Psychological Reactance is an unpleasant motivational arousal (reaction) to offers, persons, rules, or regulations that threaten or eliminate specific behavioral freedoms. Reactance occurs when a person feels that someone or something is taking away their choices or limiting the range of alternatives.
Psychological Reactance can occur when someone is heavily pressured to accept a certain view or attitude. Reactance can cause the person to adopt or strengthen a view or attitude that is contrary to what was intended, and also increases resistance to persuasion. People using reverse psychology are playing on reactance, attempting to influence someone to choose the opposite of what they request.
Further References
White, T. B., Zahay, D. L., Thorbjørnsen, H., & Shavitt, S.. (2008). Getting too personal: Reactance to highly personalized email solicitations. Marketing Letters, 19(1), 39–50.
“Research on the effects of personalized messages on consumers’ be- havioral responses has yielded mixed findings. we explore how e-mail personali- zation influences click-through intentions. our results suggest that consumers experience personalization reactance in response to highly personalized messages when the fit between the offer in the message and consumers’ personal character- istics is not explicitly justified by firms. consequently, consumers are less willing to respond favorably to the offer. results of two studies suggest that this effect primarily emerges for consumers who perceive the utility of the service to be relatively low. for those consumers with higher perceived utility, justification of personalization is less important because highly personalized messages are less likely to elicit reactance.”
Pavey, L., & Sparks, P.. (2009). Reactance, autonomy and paths to persuasion: Examining perceptions of threats to freedom and informational value. Motivation and Emotion, 33(3), 277–290.
“Autonomy, often associated with an open and reflective evaluation of experience, is sometimes confused with reactance, which indicates resistance to persuasion attempts. two studies examined a path model in which autonomy and reactance predicted motivation following the provision of anonymous or source-identified health-risk information, via the mediation of perceived threat to decision-making freedom and of perceived informational value. study 1 (n = 122) investigated alcohol consumption. the results showed that autonomy was positively related to autonomous motivation and intentions to drink responsibly. reactance negatively predicted autonomous motivation in the source-identified information condition but positively predicted autonomous motivation and intentions in the anonymous information condition. reactance negatively predicted attitudes through the mediation of perceived threat to decision-making freedom. study 2 (n = 145) tested our hypothesized model for smoking behavior and replicated several of the study 1 findings. implications for our understanding of autonomy, reactance, and responses to risk-information are discussed.”
Fogarty, J. S.. (1997). Reactance theory and patient noncompliance. Social Science & Medicine, 45(8), 1277–1288.
“With surprising frequency, and to the considerable dismay of care professionals, patients both subtly and overtly refuse to cooperate with medical treatment. despite considerable empirical and theoretical attention, and an abundance of interventions designed to combat it, noncompliance continues. its persistence is accompanied by considerable costs borne by patients and society alike. the theory of psychological reactance sheds new light on the phenomenon. reactance theory proposes that a perceived threat to an individual’s freedom generates a motivational state aimed at recapturing the affected freedom and preventing the loss of others. in a medical context, patients’ perceptions of threats to their freedom or control may induce noncompliance. this theory permits integration of many of the seemingly disparate and/or contradictory findings, and may afford professionals new opportunities for improving patient compliance.”
Beutler, L. E., Harwood, T. M., Michelson, A., Song, X., & Holman, J.. (2011). Resistance/Reactance Level. Journal of Clinical Psychology
“Psychotherapists from all professions and perspectives periodically struggle to effectively manage a patient’s resistance to change. this article provides definitions and examples of patient-treatment matching applied to patient resistance or reactance. we report the results from an original meta-analysis of 12 select studies (n = 1,102) on matching therapist directiveness to patient reactance. our findings support the hypothesis that patients exhibiting low levels of trait-like resistance respond better to directive types of treatment, while patients with high levels of resistance respond best to nondirective treatments (d = .82). limitations of the research reviewed are noted, and practice recommendations are advanced.”
