[signatoremo]

Not able to replicate an earlier study doesn’t mean that study is wrong. More likely that the assumptions and factors taken into consideration have changed, especially after almost 30 years. The pull of Visa brand may have declined, but the effect may be as strong or even stronger if it was replaced with, says, Apple.

[anonymous908213]

I didn't say that it was wrong. I said that the field is murky and not suitable for such confident declarations of fact. "Putting a credit card logo on your checkout stimulates spending" is a very different sentence than "An experiment on 130 restaraunt customers and 150 college students found credit card logos stimulated spending among the people tested", and it is abundantly clear that sentences of the latter type do not reliably generalize to entire populations, because humans are ridiculously complex and it is somewhere between very hard and impossible to accurately control for all possible confounding factors. Do they sometimes generalize? I'm sure they do, but there are also times they don't, but the general populace treats them as though these experiments always do generalize reliably and allows them to influence their thinking and discussion of issues to an unearned degree. Such studies can be useful evidence towards a claim, but they are not proof of a claim.