanted to become a stockbroker and took a validated test called the “Mind in the Eyes” task, which measures empathy by asking people to identify emotions from photos of eyes.
Students who read the winner story rated becoming a stockbroker as more appealing than those who read the victim story. Students in the victim condition scored higher on empathy than those in the winner condition. The winner perspective and the control group scored about the same on the career question, suggesting that admiration for stockbroker life may already be the default view among business students.
Does it work on people already in the job?
The third experiment tested whether these effects extended beyond students. Fifty-five Dutch sales professionals watched either a three-minute clip from “The Wolf of Wall Street” or a short CNN documentary showing the realistic day-to-day work of a stockbroker.
Even among working sales professionals, the glamorous Belfort clip produced significantly higher ratings of the main character as a desired future self than the realistic portrayal did. The allure of the fictional version held up in a group that presumably already knew what the job looked like.
What the findings suggest for businesses and schools
For business schools, the researchers suggest that screening a critical film is not enough. Even movies meant to expose the depravity of greed can be absorbed through a “winner frame” if their protagonists are wealthy and charismatic. Pairing films with discussion, or bringing in stories told from the perspective of people harmed by financial misconduct, may do more to build critical reflection and empathy.
For companies trying to understand why calls for ethical reform in finance seem to stall, the study offers one piece of the puzzle. If popular culture keeps rebranding greed as self-made success, industry norms become harder to shift from within.
There are limits to the research. The samples were small, mostly Dutch, and measured short-term reactions to single exposures. The “future work self” was captured with one question rather than a longer scale. And the films used, being real Hollywood products, mix greed with wealth, glamour, and excitement in ways that cannot be cleanly separated. Still, the consistent pattern across three experiments points to the same conclusion: the Wolf keeps finding new admirers, even when the story is supposed to be a warning.
