Little changes in the way we think can enable big behavioral changes. Researchers tested this with women and initiating dating contacts.
What’s so surprising about the results is that the manipulation of personal control was ever so slight. For a woman, simply recalling a time you had personal control seems to be enough to counteract your otherwise socially acceptable passivity. As MacGregor and Cavallo conclude p. 862, “women who generally feel a lack of control over their romantic outcomes may be particularly sensitive to fluctuations in personal control in ways that men are not.”