Love Leads to Action: Short‐Term Mating Mindset Mitigates the Status‐Quo Bias by Enhancing Promotion Focus

Abstract

We demonstrate that short‐term mating (STM) mindsets lead individuals to a preference for action over inaction, thus violating the status‐quo bias. We hypothesize, and provide supporting evidence through five experiments, that STM enhances one's promotion focus, which increases one's approaching tendencies and leads to the preference for actions against the status quo of affairs. This effect emerges independently of intrinsic product characteristics, such as the risk associated with gambling and investment decisions, and the signaling value of fashionable apparel. We also demonstrate that, for the STM mindset's effect on action‐against‐status‐quo behavior to take place, individuals must construe choice sets in the light of default vs. non‐default options, rather than mere side‐by‐side comparisons. Accordingly, upselling tactics and opt‐in offers might be effective implementations of the findings of this research.