H.Peoples shopping behaviour therefore seems to have piggy-backed on old neural circuits evolved for anticipation of reward and the avoidance of hazards.What Dr Loewenstein found interesting was the separation of the assessment of the product from the assessment of its price ,even though the two are then synthesised in the prefrontal cortex.His hypothesis is that rather than weighing the present good against future alternatives,as orthodox economics suggests happens,people actually balance the immediate pleasure of the prospective possession of a product with the immediate pain of paying for it.
I.That makes perfect sense as an evolved mechanism for trading.If one useful object is being traded for another ,the future utility of what is being given up is embedded in the object being traded.Emotion is as capable of assigning such a value as reason.Buying on credit,though,may be different.The abstract nature of credit cards,coupled with the deferment of payment that they promise,may modulate the con side of the calculation in favour of the pro.
J.Whether it actually does so will be the subject of further experiments that the three researchers are now designing.These will test whether people with distinctly different spending behaviour,such as miserliness and extravagance,experience different amounts of pain in response to prices.They will also assess whether,in the same individuals,buying with credit cards eases the pain compared with paying by cash.If they find that it does,then credit cards may have to join the list of things such as fatty and sugary foods,and recreational drugs,that subvert human instincts in ways that seem pleasurable at the time but can have a long and malign aftertaste.
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