Cash vs Non-Cash Payment Methods: Attitudes and Intentions

We design and administer a survey-based questionnaire to examine UK adults’ attitudes towards and intentions to use cash relative to other forms of payment. Using a quota-based sampling method to ensure representation across the full ranges of age, gender and income, through an online survey we obtained responses from 2810 members of the UK adult population.

For the behavioural insights we examine how an individual’s use of mental accounting/budgeting, perceptions of the fungibililty of money, their attitude to loss and their general propensity to habitual behaviour, in the form of routine and automaticity, influence their attitudes towards and intentions to use cash. To gauge the extent to which such attitudes and intentions might shift, we examine the extent to which exogenous shocks influence intentions to use cash both in absolute terms and conditional on baseline levels of intention to use cash.

The project findings will inform future forecasting of the intention to use cash, with such intentions shown elsewhere to be primary determinants of payment behaviours.