Credit Cards as Spending-Facilitating Stimuli: A Test and Extension of Feinberg's Conditioning Hypothesis

Abstract

To replicate and extend the 1986 work of Feinberg, the effect of a credit card's presence on subjects' spending behavior was assessed. Over-all, no main effect was observed, which does not support Feinberg's conditioning hypothesis that credit cards function as spending-facilitating stimuli. These results held even for subjects who exhibited high scores on materialism, as assessed on Belk's 1984 scale. Inasmuch as our procedure replicated Feinberg's, the contrasting results might be attributed to either methodological differences (our experiment used comparatively small numbers of subjects, composed of women largely from working-class backgrounds) or to nomological problems (in which case the validity of Feinberg's conditioning hypothesis and/or that of Belk's materialism scale would be called into question).