What is reactance and how can it be harnessed for good?
University of Texas Professor Christopher Bryan explains the negative reaction we have to feeling constrained or controlled and how to harness this “reactance” to promote better choices.
In the last decade, I bet you’ve felt deeply upset about a regulation or rule that constrained you. Maybe, like me, you were furious about a dress code (I couldn’t stand a rule forbidding jeans at a club my parents joined as retirees). Or maybe you were angry about less superfluous restrictions, like those imposed during the COVID era. Perhaps right now, like me, you’re infuriated by the way the U.S. government is seeking to control our great research universities, insisting that because public funds support scientific research, politicians should also be able to supervise university admissions, policies and hiring. Whenever an attempt to control you or an institution you value gets under your skin, the feeling you’re experiencing is called reactance. In this month’s Q&A, I talk with University of Texas Professor Christopher Bryan who found a clever way to harness reactance to improve people’s decisions.
But first, here are a few listens and reads I’ve enjoyed recently that I think you might like too…
This Month’s Recommended Listens and Reads
Hooked on Streaks: A new episode of Choiceology featuring University of Delaware Professor Jackie Silverman explains why we’re so motivated by maintaining a streak of consecutive achievements and demotivated by breaking a streak.
Tips to Get You Moving More: NPR's Life Kit offers evidence-based advice for fitting exercise into your busy life and staying active (featuring some of my work).
Reminding Women of Gender Gaps at Work Can Be Motivating: Fortune magazine summarizes new research led by Wharton PhD student Sophia Pink, showing how reactance can be harnessed to motivate more women to defy harmful stereotypes by competing for top corporate jobs.
Baby Healed with World’s First Gene-Editing Treatment: The New York Times shares an incredible story of what science and medicine can accomplish when we throw our support behind research universities.
Q&A: What Is Reactance and How Can It Be Harnessed for Good?
In this Q&A from Choiceology, University of Texas Professor and psychologist Christopher Bryan discusses his research exploring the negative reaction we exhibit when we feel constrained or controlled and how it’s possible to harness that “reactance” to promote better choices.
Me: I want to just start by asking you to define reactance: what is it?
Christopher: I guess the way I think about it is that reactance is our natural instinctive impulse to reassert our autonomy when we feel that our choices are being controlled by something or someone on the outside in a way that we don't believe is legitimate.
Me: So it's sort of saying: "I'm going to buck what I'm told to do."
Christopher: Yeah. Absolutely. So classic examples are the ways in which teenagers respond to their parents' authority or other adults' authority. You'll get kids saying, "No, I'm not going to clean my room." Or, "No, I won't eat that." Right? And I think those are really classic cases of reactance. I think another really prominent example is a lot of the opposition to big government in American politics, which really comes from a place of reactance. It comes from feeling that the government is trying to, or in fact is, constraining my options in ways that I don't believe are legitimate. And to some extent, just on principle, that upsets me. It's closely related to the desire for freedom. If we feel that our freedom to make choices is being constrained, that's deeply upsetting to us.
Me: I want to talk about your recent amazing research on how reactance can be harnessed to improve decision-making. Could you describe that work?
Christopher: Absolutely. I should say this all started when my close friend and frequent collaborator, David Yeager, and I did some consulting work for Disney. We were trying to help them design an attraction that would make families want to make healthy choices, like eat healthy foods, drink lots of water, that sort of thing.
And so we were discussing this and we were thinking, the problem is that we want to eat a bunch of junk food, and we want to sit on the couch instead of going out and playing a lot of the time. And how do we encourage young people and their families to reject that strong temptation? And one of the first thoughts we had was, if it doesn't feel like it's coming from within – if it feels like it's something being imposed on us from the outside – we won't feel like we have to defend it. Not only will we not feel like we have to defend it, we may feel like it's some outside influence constraining our choices. And so if we can successfully help young people to see temptations as being triggered in us by crafty villains—in this case it was a fantastical Disney scenario—then that might just do the trick. That might just get them excited about fighting back against it.
And we found that doing that, even in this obviously and clearly fictional, fantastical scenario, got kids excited about healthy choices. They were more likely to go and buy a fruit cup and a bottle of water than to go buy an ice cream sandwich and a soda. And so we thought, ‘Well, what if we just did this outside of a theme park context? Could we just tell adolescents about all of this stuff, tell them about the ways in which food marketers are manipulating them into eating junk food and causing very real harm in the process?’ And might that be enough to get adolescents to think, ‘Well, I don't want to be a part of this. I don't want to be a pawn in these guys' game. I want to make my own choices.’
Me: If I'm remembering correctly, you pitted that against a more traditional way of convincing kids to eat healthy foods.
Christopher: Yeah. We conspired with an incredibly supportive and helpful middle school principal to use one of the food giveaways that he already does regularly, giving kids a party or a snack pack as sort of a celebration/thank-you for all the work the students were putting in to prepare for the state tests.
Two days after the kids had been exposed to all this information about the controlling manipulation of food marketers, we had homeroom teachers distribute an order form where kids were asked to circle two out of five possible snack options, and one out of four or five possible drink options. And the options included really unhealthy things, like Hot Cheetos and Doritos, and healthy things, like cut fruit and trail mix and that sort of thing. And the drink options included really unhealthy things, like soda or heavily sweetened fruit drinks, and they included things like regular bottled water or bubbly water.
And what we found was that kids who had been exposed to what we called the "exposé" treatment—the one that explained to adolescents all the ways in which the food marketers were trying to control them and others—got kids to make significantly healthier choices on average than, instead, being exposed to the sort of standard health course curriculum that focused on how to know what's healthy, how to read a nutrition label, and how to understand the effects of what you eat on your long-term health.
Me: That's really, really neat. Could you talk a bit about the way you think this work applies to our daily lives. What have your takeaways been?
Christopher: I think the higher-level lesson has been to recognize that the way to get other people to do what you're hoping they'll do is almost never to make them feel stupid or bad for what they're currently doing instead. Because when you make people feel stupid or bad for what they're doing now, then they can't afford to conclude that you're right. Because your request for how they change their behavior is coming with a poison pill for their self-regard. It's coming with the message that, ‘You're a bad person for not already doing that.’ So that's one thing.
The other thing is I'm a parent of five kids, and a bunch of them are either in or right on the precipice of adolescence. And I have already seen very clear evidence that simply asserting my authority is not getting me where I need to go. And so instead, I need to reason with them. I need to be open to being persuaded by them. They want to feel that they have agency, too. Fundamentally, reactance is the rejection of the constraining of our agency. And if you understand it that way, you can begin to catch yourself seeming to constrain other people's autonomy and agency. Then you're likely to avoid a lot of pushback, a lot of negative reactions. And I've certainly found that in my life.
Me: I love that. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk with me today.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
To learn more about Christopher’s work, listen to the episode of Choiceology where we dig into reactance.
That’s all for this month’s newsletter. See you in June!
Katy Milkman, PhD
Professor at Wharton, Host of Choiceology, an original podcast from Charles Schwab, and International Bestselling Author of How to Change
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