The study appears in the journal Neuron and is the most recent from the emerging field of neuroeconomics, which looks at the mental processes that drive economic decision-making. The researchers suspect their study may help to explain why people spend more with credit cards than with cash.
“Credit cards effectively anesthetize the pain of paying,” said George Loewenstein, Carnegie Mellon professor of social and decision sciences (SDS) and co-author of the paper. “You swipe the card and it doesn’t feel like you’re giving anything up to make the purchase, unlike paying cash where you have to hand over bills.””
The researchers had subjects make decisions regarding the expense of making certain purchases while undergoing fMRI scanning of their brains, and discovered that “the insula, a section of the brain associated with pain processing, activated when subjects saw prices that were too high…”, as described by one of the team. An interesting conclusion, but I think it does not prove that paying causes “pain” in a neurologic sense as much as a metaphoric one, which we already knew. In other words, it’s semantics — if you note that the insula lights up both with a physical pain experience and when confronted with a high price, couldn’t you just as readily conclude that the insula is activated with several different types of distress, one of them being pain and the other fiscal distress? [thanks, Joel]
The insula, by the way, is also implicated in another experience we, metaphorically, also call ‘pain’, which is the distress of withdrawal in addiction. I wrote several months ago about a cigarette-smoking patient who suffered an insular stroke and found he no longer craved nicotine.
