The Psychological Ownership of Borrowed Money Scale<\/strong> is an empirical psychometric instrument developed by Eesha Sharma, Stephanie M. Tully, and Cynthia Cryder (2021)<\/a> to quantify the subjective degree to which consumers psychologically perceive borrowed financial capital as their own personal property rather than an external liability owed to a third-party creditor. Drawing upon foundational theories of psychological ownership<\/a> and behavioral mental accounting<\/a>, the scale captures individual differences and situational variations in the cognitive integration of credit, debt instruments, and loaned capital into the self-concept. The measurement model typically operates as a unidimensional construct consisting of targeted Likert-format items assessing core facets of possession: subjective feelings of ownership, identification of the funds as belonging to the self, and the cognitive framing of loan disbursements as an early realization of one’s own future income rather than an outstanding debt burden.<\/p>\n Psychometric evaluations across multiple laboratory, online panel, and field experiments demonstrate excellent internal consistency, with Cronbach's alpha<\/a> coefficients consistently exceeding .85 across diverse lending contexts (e.g., revolving credit card debt, peer-to-peer lending, personal installment loans, and Buy Now Pay Later [BNPL] programs). Confirmatory factor analyses confirm a robust single-factor structure that remains invariant across diverse consumer demographics. The scale exhibits strong construct, convergent, discriminant, and predictive validity, significantly predicting downstream financial behaviors including willingness to spend, diminished pain of paying<\/a>, accelerated consumption rates, preference for nonessential discretionary purchases, and a systematic underestimation of compounding interest costs. By revealing the psychological mechanisms underlying debt-financed consumer spending, this instrument provides researchers, financial regulators, and behavioral economists with an essential diagnostic tool for identifying vulnerability to unsustainable household borrowing.<\/p>\n psychological ownership, borrowed money, consumer debt, mental accounting, pain of paying, credit card spending, behavioral economics, consumer financial decision-making, debt literacy, scale validation<\/p>\n The Psychological Ownership of Borrowed Money construct and its empirical measurement system were developed and validated by a consortium of researchers in behavioral decision research, consumer psychology, and marketing:<\/p>\n Corresponding correspondence regarding the conceptualization of the construct can be directed to the authors through their institutional affiliations or via the administrative editorial offices of the Journal of Marketing Research<\/em>.<\/p>\n The primary purpose of the Psychological Ownership of Borrowed Money Scale is to assess and operationalize a pervasive yet historically overlooked psychological distortion: the cognitive tendency of borrowers to mentally represent borrowed funds as personal wealth. Traditional normative economic models, anchored in classical expected utility theory<\/a> and permanent income hypotheses, assume that rational agents treat borrowed capital strictly as a liability. Under standard economic assumptions, an individual who borrows $1,000 acquires an asset offset by an equivalent or greater liability (accounting for interest rates and origination fees). Consequently, the rational actor should track the net economic position and treat the expenditure of borrowed funds with heightened scrutiny due to the structural carrying costs of debt.<\/p>\n Empirical consumer behavior, however, demonstrates profound departures from this normative benchmark. Consumers routinely accelerate spending, exhibit relaxed price sensitivity, and engage in high-risk purchasing when transacting with credit cards, retail loans, and short-term credit vehicles. While behavioral economists historically attributed this spending premium to liquidity constraints or transaction decoupling, the Psychological Ownership of Borrowed Money Scale was engineered to isolate the psychological sense of possession that arises once credit is disbursed or authorized.<\/p>\n In both clinical financial therapy and empirical research, the scale serves several critical functions:<\/p>\n The construct of psychological ownership over borrowed money is defined as a state- or trait-level cognitive-affective condition in which an individual feels that borrowed financial resources belong to them personally, viewing these funds as an extension of the self rather than an external obligation. Unlike legal ownership, which represents a legally recognized property right, psychological ownership is an entirely phenomenological experience captured by the psychological sentiment: “This is mine.”<\/em><\/p>\n When applied to debt and consumer credit, the construct exhibits distinct structural dimensions and psychological manifestations:<\/p>\n The core dimension of the construct reflects the immediate, intuitive feeling that the borrowed funds reside within the consumer's personal asset boundary. When a consumer experiences high psychological ownership over credit, the capital in their bank account, loan disbursement, or credit line is subjectively integrated into their aggregate liquid wealth. For example, when viewing a bank balance that includes a recently deposited $5,000 personal loan, an individual with high psychological ownership focuses exclusively on the $5,000 liquidity, experiencing emotional pride, personal empowerment, and heightened spending entitlement. Conversely, an individual low in psychological ownership perceives the same $5,000 as foreign, encumbered capital that belongs entirely to the banking institution until full amortization is achieved.