Crawford, M. T., McConnell, A. R., Lewis, A. C., & Sherman, S. J.. (2002). Reactance, compliance, and anticipated regret. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology
“In this paper we review the basic assumptions formulated by jack brehm in 1966 in his theory of psychological reactance and we sample some interesting directions of research on reactance that have been carried out by social psychologists during the last 40 years. we conclude that although there has been impressive development in the reactance research, more exciting avenues of investigation lie ahead. throughout the paper we outline some of these future directions.”
Rains, S. A.. (2013). The Nature of Psychological Reactance Revisited: A Meta-Analytic Review. Human Communication Research, 39(1), 47–73.
“Psychological reactance (brehm, 1966; brehm & brehm, 1981) has been a long-standing topic of interest among scholars studying the design and effects of persuasive messages and campaigns. yet, until recently, reactance was considered to be a motivational state that could not be measured. dillard and shen (2005) argued that reactance can be conceptualized as cognition and affect and made amenable to direct measurement. this article revisits dillard and shen’s (2005) questions about the nature of psychological reactance and reports a test designed to identify the best fitting model of reactance. a meta-analytic review of reactance research was conducted (k = 20, n = 4,942) and the results were used to test path models representing competing conceptualizations of reactance. the results offer evidence that the intertwined model—in which reactance is modeled as a latent factor with anger and counterarguments serving as indicators—best fit the data.”
Clee, M. A., & Wicklund, R. A.. (2002). Consumer Behavior and Psychological Reactance. Journal of Consumer Research
“A theory about psychological freedom is reviewed in terms of its broad appl- icability to consumer behavior. promotional influence, manipulative advertisements, product unavailability, and government regulations are all cast as potentially freedom-threatening events, and a theory of psychological react- ance details the consumer’s reply to reductions in freedom.”
Dillard, J. P., & Shen, L.. (2005). On the Nature of Reactance and its Role in Persuasive Health Communication. Communication Monographs, 72(2), 144–168.
“Reactance theory might be profitably applied to understanding failures in persuasive health communication but for one drawback: the developer of the theory contends that reactance cannot be measured. rejecting this position, this paper develops four alternative conceptual perspectives on the nature of reactance (i.e., combinations of cognition and affect), then provides an empirical test of each. two parallel studies were conducted, one advocating flossing ðn ¼ 196þ; the other urging students to limit their alcohol intake ðn ¼ 200þ: in both cases, a composite index of anger and negative cognitions fully mediated the effects of threat-to-freedom and trait reactance on attitude and intention. the data showed that, in fact, reactance can be operationalized as a composite of self-report indices of anger and negative cognitions. the implications for persuasive communication, in general, are considered as well the specific findings for flossing and drinking.”
Torrance, E. P., & Brehm, J. W.. (1968). A Theory of Psychological Reactance. The American Journal of Psychology, 81(1), 133.
“THIS theory states that individuals have certain freedoms with regard to their behavior. if these behavioral freedoms are reduced or threatened with reduction, the individual will be motivationally aroused to regain them. this is psychological reactance. the theory is examined in a series of experiments with personal and impersonal threats, and also in the light of attitude change theories. (psycinfo database record (c) 2004 apa, all rights reserved)”
Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media is a 1988 book by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, in which the authors propose that the mass communication media of the U.S. “are effective and powerful ideological institutions that carry out a system-supportive propaganda function, by reliance on market forces, internalized assumptions, and self-censorship, and without overt coercion”, by means of the propaganda model of communication. The title derives from the phrase “the manufacture of consent,” employed in the book Public Opinion (1922), by Walter Lippmann (1889–1974).
The book was revised 20 years after its first publication to take account of developments such as the fall of the Soviet Union. There has been debate about how the Internet has changed the public´s access to information since 1988.
