Background Research
To perform the background research for this study, I used the search
engine Google. To begin the research, I did a very general search of
“credit cards vs. cash study” to see an overview of studies that
involved credit card spending vs. cash. Many websites appeared that
talked about how people who use credit cards on average spend more
money then they do when paying with cash. Sites such as:
http://www.livescience.com/2849-study-credit-cards-spending.html
showed results from a study at New York University by Priya
Raghubir. This study also showed that people use more money when
buying items with gift cards compared to money.
http://personalfinancebythebook.com/do-we-spend-more-with-credit-cards-a-study-proves-maybe/
showed a study by researchers at MIT, Carnegie Mellon, and Stanford
and they are testing whether credit cards “anesthetize” the pain of
spending more. They proved, via brain scans, that a section of a
humans brain that is associated with pain processing activated when
their study subjects saw high prices.
The latter article I read, off
personalfinancebythebook.com, led me to investigate more into the
study by the Carnegie Mellon researchers. I proceeded to Google
“spending money till it hurts” and opened the first result, which
was a PDF file of the study. This was from the journal the study was
posted in.
I then Googled “cash vs credit cards men and women” and
found little result. There were not any studies regarding gender,
but I realized that I should mention “gender” instead of “men and
women” in my search, to maybe top off the best sites. So I Googled
“cash vs credit card vs gender” and stumbled upon exactly what I was
searching for. A study done by researchers at Purdue University
concluded that the results of what types of payment different sexes
use has a lot to do with who is the head of the household. This
would effect my study but I have no way to control this.