<\/p>\n A crucial cognitive facet captured by the construct is the mental accounting mechanism through which borrowed money is legitimized. Borrowers high in psychological ownership mentally classify the borrowed sum as an early realization of their own future earned income. They frame the transaction not as receiving someone else's capital, but rather as “unlocking” or “accelerating” their own future earnings into the present moment. Because people inherently feel complete psychological ownership over their future labor and anticipated salary, transferring this sense of entitlement onto the borrowed capital neutralizes any cognitive dissonance associated with being in debt.<\/p>\n Grounded in the psychological paradigm of the extended self<\/a>, money serves as an instrumental proxy for personal autonomy, agency, and self-worth. High psychological ownership of borrowed funds involves absorbing the financial capital into the boundary of the extended self. When spending these funds, consumers feel they are exercising personal agency using their own resources. This integration drastically alters spending choices: consumers become far more inclined to allocate borrowed money toward hedonic, luxury, or status-signaling acquisitions, precisely because spending “one's own” money on self-actualizing goods feels psychologically justifiable, whereas spending “someone else's” loan proceeds on luxuries typically triggers moral guilt and anxiety.<\/p>\n The Psychological Ownership of Borrowed Money Scale is anchored at the intersection of three major theoretical domains: the theory of psychological ownership, mental accounting theory, and the behavioral framework of the pain of paying.<\/p>\n The foundational architecture of the scale is derived from the seminal work of Pierce, Kostova, and Dirks (2001, 2003)<\/a>. Pierce and colleagues posited that psychological ownership emerges to fulfill three fundamental human motives: efficacy and effectance (the desire to control one's environment), self-identity (using objects to define and express who one is), and having a “home” or place of security. Pierce et al. identified three primary psychological routes through which ownership develops:<\/p>\n The scale integrates Richard Thaler's<\/a> (1985, 1999) mental accounting theory<\/a>, which articulates that individuals categorize, budget, and evaluate economic outcomes into distinct, non-fungible cognitive accounts. According to mental accounting principles, funds designated as “windfalls,” “hard-earned labor,” or “credit liabilities” carry different marginal propensities to consume. The Psychological Ownership of Borrowed Money Scale captures the specific cognitive phenomenon wherein borrowed funds are mentally booked into a personal asset account rather than a liability or debt account. By violating the normative principle of fungibility<\/a>, consumers who psychologically “own” debt capital treat it as spendable liquidity, insulating themselves from the ongoing realization that their future consumption must be severely discounted to repay the principal and interest.<\/p>\n The operational framework relies heavily on the pain of paying<\/a> paradigm pioneered by Prelec and Loewenstein (1998)<\/a>. Under normative conditions, the immediate psychological pain experienced during a financial transaction acts as a natural, self-regulating brake on excessive consumption. When consumers spend using cash or checking balances, the acute awareness of resource depletion generates immediate visceral pain. However, when consumers experience high psychological ownership over borrowed capital, a paradoxical cognitive decoupling occurs: because the money is already integrated as “theirs,” spending it does not feel like relinquishing external resources, nor does it immediately register as incurring a future repayment obligation. Consequently, the pain of paying is drastically attenuated, precipitating reckless purchasing behavior, overspending, and high debt burdens.<\/p>\n The psychometric validity of the Psychological Ownership of Borrowed Money Scale has been extensively evaluated across experimental, correlational, and longitudinal investigations, confirming robust construct, convergent, discriminant, and predictive validity.<\/p>\n Construct validity is substantiated by significant, theoretical-aligned correlations with related psychological constructs. The scale demonstrates robust positive correlations with general psychological ownership scales adapted from Pierce et al. (2003) ($r = .68$<\/span> to $.74, p < .001$<\/span>), indicating that the instrument accurately captures the broader genus of ownership feelings within the specific domain of liabilities. Furthermore, the scale correlates positively with debt tolerance ($r = .42, p < .001$<\/span>), materialistic value orientation ($r = .35, p < .001$<\/span>), and generalized spending impulsivity ($r = .38, p < .001$<\/span>). Individuals scoring high on the scale also show higher scores on present-hedonistic time orientation<\/a>, viewing temporal trade-offs through an immediate-gratification lens.<\/p>\n Discriminant validity was established through multitrait-multimethod<\/a> procedures and average variance extracted (AVE) versus shared variance comparisons (Fornell-Larcker criterion). Across empirical validation studies by Sharma, Tully, and Cryder (2021), psychological ownership of borrowed funds was shown to be empirically and conceptually distinct from several established psychological constructs:<\/p>\n The scale possesses remarkable predictive validity regarding concrete behavioral outcomes. In controlled behavioral experiments, participants who exhibited high scores on the scale displayed:<\/p>\n The reliability of the Psychological Ownership of Borrowed Money Scale has been corroborated across diverse consumer samples, including representative American adult cohorts, college student populations, and international online convenience panels (e.g., Prolific Academic and Amazon Mechanical Turk).