“Pantheon books, 1988 the mass media serve as a system for communicating messages and symbols to the general populace. it is their function to amuse, entertain, and inform, and to inculcate individuals with the values, beliefs, and codes of behavior that will integrate them into the institutional structures of the larger society. in a world of concentrated wealth and major conflicts of class interest, to fulfill this role requires systematic propaganda. in countries where the levers of power are in the hands of a state bureaucracy, the monopolistic control over the media, often supplemented by official censorship, makes it clear that the media serve the ends of dominant elite. it is much more difficult to see a propaganda system at work where the media are private and formal censorship is absent. this is especially true where the media actively compete, periodically attack and expose corporate and governmental malfeasance, and aggressively portray themselves as spokesmen for free speech and the general community interest. what is not evident (and remains undiscussed in the media) is the limited nature of such critiques, as well as the huge inequality in command of resources, and its effect both on access to a private media system and on its behavior and performance. a propaganda model focuses on this inequality of wealth and power and its multilevel effects on mass-media interests and choices. it traces the routes by which money and power are able to filter out the news fit to print, marginalize dissent, and allow the government and dominant private interests to get their messages across to the public. the essential ingredients of our propaganda model, or set of news ‘filters,’ fall under the following headings: (i) the size, concentrated ownership, owner wealth, and profit orientation of the dominant mass-media firms; (~) advertising as the primary income source of the mass media; (3) the reliance of the media on information provided by government, business, and ‘experts’ funded and approved by these primary sources and agents of power; (4) ‘flak’ as a means of disciplining the media; and (5) ‘anticommunism’ as a national religion and control mechanism. these elements interact with and reinforce one another. the raw material of news must pass through successive filters, leaving only the cleansed residue fit to print. they fix the premises of discourse and interpretation, and the definition of what is newsworthy in the first place, and they explain the …”
Herman, E. S., & Herman, Edward S.; Chomsky, N.. (1988). Manufacturing Consent. News: A Reader
“An absolutely brilliant analysis of the ways in which individuals and organizations of the media are influenced to shape the social agendas of knowledge and, therefore, belief. contrary to the popular conception of members of the press as hard-bitten realists doggedly pursuing unpopular truths, herman and chomsky prove conclusively that the free-market economics model of media leads inevitably to normative and narrow reporting. whether or not you’ve seen the eye-opening movie, buy this book, and you will be a far more knowledgeable person and much less prone to having your beliefs manipulated as easily as the press.”
Comeforo, K.. (2010). Manufacturing consent: The political economy of the mass media. Global Media and Communication
“Since the 1930s, industrial sociologists have tried to answer the question, why do workers not work harder? michael burawoy spent ten months as a machine operator in a chicago factory trying to answer different but equally important questions: why do workers work as hard as they do? why do workers routinely consent to their own exploitation? manufacturing consent, the result of burawoy’s research, combines rich ethnographical description with an original marxist theory of the capitalist labor process. manufacturing consent is unique among studies of this kind because burawoy has been able to analyze his own experiences in relation to those of donald roy, who studied the same factory thirty years earlier. burawoy traces the technical, political, and ideological changes in factory life to the transformations of the market relations of the plant (it is now part of a multinational corporation) and to broader movements, since world war ii, in industrial relations.”
Borkar, V. S., Karnik, A., Nair, J., & Nalli, S.. (2015). Manufacturing Consent. IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control
“An absolutely brilliant analysis of the ways in which individuals and organizations of the media are influenced to shape the social agendas of knowledge and, therefore, belief. contrary to the popular conception of members of the press as hard-bitten realists doggedly pursuing unpopular truths, herman and chomsky prove conclusively that the free-market economics model of media leads inevitably to normative and narrow reporting. whether or not you’ve seen the eye-opening movie, buy this book, and you will be a far more knowledgeable person and much less prone to having your beliefs manipulated as easily as the press.”
Chomsky, E. I. A. S. O. I. I.. (1992). Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media. East
Show/hide publication abstract
“Explores the political life and times of the controversial author, linguist and radical philosopher, noam chomsky. highlighting his analysis of media, chomsky focuses on democratic societies where populations not disciplined by force are subject to more subtle forms of ideological control.”
