Action Bias: Why Your Client Demands a Dive When They Need You to Stay

The penalty kick study explains everything wrong with how PBSA brands react to slow sales.

You’ve probably seen the study. Michael Bar-Eli and his team at Ben-Gurion University analysed 286 penalty kicks across top European leagues and found that goalkeepers who stayed in the centre of the goal stopped 33% of all kicks, while those who dove left or right stopped only 25-30%. The rational strategy is clear: stay put. Yet goalkeepers dive anyway, because the psychological cost of doing nothing and conceding feels worse than doing something and conceding.

This is action bias: the tendency to favour action over inaction under pressure, even when inaction is the statistically superior choice.

It’s a neat study. It makes for a great LinkedIn post. And every time it resurfaces, someone draws the same conclusion: “Marketers do this too. They abandon working campaigns to chase novelty. They should just stay in the centre.”

That conclusion is true. And it’s also incomplete. Because in PBSA marketing, the action bias problem isn’t just about what we do. It’s about what our clients demand we do. And that changes the entire dynamic.

The PBSA Penalty Shootout

Here’s the scene. Sales are slow. Occupancy is behind target. The client is watching the numbers and the numbers aren’t moving. They call a meeting. The tone is urgent. Something must be done.

And so the demands come. More social media activity. More content. More posts, more reels, more TikToks. Launch a campaign. Run a competition. Do something. Anything. Because doing nothing while the numbers sit there feels worse than doing something, even if the something doesn’t work.

This is the goalkeeper diving. Not because the data supports it, but because the alternative, standing still, watching, waiting, trusting the strategy, feels like negligence.

And here’s what happens next. The social media ramps up. The content goes out. The reels are posted. The team is visibly doing things. The client sees the activity and feels reassured. “Good, they’re on it.”

Then, weeks later, usually after months of gentle advice that’s been ignored, the price drops. And sales come in. Not because of the TikTok. Not because of the reel. Because the price was the problem all along. The product needed to be repriced, not remarketed.

But the narrative that forms is different. The narrative says: “The social media worked. Look, sales are up.” The dive gets the credit. The stay in the centre, the thing that actually saved the penalty, is invisible.

The Architecture of a Bias

Before we get to types, we need to understand the machinery.

Action bias sits at the intersection of three psychological forces that the STAR Operating System identifies as foundational to human behaviour. The first is Dual Process Theory, the distinction between System 1 (fast, instinctive, automatic) and System 2 (slow, deliberate, analytical) thinking. Action bias is a System 1 phenomenon. It fires before System 2 has time to calculate the expected value of staying put. The client’s demand for more social media is a System 1 response to a System 2 problem.

The second force is Regulatory Focus Theory, which describes two motivational orientations: promotion-focus (driven by gains, growth, and opportunity) and prevention-focus (driven by safety, security, and avoiding losses). Promotion-focused clients are more susceptible to action bias because action feels like progress. Prevention-focused clients are more susceptible to the opposite: inaction bias, because staying put feels like safety.

The third force is the emotional dimension, which Appraisal Theory explains. We don’t just make decisions; we appraise situations emotionally before we make them. The client who demands more social media isn’t calculating conversion rates. They’re appraising the emotional consequence of watching occupancy stall while their marketing team appears passive. The appraisal is: “That would be unbearable.” The demand for action is an emotional escape, not a strategic choice.

These three forces interact differently in different clients. And that’s where the real problem lives.

Four Client Types, Four Relationships with the Dive

The STAR Operating System identifies four core mindsets, each driven by a fundamental psychological need from Self-Determination Theory. Each type processes the action-inaction decision through a distinct psychological lens, and each has a characteristic bias that creates a specific kind of pressure on the marketing team.

The Adventurer Client: “Just Do Something”

Adventurer clients are the textbook action bias drivers. Their cognitive default is System 1 processing: instinctive, rapid, and biased toward movement. Their regulatory orientation is strongly promotion-focused: they lean toward the bold option if it could pay off. And their core psychological need is autonomy, which means that doing nothing feels like a loss of control, which is precisely the thing they cannot tolerate.

Put an Adventurer client in a slow-sales situation and they will demand action. Not because they’ve calculated the expected return on a TikTok campaign, but because inaction feels like paralysis, and paralysis feels like death. The Bar-Eli study is essentially a study of Adventurer psychology applied to business decisions.

The Adventurer client will ask for more content, more activity, more visible effort. They want to see the team diving. The appearance of motion is as valuable as the motion itself. When you explain that the issue is pricing, not positioning, they hear: “You want me to do nothing.” And doing nothing is not something an Adventurer can tolerate.

The blind spot: Adventurer clients don’t distinguish between “action because the situation demands it” and “action because I can’t sit still.” Both feel identical from the inside.

The Thinker Client: “Show Me the Data, Then Do Something”

Thinker clients should be immune to action bias. Their cognitive default is System 2: analytical, deliberate, and biased toward calculation. If any client type should stay in the centre of the goal, it’s the Thinker.

