Money trees do not generate wealth or redirect fate, but the belief that they do is not entirely baseless once you look at the psychology involved. The braided-trunk houseplant sold under the name “money tree” is Pachira aquatica, a tropical wetland species that became tangled up in feng shui folklore sometime in the 1980s. No peer-reviewed study has ever linked owning one to financial windfalls. Yet research on superstition and self-efficacy suggests that objects people treat as lucky can genuinely shift their confidence, decision-making, and even task performance in measurable ways.
Where the Money Tree Legend Comes From
The story most often repeated in nurseries and plant shops goes like this: a poor Taiwanese farmer prayed for prosperity, found a Pachira aquatica seedling in his field, began cultivating and selling the plants, and grew wealthy. Whether or not any version of that story is literally true, it gave the plant a marketing identity that aligned neatly with existing feng shui principles about living greenery, flowing energy, and the symbolic power of the number five. The money tree’s five-lobed leaves are said to represent the five classical elements in Chinese philosophy, and its braided trunk (a purely horticultural styling choice made by growers, not a feature of wild trees) is supposed to “trap” good fortune inside the home.
Feng shui practitioners who subscribe to what researchers call the “instrumental view” genuinely believe that specific arrangements of objects can influence luck and fortune, and that belief has a strong positive effect on how they evaluate spaces and products.
1Psychology & Marketing. Consumers’ Views of Feng Shui: Antecedents and Behavioral ConsequencesFor people who hold this view, placing a money tree in the southeast corner of a room is not decorative whimsy; it is a deliberate act meant to channel prosperity energy. The tradition is taken seriously enough that money trees remain one of the most popular housewarming and Lunar New Year gifts across East and Southeast Asia, and increasingly in Western markets as well.
It is worth separating the cultural tradition from the scientific question. Feng shui is a living practice with centuries of philosophical grounding, and dismissing it as mere superstition misses how powerfully it shapes real behavior. At the same time, the specific claim that a potted plant attracts money has no mechanism that science can test. The more interesting question is what believing that claim actually does to the person who holds it.
What a Money Tree Actually Is
The plant marketed as a money tree, Pachira aquatica, is a tropical wetland tree native to Central and South America. In the wild it is a dominant canopy species in freshwater swamp forests along coastal plains, pollinated by an unusual mix of bats, sphinx moths, and honey bees.
2Botanical Journal of the Linnean Society. Reproductive biology of Pachira aquatica Aubl. (Malvaceae: Bombacoideae): a tropical tree pollinated by bats, sphingid moths and honey beesIt can reach heights of 18 meters in its native habitat, a far cry from the tabletop specimens most people know. Its seeds are edible and sometimes roasted or ground into a flour in parts of Latin America, where it has no particular association with money or luck.
The money tree’s identity as a prosperity symbol is almost entirely a product of the Taiwanese horticultural trade. Growers discovered that young Pachira stems could be braided while still flexible, creating a distinctive twisted trunk that looked ornamental and vaguely mystical. Combined with the five-fingered leaf shape and a compelling origin story, the braided money tree became a commercial phenomenon. The plant itself is hardy, tolerant of low light, and forgiving of irregular watering, which made it ideal for offices and apartments. Its success as a houseplant owes more to its resilience than to any supernatural property.
Can Believing in Luck Actually Help?
Here is where the story gets genuinely interesting. Psychologists have spent decades studying what happens when people believe they have a lucky charm, and the findings are surprisingly consistent: the belief works, just not the way folk traditions describe.
In a series of experiments published in Psychological Science, researchers found that activating a superstition boosted participants’ confidence in mastering upcoming tasks, and that increased confidence in turn improved actual performance. Participants who were told to “keep their fingers crossed” or who had a personal lucky charm present performed better on motor-skill and memory tasks. The mechanism was self-efficacy: feeling lucky made people feel more capable, and feeling more capable made them try harder and persist longer.
3PubMed. Keep your fingers crossed!: how superstition improves performanceA separate study examining good-luck beliefs in children found a similar pathway. Belief in good luck facilitated cognitive performance in girls by increasing their self-efficacy, measured as their subjective estimate of how well they would do on upcoming tasks.
4PubMed Central. The Differential Effects of Good Luck Belief on Cognitive Performance in Boys and GirlsThe luck itself was not real in any physical sense. But the psychological chain reaction it set off, greater confidence leading to greater effort leading to better outcomes, was entirely real and measurable.
