John Leland published a fascinating article in today’s New York Times.  Debtors Search for Discipline via Blogs describes a new trend, blogging for willpower.  People publish the intimate details of their of personal debt in order to use the exposure and reader feedback to help them control their debt accumulation.  The bloggers believe that by forcing themselves to publish everything they spend, they will become more conscious of their spending and have a stronger incentive to do less of it.  As Tricia of www.bloggingawaydebt.com said, “I think about this blog every time I’m in the store and something that I don’t need catches my eye.”

For those of us who are interested in debt, a few interesting points emerge.  First, for these bloggers, stigma is alive and well.  They are using the Internet as a clever way to circumvent it and still obtain the help they need.  Many of these bloggers are revealing private information they conceal from their families and friends. One couple refused permission to use their names in the article because, “We don’t want our parents to find out and kill us.”  This same couple is even sharing information they find difficult to discuss with each other in person.  The self-titled “King and Queen of Debt” say that, although they have good communication skills in other areas, it is only by writing the blog that they have been able to communicate about their finances.

Second, these bloggers have developed a self-control mechanism that
aligns perfectly with cutting-edge research in behavioral economics.
Just yesterday, I read an article by economists George Lowenstein and Ted O’Donoghue in the Chicago Law Review’s
Winter 2006 Symposium. In "We Can
Do This the Easy Way or the Hard Way": Negative Emotions,
Self-Regulation, and the Law, Lowenstein and O’Donoghue explain that people use negative emotions to
help resist temptation.  When the benefits of a decision will be
realized immediately, but the costs will not occur so soon, people experience temptation, because we tend to weigh
present costs and benefits more heavily than future ones.
(Interestingly, we have the same experience when the costs are
immediate but the benefits are delayed. Think the temptation to
procrastinate on a large project.)  One way people attempt to even out
the scales and resist temptation is by imposing immediate costs on
themselves through negative emotion.  So a dieter resists a dessert by
thinking, “If I have that last piece of cake, I’m a glutton,” and thus
transfers some of the costs eating it to the present.  Obviously, this
negative emotion is not always enough, or we wouldn’t have Weight
Watchers.  What the debt bloggers are doing is intensifying the negative
emotions they associate with spending to the point where many of them
claim that their blogs helped them substantially reduce or eliminate
their debt.  As one blogger said, “I teach people how to get out of debt for a living, but I couldn’t do it myself until I started the blog.”

A final point is to notice what an extreme measure this is.  People are
revealing information they find humiliating to strangers in order to
prevent themselves from spending and accumulating more debt.  Perhaps
these bloggers and other debtors like them could use a little help.  (Self-disclosure: I’m currently writing a law-review article on precisely this topic.)  Credit-card issuers don’t need to continue giving
these borrowers enough rope to hang themselves.  At least one blogger’s credit-card debt exceeded her annual income.  That seems like a reasonably
extreme point to cut off somebody’s credit.  Another option is to create easy ways for credit-card users to decline credit raises.  If
some debtors are resorting to blogging to resist temptation, I’m
willing to bet that plenty of others would welcome less dramatic
willpower reinforcements.