Abstrair ganhos e concretizar perdas: quando a representação mental pode alterar o comportamento dos indivíduos

The preference for the status quo by an individual is a central matter to understand the decision-making process by consumers. The more subtle and symmetrical the probabilities of an outcome (it doesn’t matter if positive or negative) the harder to model such phenomena. Previous research demonstrated that an individual’s regulatory focus (motivation) affects its preference for the status quo and also how the construal level of a decision, alone, may change the subject’s perception on the decision itself. This research, based on the experimental methodology, demonstrates how the construal level affects the individual motivation (regulatory focus) in order to determine in which conditions the individual’s behavior deviates of the expected behavior considering only its motivation. A total of three experiments were conducted to expose subjects to a lottery context with a gambling option: take risk to improve the lottery probabilities or a no-choice condition to keep lower chances (with no risk) of winning the lottery. Before this decision, the individuals were asked to think about the prize money on higher and lower construal levels (also including positive and negative message framings) and their regulatory focus were measured as an independent variable. The first and second studies demonstrated that individuals on high construal and positive framings; and individuals on low construal and negative framings are willing to behave against its natural tendencies and decide for leaving the status quo (taking risk on the process). A third study demonstrated the effects of some experimental design changes on the construal level manipulation, proposing an effective method of getting individuals in specific construal levels on the context of this study. Contributions, limitations and suggestions for future research are described at the end of this research.