And often, they do ask for data. They want reports, analysis, benchmarks, attribution models. They want to understand why sales are slow before they demand a response. This is the type that Bar-Eli’s study implicitly recommends everyone become.

But here’s the paradox: Thinkers have their own bias, and it’s the mirror image. Inertia bias. Once a Thinker has invested significant cognitive effort into a strategy, they become attached to it, not emotionally, but intellectually. The Sunk Cost Fallacy hits Thinkers differently. For an Adventurer, sunk costs are irrelevant. For a Thinker, sunk costs represent invested reasoning, and abandoning that reasoning feels like admitting their analysis was wrong. That threatens the core need for competence.

So Thinkers will commission another report. And another. They’ll ask for more data before they’ll act on the data they have. They’ll optimise the campaign when what they need is to change the price. Their version of action bias is inverted: it’s a bias toward continued analysis because the intellectual cost of changing course feels higher than the practical cost of staying wrong.

The blind spot: Thinkers mistake thoroughness for wisdom. Sometimes the penalty is coming and the only rational move is to change the price, even without a perfect attribution model.

The Socialiser Client: “Everyone Else Is Doing It”

Socialiser clients don’t have an individual action bias. They have a social one. Their decision to act or stay is overwhelmingly influenced by what their peers are doing.

This operates through the mechanisms that Social Identity Theory describes. When a Socialiser client perceives that competing PBSA brands are running TikTok campaigns, they demand a TikTok campaign. When they see other operators posting Instagram reels, they want Instagram reels. Their System 1 doesn’t process “what’s the optimal move?” It processes “what’s everyone else doing?” The answer to that question is their decision.

In a slow-sales situation, a Socialiser client will benchmark against competitors. If competitors are visibly active on social media, the Socialiser client will demand equivalent activity, regardless of whether that activity is driving sales. The statistical evidence is irrelevant compared to the social evidence. This isn’t irrational. For a type whose core need is relatedness, maintaining alignment with the market is the rational strategy, because the cost of appearing inactive outweighs the cost of ineffective marketing.

Socialiser clients produce a specific flavour of action bias: bandwagon bias. They adopt new strategies not because the data supports them, but because the industry is moving. They demand social media activity not because it converts, but because everyone else is doing it and looking inactive feels worse than being ineffective.

The blind spot: Socialiser clients can’t tell the difference between “everyone’s doing it because it works” and “everyone’s doing it because everyone’s doing it.” The felt experience is identical.

The Realist Client: “Why Isn’t What We’re Doing Working?”

Realist clients are the natural stay-in-the-centre type. Their cognitive default leans toward System 1 familiarity: they trust proven approaches and instinctively distrust novelty. Their regulatory orientation is strongly prevention-focused: they protect what works and avoid unnecessary risk. Their core need is security, which means that any action that introduces unpredictability is appraised as a threat.

A Realist client doesn’t demand new activity. They demand better results from existing activity. “Why aren’t the posts converting?” “What’s wrong with the content?” “Fix the creative.” They’d rather optimise the current strategy than change it. This makes them the type that Bar-Eli’s study would reward, at least in theory.

But Realists have their own version of action bias, and it’s subtler. Status quo bias. They don’t just prefer inaction; they prefer the current state, whatever it is. This means they’ll keep the price where it is not because they’ve analysed the price elasticity and concluded it’s optimal, but because changing the price feels like an admission that the original pricing was wrong. That’s a security threat.

When a Realist client finally drops the price, it’s not because they were persuaded by data. It’s because the market forced them. And even then, they’ll frame it as a tactical adjustment, not a strategic correction. The dive is reluctant, late, and disguised as a controlled movement.

The blind spot: Realist clients mistake stability for safety. Sometimes the penalty is coming and the only safe move is to change the price now, not after three months of optimising the social media strategy.

The Performative Dive

Here’s the dynamic that should concern every PBSA marketing team. In most client relationships, the marketing team is the goalkeeper. The client is the manager on the sideline, screaming instructions. And the instructions are almost always: “DIVE.”

More content. More activity. More visible effort. The client needs to see the team doing something, because the alternative, trusting that the strategy is sound and the issue is pricing, feels like negligence. Even when the data says exactly that.

So the team dives. They produce the content. They run the campaigns. They post the reels. They create the visible evidence of effort. And the client is reassured. “Good, they’re on it.”

This is the performative dive. It’s not done because it will save the penalty. It’s done because the audience, the client, the stakeholders, the board, needs to see the goalkeeper moving. Standing still, even when standing still is the optimal strategy, looks like incompetence.

The cost is real. Every hour spent on a social media campaign that won’t move the needle is an hour not spent on the conversation that would: “The price is wrong.” Every report commissioned to justify the current strategy is a delay in changing the strategy. Every reel posted to demonstrate activity is a distraction from the one action that would actually work.