<\/p>\n Across the validation studies conducted by Sharma, Tully, and Cryder (2021), internal consistency metrics systematically met and exceeded conventional psychometric thresholds for behavioral research:<\/p>\n To examine the stability of the scale across time, longitudinal test-retest assessments were executed across multi-week intervals:<\/p>\n The structural dimensionality of the Psychological Ownership of Borrowed Money Scale has been verified using both Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) and Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) across independent respondent cohorts.<\/p>\n During initial scale development, an exploratory factor analysis using maximum likelihood estimation with Promax (oblique) rotation was conducted on an initial pool of candidate items. Both the Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin (KMO)<\/a> measure of sampling adequacy ($KMO = .89$<\/span>) and Bartlett's Test of Sphericity ($\\chi^2(28) = 1452.82, p < .001$<\/span>) confirmed the suitability of the data for factor extraction.<\/p>\n Subsequent confirmatory factor analyses performed on separate hold-out validation samples validated the single-factor structural specification. Model fit parameters consistently met or exceeded rigorous psychometric benchmarks across all standard fit indices:<\/p>\n Measurement invariance testing across demographic sub-populations (e.g., gender, age brackets, and household income tiers) further demonstrated metric and scalar invariance ($\\Delta CFI < .01, \\Delta RMSEA < .015$<\/span>), confirming that the scale functions equivalently across diverse socioeconomic strata.<\/p>\n The operational administration of the Psychological Ownership of Borrowed Money Scale is structured as follows:<\/p>\n The foundational research documenting the Psychological Ownership of Borrowed Money Scale was published in 2021<\/strong> in the Journal of Marketing Research<\/em> by the American Marketing Association (AMA). Below are the practical parameters regarding access, permissions, and operational deployment:<\/p>\n The theoretical, empirical, and psychometric literature supporting the scale includes the following foundational works:<\/p>\n A comprehensive academic analysis of the Psychological Ownership of Borrowed Money Scale (Sharma, Tully, & Cryder, 2021), examining its psychometric properties, theoretical framework, validity, and role in consumer debt behavior.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","categories":[745,1076,2],"tags":[19751,5600,19752,8643,3055,5599,4618,35],"class_list":["post-6263","psych_scale","type-psych_scale","status-publish","hentry","category-behavioral-economics","category-consumer-psychology","category-psychometrics","tag-borrowed-money","tag-consumer-debt","tag-credit-cards","tag-financial-decision-making","tag-mental-accounting","tag-pain-of-paying","tag-psychological-ownership","tag-scale-validation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ashadocs.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/psych_scale\/6263","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ashadocs.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/psych_scale"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ashadocs.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/psych_scale"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ashadocs.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ashadocs.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6263"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ashadocs.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/psych_scale\/6263\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ashadocs.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6263"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ashadocs.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6263"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ashadocs.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6263"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}2. Keywords<\/h2>\n
3. Authors<\/h2>\n
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4. Purpose<\/h2>\n
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5. Psychological Construct<\/h2>\n
5.1 Perceived Personal Belongingness<\/h3>\n
5.2 Future Income Pre-allocation vs. External Liability Framing<\/h3>\n
5.3 Boundary Infiltration into the Extended Self<\/h3>\n
6. Theoretical Framework<\/h2>\n
6.1 Pierce, Kostova, and Dirks' Theory of Psychological Ownership<\/h3>\n
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6.2 Thaler's Mental Accounting Theory<\/h3>\n
6.3 Prelec and Loewenstein's Pain of Paying Paradigm<\/h3>\n
7. Validity<\/h2>\n
7.1 Construct and Convergent Validity<\/h3>\n
7.2 Discriminant Validity<\/h3>\n
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7.3 Predictive and Nomological Validity<\/h3>\n
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8. Reliability<\/h2>\n
8.1 Internal Consistency<\/h3>\n
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8.2 Test-Retest Reliability and Temporal Stability<\/h3>\n
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9. Factor Analysis<\/h2>\n
9.1 Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA)<\/h3>\n
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9.2 Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA)<\/h3>\n
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10. Instrument \/ Measurement Tool<\/h2>\n
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11. Permissions & Fee and Test Year<\/h2>\n
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12. References<\/h2>\n
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13. Items of the Scale<\/h2>\n