Reactance: Why Being Told Not To Makes You Want To

Jack Brehm's 1966 theory starts from a simple claim: people believe they have a set of free behaviors, things they could do or choose if they wished, and when one of those freedoms is threatened or removed they experience an unpleasant motivational state aimed at getting it back. That state is reactance. It can be reduced by doing the forbidden thing, by wanting it more, by downgrading the source of the threat, or by exercising some other freedom instead. The theory predicts that reactance grows with the importance of the freedom, with the proportion of freedoms under threat, and with how strongly the threat is worded.

The wording matters because a demand carries two messages. One is the content: do not write on this wall. The other is a statement about the listener: you are someone who can be ordered. A polite request leaves the choice with the reader, and the reader can comply without conceding anything. A command with no exceptions takes the choice away, and the only way to show it is still yours is to use it. In Pennebaker and Sanders's study the strict sign was the one that drew writing, and a signature from a higher authority drew more again.

Later work sharpened what reactance is made of. Dillard and Shen proposed in 2005 that it is best measured as a combination of anger and counterarguing, and Rains's 2013 meta-analysis of 20 studies with 4,942 participants found that this intertwined model fit the data better than anger alone or counterarguments alone. Reactance, on that account, is a hot state with an argument attached: the person feels pushed and starts building the case against the pusher.

Not every claim made in the theory's name has held up. The best-known one, the Romeo and Juliet effect reported by Driscoll, Davis and Lipetz in 1972, in which parental interference supposedly deepened couples' love, was tested again by Sinclair, Hood and Wright in 2014 with the original measures and 396 participants; they found no such effect, and interference went with poorer relationship quality instead. Reactance to a sign is well documented. Reactance as a general law that opposition breeds devotion is not.

Brehm's 1966 book, A Theory of Psychological Reactance, set out the theory and reported a series of laboratory experiments in which eliminating or threatening a choice made the lost option more attractive. The field study that became the textbook illustration came a decade later. James Pennebaker and Deborah Yates Sanders published "American graffiti: Effects of authority and reactance arousal" in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin in 1976.

The setting was the restroom stalls of a university. Placards were posted on the walls with one of two messages. The high-threat version read "Do NOT write on these walls under any circumstances!" The low-threat version read "Please don't write on these walls." Each message was attributed either to a high authority or to a low authority, which gave four combinations. The measure was the graffiti that appeared on the placards themselves. The amount of writing rose with the level of threat in the wording and with the authority of the signer; the paper interpreted the pattern as a response to reactance arousal. The placard that tried hardest to stop the writing was the one that collected the most of it.

The study has limits worth stating. It was small and brief, graffiti is a low-stakes behavior, and the paper reported the pattern rather than a figure that has entered the secondary literature, which is why the result on this page is given as a direction and not as a percentage. What makes it the standard example is its cleanness: the request was the same in every stall, and only the force behind it changed.

Reviews by Miron and Brehm in 2006 and by Steindl and colleagues in 2015 trace the theory's forty years of experiments, from forced choices between records and films to health messages that tell people what they must do, and find the core prediction holding across them: the harder the push, the stronger the pull back.

Reactance appears wherever a request is delivered as a removal of choice. The rows below are illustrations, not findings from the studies cited on this page.

Reactance is a response to how a message is framed, so the counters work on both sides: how you issue requests and how you hear them.

• When asking, leave the choice visible. A request that ends by acknowledging that the other person can say no asks for the same thing as a demand without taking anything away, which is the mirror image of the graffiti result.
• Give the reason with the rule. A reason turns a command into information the listener can weigh, and information does not threaten a freedom.
• Scale the force to the stakes. Absolute language, never and under any circumstances, invites the test of the exception. Save it for things that are actually absolute.
• When you feel the push-back, name it. The urge to do the opposite of what you have just been told is not evidence that the opposite is a good idea; it is evidence that you were told.
• Separate the message from the messenger. Ask whether you would want the forbidden thing if nobody had forbidden it. If not, the wanting is reactance and will pass.
• Recognize reactance being used on you. Marketing that tells you that they do not want you to know this, or that you cannot handle it, is renting your resistance.

Reactance is a specific motivational state with a specific trigger: a perceived threat to a freedom. Several neighbors are easy to confuse with it.

• It is not reverse psychology, which is a tactic rather than a response: a person tells you to do the opposite of what they want, counting on your reactance to deliver the result. Reactance is what the tactic exploits.
• It is not the backfire effect, in which a correction supposedly strengthens the belief it was meant to fix. That claim concerns factual beliefs and has replicated poorly; reactance concerns freedom of action and the wording of demands.
• It is not status quo bias, the preference for the way things are. Reactance can push toward change or against it; what it opposes is the removal of the choice.
• It is not simple defiance or a personality trait, though people differ in how readily they experience it. In Brehm's theory anyone with a freedom to lose can feel it, and the same person will feel more of it when the freedom matters more and the threat is heavier.