Han, R.. (2015). Manufacturing Consent in Cyberspace :. Journal of Current Chinese Affairs
“Studies on public expression in china tend to focus on how the state and internet users (netizens) struggle over the limits of online expression. few have systematically traced discourse competition within state-imposed boundaries, particularly how the authoritarian state has adapted to manage, rather than censor, online expression. this paper explores and evaluates the state’s attempts to manipulate online expression without resorting to censorship and coercion by examining the role of internet commentators, known as the ‘fifty-cent army’, in chinese cyberspace. to cope with the challenge of online expression, the authoritarian state has mobilized its agents to engage anonymously in online discussions and produce apparently spontaneous pro-regime commentary. however, due to a lack of proper motivation and the persistence of old propaganda logic, this seemingly smart adaptation has proven ineffective or even counter-productive: it not only decreases netizens’ trust in the state but also, ironically, suppresses the voices of regime supporters.”
Herman, E. S., & Chomsky, N.. (1988). Manufacturing Consent, A Propaganda Model. Manufacturing Consent
Show/hide publication abstract
“Pantheon books, 1988 the mass media serve as a system for communicating messages and symbols to the general populace. it is their function to amuse, entertain, and inform, and to inculcate individuals with the values, beliefs, and codes of behavior that will integrate them into the institutional structures of the larger society. in a world of concentrated wealth and major conflicts of class interest, to fulfill this role requires systematic propaganda. in countries where the levers of power are in the hands of a state bureaucracy, the monopolistic control over the media, often supplemented by official censorship, makes it clear that the media serve the ends of dominant elite. it is much more difficult to see a propaganda system at work where the media are private and formal censorship is absent. this is especially true where the media actively compete, periodically attack and expose corporate and governmental malfeasance, and aggressively portray themselves as spokesmen for free speech and the general community interest. what is not evident (and remains undiscussed in the media) is the limited nature of such critiques, as well as the huge inequality in command of resources, and its effect both on access to a private media system and on its behavior and performance. a propaganda model focuses on this inequality of wealth and power and its multilevel effects on mass-media interests and choices. it traces the routes by which money and power are able to filter out the news fit to print, marginalize dissent, and allow the government and dominant private interests to get their messages across to the public. the essential ingredients of our propaganda model, or set of news ‘filters,’ fall under the following headings: (i) the size, concentrated ownership, owner wealth, and profit orientation of the dominant mass-media firms; (~) advertising as the primary income source of the mass media; (3) the reliance of the media on information provided by government, business, and ‘experts’ funded and approved by these primary sources and agents of power; (4) ‘flak’ as a means of disciplining the media; and (5) ‘anticommunism’ as a national religion and control mechanism. these elements interact with and reinforce one another. the raw material of news must pass through successive filters, leaving only the cleansed residue fit to print. they fix the premises of discourse and interpretation, and the definition of what is newsworthy in the first place, and they explain the b…”
Burawoy, M.. (2012). Manufacturing Consent revisited. La Nouvelle Revue Du Travail
“Cet article présente rapidement manufacturing consent publié en 1979 dans lequel la direction d’Allis chalmer organisait la discipline du travail ouvrier par la coercition et par le consentement, en particulier à travers l’établissement des quotas de production qui fondait une sorte de jeu social entre ouvriers (the game of making out). l’auteur revient sur la méthode ethnographique utilisée alors pour la critiquer et il propose de la remplacer par « l’étude de cas élargie » (the extented case method) qui prend en compte le contexte du travail dont les trajectoires des acteurs, les transformations des marchés et du rôle de l’État, sans négliger les éléments spatio-temporels facteurs de changement. c’est l’occasion pour l’auteur de passer en revue les publications récentes qui ont élargi les objets de recherches à la question du genre, au travail domestique, aux travailleurs migrants, aux services, au syndicalisme, etc. l’article suggère que l’enjeu des luttes passerait de l’exploitation à la marchandisation (commodification) avec les luttes consuméristes qui l’accompagneraient ; lesquelles inaugureraient une nouvelle ère de mobilisations transnationales étendues à l’Europe de l’Est et à l’Asie. ce qui conduit l’auteur à reprendre les thèses de polanyi sur la grande transformation en les actualisant avec l’avènement présent d’une troisième vague ultra-libérale qui étend la marchandisation à la nature (terre, eau et air) et aux connaissances : les mouvements « d’occupation » (‘occupy’ movements) en seraient les premières ripostes.”
