See No Evil, Swipe No Evil?

Do you have any personal flaws, faults or imperfections?

Don’t blame yourself. Blame your credit card.

That’s the advice we glean from this recent piece in The Atlantic, which gently suggests four ways in which those insidious pieces of plastic in your wallet could be ruining your life.

To be fair to the piece, there are some interesting elements of behavioral psychology that come into play here, and it’s naÃ¯ve to suggest that credit cards can’t be harmful if used irresponsibly or without care.

On the other hand, there is a portion of the population capable of leveraging credit without heading down a path of moral decay. And for hundreds of millions of Americans, self-control isn’t this big of an issue.

But if you’re looking for a scapegoat for something that’s not going right in your life, have no fear: you’re not alone. Let’s take a look at three personal flaws you can pass off to your plastic.

Irresponsibility

Well, ok. You can see the merit to the underlying argument here: because credit cards are so good at eliminating payments pain points, they make it easier to spend.

Perhaps some of that is true, but in the payments industry, we tend to view “easier to spend as a good thing.” And that’s because it is.

If you’re worried about your spending habits, perhaps you should reflect on them before you get to the point of sale. Banking on the extra 10 seconds it takes you to pay witch cash as a deterrent probably isn’t a sound strategy.

Plus, as the report states, “research has shown that people who own more credit cards spend more over all.”

You don’t say? I would hate to be the researcher who got that hypotheses wrong.

Forgetfulness

The Atlantic argues that credit cards are so easy to use, you can actually forget you’re spending money. Not “forget” like when you’re running up a bar tab, but sincerely lose touch with the fact that what you’re dolling out is real money.

According to the report, credit cards create “an illusion of liquidity,” causing users to confuse the “ability to spend money with the means to spend money.” They’re less likely to remember details about their purchases, and more likely to buy more as a result.

There are probably elements of this that are true. There are also elements of this that I want to repurpose for other reasons. Forget to turn something on deadline? Blame the credit card. Didn’t pick up milk at the store? It’s not your fault: the card made you forget.

But didn’t it make you more likely to buy that milk impulsively? Erm …

Obesity

Yes, I’m not making this up. The report indicates that if you’re fat, your credit cards could be to blame.

Credit cards “weak impulse control,” according to a 2011 paper published in the Journal of Consumer Research. The report cited a study that found that shoppers with credit cards bought food with poorer health rankings than their cardless counterparts, which is pretty irrefutable evidence if you ask me.

We can only assume that chip & PIN cards lead to more calories.

To read the full report in The Atlantic – and you should, to give it a fair shake — click here.