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. 2020 Nov 17:11:537606.
doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.537606. eCollection 2020.

The Hedonics of Debt

Faith Shin  1 , Dov Cohen  1 , Robert M Lawless  2 , Jesse L Preston  3
Affiliations

The Hedonics of Debt

Faith Shin et al. Front Psychol. .

Abstract

Psychologists and economists often discuss the "pain" of paying for our purchases. Four experiments examine how people evaluate prospective debt payments, analyzing how different features of a loan (down payment, final payment, duration, monthly payments) affect willingness to accept the loan. Akin to previous findings on physical pain, participants exhibited duration neglect and overweighted final moments. However, participants also focused heavily on the monthly or average payment (unlike in retrospective studies of physical pain where only peak-end moments seem to count). In Experiment 2, participants' willingness to accept the loan was not significantly diminished by making it more expensive through keeping the same monthly payment but extending the length of the loan by 40% (evincing duration neglect). Further, in Experiments 3 and 4, we show that participants increased their willingness to buy if loans were made longer and more expensive by adding smaller, less "painful" payments to the end.

Keywords: credit; debt; duration neglect; financial decision-making; hedonics; loan; pain of paying; peak-end.

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Figures

FIGURE 1
FIGURE 1
Average monthly payment students were willing to make on loans of different lengths (between-subjects, Experiment 1).
FIGURE 2
FIGURE 2
Average monthly payment students were willing to make on loans of 10 and 15 years (within-subjects, Experiment 1).
FIGURE 3
FIGURE 3
Memory for features of the first loan offer (Experiment 2).
FIGURE 4
FIGURE 4
Willingness to take a loan, depending on whether it had 12 extra months of “less painful” payments added on to the end (Experiments 3 and 4).
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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