Out of debt, out of burden: The physical burdens of debt

Proverbs in different cultures describe being indebted as burdensome or a physical strain. To our knowledge, little research has examined the link between debt and burden. In the present work, we conducted five studies to examine the hypothesis that debt would lead to perceptual judgments of the environment as more forbidding and extreme in much the same manner as a physical burden. In Studies 1-3, we found that compared with the control condition, people in the debt condition threw beanbags farther, estimated the distance to be greater, and estimated the hills to be steeper. In study 4 we found that participants with student loan debt rated their subjective weight as heavier than participants without debt. In Study 5, we replicated the results of Study 3, which we pre-registered using the Open Science Framework. These findings provided the first evidence of the association between debt and physical burden and indicated that debts affect people similarly to physical burdens.