Impact of the status quo bias on environmental decision making : moderating effects of affect and need for cognition

The status quo bias (SQB), known as a heuristic, tends to make us choose the default option more often than the alternative. This is particularly problematic when it comes to sustainable decision-making (DM) since most of the unsustainable options are often labelled as default. Therefore, this study aims to investigate if specific induced emotions and the personality construct of need for cognition (NC), could potentially reduce the SQB in the context of environmental DM. We hypothesized that emotions with higher levels of felt agency and higher levels of NC would both reduce the effect of the SQB in the context of an environmental DM task. To test this we first induced one of three emotional states (pride, neutral and gratitude) in 62 participants, covered as a memory task, and then asked them to assess three environmental DM scenarios..