Applied to a money tree sitting on someone’s desk, this research suggests a plausible mechanism for why people report “feeling luckier” after acquiring one. If you genuinely believe the plant signals prosperity and good fortune, you may approach financial decisions, job tasks, or business negotiations with slightly more confidence. You might persist a bit longer on a difficult problem. You might interpret ambiguous outcomes more optimistically. None of that is magic. All of it is documented human psychology.
The effect has limits, of course. A money tree will not help you win the lottery or cause a raise to materialize. The self-efficacy boost works on tasks where effort and persistence matter, not on pure chance. And the effect depends entirely on genuine belief. If you think the whole thing is nonsense, having a braided plant on your windowsill will not secretly alter your behavior. The psychology of lucky objects is belief-dependent in a way that makes it self-selecting: it helps the people who think it will.
The Real Benefits of Keeping a Money Tree Indoors
Strip away the folklore entirely and you still have a living plant in your home, which carries its own set of well-documented benefits. A randomized crossover study found that people who performed a simple plant-care task (transplanting seedlings) felt more comfortable, soothed, and natural compared to when they performed a computer task. Their sympathetic nervous system activity decreased during the plant interaction, and their diastolic blood pressure was significantly lower afterward.
5PubMed Central. Interaction with indoor plants may reduce psychological and physiological stress by suppressing autonomic nervous system activity in young adults: a randomized crossover studyBroader reviews of the literature on indoor plants have found that they can reduce perceived stress, lower blood pressure, and alleviate symptoms of sick building syndrome.
6International Journal of Built Environment and Sustainability. Psychological And Physiological Benefits Of Plants In The Indoor Environment: A Mini And In-Depth ReviewThose same reviews note that results are not uniform across all people and all settings. Factors like gender, whether the person finds the plant attractive, the physical characteristics of the plant, and how people interact with it (watering it vs. just looking at it) all shape the strength of the effect. A money tree you enjoy caring for will likely do more for your stress levels than one you forget about behind the couch.
There is also the air-quality angle. Indoor plants, as a group, can break down volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and reduce indoor pollutants. Research on plant species used in a green wall installation at Harvard University examined how effectively various plants decompose and absorb VOCs, contributing to a growing body of evidence that living plants can meaningfully contribute to indoor air cleaning.
7ScienceDirect. Benchmark of plant-based VOCs control effect for indoor air quality: Green wall case in smith campus at Harvard UniversityThat said, the air-purifying capacity of a single potted money tree in a normal-sized room is modest. The famous 1989 NASA Clean Air Study, which popularized the idea that houseplants filter toxins, used sealed experimental chambers far smaller than a living room. In a real home with normal ventilation, you would need a small jungle to match the purification rates those experiments reported. A money tree helps a little. An open window or an air purifier helps more.
Still, even a small contribution to air quality, combined with the documented stress-reducing effects of plant interaction, means that a money tree is doing something measurably positive for your indoor environment. Just not the thing its name promises.
Why Green Feels Prosperous
Part of the money tree’s symbolic power comes from something humans respond to almost automatically: the color green. In many cultures, green is associated with growth, renewal, and financial gain (think green dollar bills, green lights meaning “go,” green arrows on stock tickers). This is not just cultural decoration. Color priming studies show that the colors people are exposed to can shift their financial judgments.
One study on color priming in financial decisions found that people exposed to red assigned higher valuations and probabilities to loss scenarios, while people exposed to green were more oriented toward gains. The difference was substantial: subjects primed with red valued loss-domain events roughly 15 percent higher than green-primed subjects, and green-primed subjects valued gain-domain events about 19 percent higher than their red-primed counterparts.
8The Journal of Socio-Economics. Red light, green light: Color priming in financial decisionsA separate set of experiments confirmed that red color cues led to more conservative, risk-averse choices in online environments, while the absence of red (or presence of blue or neutral colors) allowed for less cautious behavior.
9PubMed Central. Red Color and Risk-Taking Behavior in Online EnvironmentsWhat this means for your money tree is subtle but real. Having a lush green plant in your workspace creates a micro-environment that, at a subconscious level, is more associated with growth and financial opportunity than loss and danger. You are not going to make better stock picks because your Pachira is thriving. But if you are already primed to associate the plant with prosperity through cultural narrative, the greenness of the leaves reinforces that association through a separate, well-documented color-cognition pathway. The folklore and the color science happen to push in the same direction.
This also helps explain why a dying, yellowing money tree feels like such bad luck to people who believe in the tradition. A healthy green plant triggers gain-oriented thinking. A sickly brown one triggers the opposite emotional register, activating the same loss-focused psychology that red cues produce in experimental settings. Keeping the plant alive and green is not just good horticulture; for believers, it is psychologically self-reinforcing.