And when the price finally drops and sales come in, the narrative forms around the wrong lesson. “The social media worked.” “The campaign drove the conversion.” “The content strategy paid off.” The dive gets the credit. The stay in the centre, the price correction, the thing that actually saved the penalty, is invisible.

This is how action bias perpetuates itself. The dive is rewarded. The stay is ignored. And the next time sales slow, the client demands another dive.

What Bar-Eli’s Study Actually Teaches PBSA

Bar-Eli’s study is usually cited as a lesson about action bias: stop diving, stay in the centre. But that reading misses the deeper insight when applied to client relationships.

The study doesn’t prove that inaction is always superior. It proves that defaulting to the audience’s expectation is suboptimal. The goalkeepers who dive aren’t wrong to dive. They’re wrong to dive every time, regardless of context. They’re diving for the cameras, not for the outcome.

In PBSA marketing, the equivalent is this: the team that produces social media content because the client demands it isn’t wrong to produce content. They’re wrong to produce content instead of having the pricing conversation. They’re wrong to let the client’s action bias override the data. They’re wrong to prioritise the appearance of effort over the substance of strategy.

The best marketing teams don’t eliminate action bias. They manage it. They understand that the client will demand a dive. They anticipate the demand. And they have the courage to say: “We can dive. But the data says the penalty is going down the middle. The price is the problem. The social media isn’t going to fix it. Here’s the evidence.”

That’s not easy. It requires a relationship where the team has enough credibility to challenge the client’s instinctive response. It requires data that’s clear enough to override the emotional appraisal. And it requires the discipline to stay in the centre while the crowd screams “DIVE.”

The Team-Level Problem

Most PBSA marketing teams are composed of all four types, and most client situations involve a mix of action bias and inaction bias operating simultaneously.

Adventurer team members want to move fast and try new things. Thinker team members want to analyse the data before committing. Socialiser team members want to align with what the industry is doing. Realist team members want to protect what’s working. The resulting recommendation isn’t a rational compromise. It’s a tug-of-war between four different biases, amplified by the client’s own biases.

When the client is an Adventurer, the Adventurer team members gain influence (“let’s try something new”). When the client is a Thinker, the Thinkers gain influence (“let’s get more data”). When the client is a Socialiser, the Socialisers gain influence (“everyone’s doing reels”). When the client is a Realist, the Realists gain influence (“let’s optimise what we have”).

The healthiest teams don’t eliminate these biases. They orchestrate them. The Adventurer’s impulse to act is correct when the situation demands movement. The Thinker’s impulse to analyse is correct when the situation demands rigour. The Realist’s impulse to protect is correct when the situation demands stability. The Socialiser’s impulse to align is correct when the situation demands cohesion.

The skill isn’t removing bias. It’s knowing which bias the moment calls for, and having the courage to override the client’s default when the data demands it.

The Uncomfortable Truth

Here’s the version of this that leads to a comfortable conclusion: just present the data, the client will see reason, and the pricing conversation will happen. That’s true sometimes. And it’s incomplete.

The uncomfortable truth is this: most clients will choose the dive over the stay, every time, because the dive feels like leadership and the stay feels like negligence. The psychological cost of appearing passive is higher than the financial cost of an ineffective campaign. And that equation holds even when the ineffective campaign costs real money and the pricing adjustment would solve the actual problem.

The best marketing teams accept this reality. They don’t fight the client’s action bias head-on. They reframe it. They make the pricing conversation feel like action, not inaction. They present the price drop as a strategy, not a concession. They make staying in the centre look like a deliberate choice, not a failure to move.

Because here’s the thing about the Bar-Eli study. The goalkeepers who stayed in the centre didn’t look passive. They looked confident. They looked like they’d read the situation and made a deliberate choice. The ones who dove looked reactive. The ones who stayed looked strategic.

The same is true in PBSA marketing. The team that says “the price is wrong, here’s the data, here’s the adjustment, here’s the projected impact” isn’t doing nothing. They’re doing the hardest thing of all: telling the client what they don’t want to hear, and backing it with evidence.

That’s not inaction. That’s leadership.

Sometimes the best move is to dive. Sometimes it’s to stay. The only consistently bad strategy is to let the client’s action bias make the decision for you.

David Chadderton spent his twenties and thirties teaching people how to make life-or-death decisions at forty thousand feet. He now applies the same principles to consumer psychology, which, depending on the brief, can feel equally high-stakes. He’s the creator of the STAR Framework and the author of The STAR Framework: Rewriting the Rules of Consumer Engagement (NYC Big Book Award 2025), The STAR Operating System: Decode Mindset, Understand Motivation, Transform Human Behaviour, and Dear Algorithm, It’s Not Me, It’s You. By day, a Chief Marketing Officer. By night, a behavioural science obsessive who writes The Unoptimised Human because he can’t stop thinking about why people do what they do.