We’re all guilty of making guilty purchases — those impulse buys we’d like to think we don’t make, but do anyway. But a new study from the University of Notre Dame shows how we pay for them helps us to fool ourselves into forgetting we did.
In short, we pay with our debit cards to remember, but we pay cash to forget.
The study, which will be published in the Journal of the Association for Consumer Research, looked into 118,042 purchases and used 5,000 individuals in an experiment to see how they could justify them.
In short, an unmistakable pattern emerged, says one of the study’s authors, Christopher Belcher. “When a purchase is difficult to justify — like buying an overpriced bottle of water at the airport, cigarettes or candy — consumers pay with less-trackable methods, like cash, so they can eliminate the paper or electronic trail and ‘forget’ this guilty purchase.”
He noted, “This strategy of using cash to hide purchases from ourselves if we feel bad about them is something my co-authors and I admitted to doing ourselves.”
The researchers said stores could put this “dirty money” strategy to their advantage, positing, “A doughnut shop could benefit from letting its customers pay with cash because they may want to forget their unhealthy purchase.”