Understanding psychological reactance

Most of us do not like to be told what to do. From toddlers adamant about choosing their own bedtimes to adults who should have grown out of it, it's a fact that when faced with advice, instructions, or even a pushy advert, we oftentimes interpret it as a threat to our freedom of choice and end up wanting to do the exact opposite.

This feeling demonstrates the phenomenon of psychological reactance—for us, as children, students, and employees, it can be liberating, but it can also serve as a pathway to crippling guilt and self-sabotage. And for when we are people whose entire job is to tell others what to do, like team leaders and parents, psychological reactance will most certainly be the bane of our existence.

What is psychological reactance?

First proposed in 1966 by Jack W Brehm and researched extensively over the past five decades, psychological reactance is a motivational state experienced when a person identifies a limitation being placed on their freedom to act and choose as they wish, motivating them to reclaim that freedom.

Whether that limitation is a well-meaning suggestion or a real order, we like making our own decisions so much that our automatic responses to these threats often involve acting in ways opposite to those recommended or secretly grumbling to ourselves and agreeing anyway, albeit with great resentment.

Reactance may be an attempt to avoid losing options; nonetheless, there are occasions when we have no other choice. This is well illustrated by an instance where, after a particularly bad day, I once watched a grown adult curse out the GPS for suggesting a left turn to avoid traffic. They did not make that left turn and so remained stuck in traffic for the next hour. I think the fact that the GPS continued to have many more opinions did not help, as, according to The Decision Lab, the larger the number of freedoms restricted, the more reactance experienced.

How to deal with psychological reactance as a leader

Unfortunately for those in authoritative positions, the easiest way to get someone to do something is to make them want to do it, and so, even if they get everything else right, psychological reactance is likely to be their one weakness. However, there are some tactics one can follow to minimise provoking reactance significantly.

Rephrasing our instructions in a way that allows people to have a sense of control, perhaps by including options and alternatives, is often recommended. For example, when telling your teammate that their choice of orange marker will most definitely clash with the pink poster paper, you can present them with a choice between purple and dark blue. Similarly, one may choose to encourage collaboration, where you might try to appeal to your teammate by choosing the colour of the marker together. Parents can participate in similar strategies to give their children more autonomy over what they do.

How to navigate psychological reactance as a teammate

Despite society encouraging obedience to authority in almost every facet of life, people remain stubbornly resistant. When one has identified that their constitutional right to personal liberty is not being threatened when asked to go to sleep at a reasonable hour and that their protests in this scenario are unreasonable, they can try to deal with the unpleasant feeling in a responsible way.

According to Psychology Today, the best way to manage the feeling, while keeping our reactions in check, is simply reminding ourselves that by agreeing to act in the ways advised, we are not being controlled or patronised. Besides that, acknowledging that sometimes not choosing to do something simply because someone else told us to do it can be quite counterproductive—especially if the advice is ultimately beneficial to us.

Reactance is such a fundamentally human experience that it defines our most turbulent foundational years, that is, our adolescence, and is the psychological phenomenon behind the main conflict points in almost all the stories about teenage rebellion.

References:

1. Brehm, J. W. (1966). A theory of psychological reactance.

2. The Decision Lab (2021). Reactance theory.

3. Steindl C, Jonas E, Sittenthaler S, Traut-Mattausch E, Greenberg J (2015). Understanding Psychological Reactance: New Developments and Findings.

4. Psychology Today (2019). Why We Hate People Telling Us What to Do.

Elma Tabassum has an obsession with never using her new notebooks, and now her storage cabinets are giving up on her. Send her ways to cope at elmatabassum2020@gmail.com.