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If You Are Going to Pay Within the Next 24 Hours, Press 1: Automatic Planning Prompt Reduces Credit Card Delinquency
Author(s) -
Mazar Nina,
Mochon Daniel,
Ariely Dan
Publication year - 2018
Publication title -
journal of consumer psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 4.433
H-Index - 110
eISSN - 1532-7663
pISSN - 1057-7408
DOI - 10.1002/jcpy.1031
Subject(s) - concreteness , juvenile delinquency , psychology , action (physics) , credit card , test (biology) , plan (archaeology) , debt , business , cognitive psychology , finance , payment , criminology , paleontology , history , physics , archaeology , quantum mechanics , biology
People often form intentions but fail to follow through on them. Mounting evidence suggests that such intention‐action gaps can be narrowed with prompts to make concrete plans about when , where , and how to act to achieve the intention. In this paper, we pushed the notion of plan‐concreteness to test the efficacy of a prompt under a minimalist automated calling setting, where respondents were only prompted to indicate a narrower duration within which they intent to act. In a field experiment, this planning prompt significantly helped people to pay their past dues and get out of debt delinquency. These results suggest that minimalist automatic planning prompts are a scalable, cost‐effective intervention.