The phrase "take a certain action" is grammatically correct and can be used in written English.
It is typically used to indicate a specific action that needs to be taken in a given situation. Example: "In order to resolve the issue, the company must take a certain action, such as conducting a thorough investigation into the matter."
You're not misleading the telemarketers: they asked you to take a certain action, not to have a particular attitude.
If you ask your source a question about how they came to a certain conclusion, why they were motivated to take a certain action, they'll answer it.
If EPA had instead instructed a state, "You must do X, you must pass a certain law, you have to take a certain action or be sanctioned," that would raise serious 10th Amendment concerns.
Their responses may have been the result of social desirability bias — an aspect of human nature where people who are frequently counselled to take a certain action, like using condoms or brushing their teeth every night, may say they do so when asked, even if they don't.
Nudges are indirect suggestions used to encourage people to take a certain action, while still allowing them the freedom to deny the recommendation.
For this purpose, we construct a big database to save the CFD results with respect to each scenario, and provide them to trainees selectively as they take a certain action in the training interface.
Decision Making Tools are interactive, customizable ways for a person to figure out how taking a certain action might play out.
Marketers often emphasize that majority of people have already taken a certain action and this very thought pulls people forward to do the same.
Persuasive speeches are often serious and may use a serious opening, especially if the speaker is trying to persuade an audience to take a certain beneficial action or to adopt a new perspective about a topic.
This is what she means by "magical thinking": the primitive belief that if you take a certain course of action, the desired consequence will inevitably follow.
In an analysis of more than 160 decisions made by businesses over the years, management scholar Paul Nutt found that 71% of them had been framed in terms of whether or not an organization or a person should take a certain course of action.
