Abstract
Financial industry data indicate that consumers increasingly prefer debit cards over credit cards, especially as a means of enforcing financial self-discipline. Given prior research suggesting that credit cards act as spending facilitating stimuli, this move toward reduced credit card use would appear to be in the right direction. Ironically, however, the same logos that were implicated in facilitating spending with credit cards are the logos that appear on debit cards. In what should serve as an eye-opener to consumers, it is found that exposure to debit card logos does result in an increased willingness to spend, similar to credit cards.
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Notes
The six items were selected on the basis of a pre-test. The pre-test consisted of an unaided recall task in which each of the 15 individuals made a list of as many gift items as he/she could remember that they had purchased recently along with the price (or price range) they had paid. Based on the responses from the pre-test, we selected six items that were most frequently mentioned and whose price range overlapped the most across respondents.
The following statements with a 7-point strongly agree–strongly disagree scale were used: I would describe myself as being aware of prices in general; I would describe myself as being careful with spending money; I feel that most things are over-priced; I find myself spending too much money.
For the contrasts, we tested the hypothesis of equality of variances using the Levene test. Since the Levene statistic was significant for all items (all p < .001), which indicates unequal variances, we report the results of the contrast tests corresponding to the unequal-variance t test.
Lie et al. (2010) found a “reverse” credit card effect in which credit cards inhibited spending, ascribed to New Zealand student subjects' negative associations with credit cards.
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Moore, A., Taylor, M. Time to Cut Up Those Debit Cards? Effect of Payment Mode on Willingness to Spend. J Consum Policy 34, 415–422 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10603-011-9172-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10603-011-9172-7