Feng Shui as a Market Force
Whether or not feng shui “works” in any metaphysical sense, it undeniably works as a driver of consumer behavior. Research on how consumers view feng shui identified three distinct perspectives: an instrumental view (arrangements can change your luck), a spiritual view (arrangements connect you to a higher order), and a minimalist view (it is mostly about aesthetics and decluttering). Of these, the instrumental view had the strongest positive effect on purchasing behavior and product evaluation.
1Psychology & Marketing. Consumers’ Views of Feng Shui: Antecedents and Behavioral ConsequencesPeople who believe feng shui arrangements can genuinely affect fortune are the most enthusiastic buyers of feng shui-related products, and they rate spaces arranged according to feng shui principles as significantly more desirable. The money tree sits squarely in this market segment. It is not sold primarily as a houseplant; it is sold as a feng shui remedy, a prosperity activator, a luck-enhancing tool that happens to need watering.
The commercial reality is staggering. Money trees are one of the best-selling houseplants in many Asian markets and have become a staple in Western garden centers, often retailed at a premium compared to other plants of similar size. Their braided trunks, which require skilled labor during early growth, justify part of that markup, but the “luck” branding carries significant price power of its own. Gift-ready money trees with red ribbons and gold coins wired into the branches sell for several times the price of an equivalent un-branded Pachira in a plain pot. The folklore is, in a very literal sense, worth money.
For skeptics, this is evidence that the money tree is a marketing creation. For practitioners of feng shui, it is simply proof that the tradition is valued. Both perspectives coexist in the marketplace, and neither is likely to budge the other. What the research confirms is that the belief itself is a genuine psychological force, regardless of whether the metaphysics hold up.
When a Money Tree Actually Backfires
There is a less-discussed side to lucky objects. If your money tree starts dropping leaves, develops root rot, or dies outright, the psychological effect can reverse. People who assign symbolic meaning to objects experience genuine distress when those objects fail or are damaged. A dead money tree, in a household that took the symbolism seriously, can feel like an omen of financial loss or personal failure. The same self-efficacy mechanism that boosts confidence when the charm is present can undermine it when the charm is absent or broken.
This is one reason feng shui guides are emphatic about plant health. Yellowing leaves or stagnant growth are considered signs of blocked energy, which translates to blocked fortune. From a psychological standpoint, the advice is sound even without the metaphysical framework: if you are going to tie your sense of financial optimism to a living thing, keep it alive. A dead plant in the prosperity corner of your office is a daily visual reminder of neglect or failure, which is the opposite of the confidence boost that makes lucky charms useful in the first place.
There is also the question of over-reliance. The self-efficacy boost from lucky objects works best when it amplifies effort, not when it replaces it. If someone buys a money tree and then sits back waiting for money to arrive, the superstition is not just failing to help; it may be displacing more productive financial behavior. The research on superstition and performance is clear that the benefit flows through increased persistence and confidence in tasks that require effort. Passive luck-seeking gets no measurable boost from a plant or any other charm.
Other “Money Plants” and How They Compare
The braided Pachira aquatica is not the only plant sold under a prosperity label. In parts of Southeast Asia, Epipremnum aureum (commonly called golden pothos or “money plant”) carries similar luck associations, partly because its round, coin-shaped leaves resemble currency. In South Africa, Crassula ovata (jade plant) is the prosperity plant of choice, and it shows up in feng shui traditions as well. Each of these plants has a different botanical identity, different care requirements, and a different regional folklore, but they share the same underlying psychological appeal: green, growing, and symbolically linked to abundance.
Jade plants, in particular, are interesting because they are succulents and survive long periods of neglect, which means they rarely trigger the “dying plant = dying fortune” anxiety described above. A Pachira is more temperamental indoors; it likes bright indirect light, consistent moisture without waterlogging, and reasonable humidity. In dry apartment air during winter, its leaves can brown at the tips, which sends feng shui-minded owners into mild panic. If low-maintenance luck is the goal, a jade plant is arguably the more practical choice. If the braided-trunk aesthetic and the specific Taiwanese folklore matter to you, Pachira is the traditional pick.
None of these plants have been compared head-to-head in any study of psychological or financial outcomes, which is probably for the best. The point is that the “lucky plant” concept is remarkably widespread across cultures, and the specific species matters far less than the human tendency to assign symbolic meaning to living things and then behave in accordance with that meaning.