You're Not the Boss of Me!

Today's show is brought to you by T-Mobile for Business. This is Hidden Brain.

I'm Shankar Vedantam. As we make our way through life, all of us have access to a rich repository of wisdom.

This storehouse of knowledge can help us make better decisions, cultivate closer relationships, and enhance the quality of our work.

It can help us be better partners and parents, better artists and writers, better entrepreneurs and leaders.

How do we tap into this deep well of insight? We need to listen to others who know more than us, and to learn from those who see more clearly than we do. Whether it's a veteran member of our profession, a seasoned parent or grandparent, or a couple with decades of marriage behind them, Other people can provide us with tools, expertise, and insight— incalculably valuable assets in any life.

So why is it, given all the wisdom we have within easy reach, we so often resist or reject what other people have to tell us?

This week on Hidden Brain, the curious psychological tendency that keeps us from acquiring all the knowledge available to us. And how we can open ourselves to learn from others. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Planet Visionaries. Professional climber and environmental advocate Alex Honnold hosts Planet Visionaries, a podcast spotlighting the people tackling climate challenges with real hopeful solutions. Throughout Season 6, Alex brings together extraordinary changemakers for powerful conversations about grit, determination, and the power of hope to fuel our fight for a better future. In partnership with the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative, this is Planet Visionaries. Listen or watch wherever you get your podcasts. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Southern New Hampshire University. Science consistently tells us learning starts with motivation. That's why SNHU offers over 200 flexible, affordable online programs to help you get where you want to go. Take classes that spark your curiosity, shape your skill set, and prepare you for what's next. A degree can help move you forward no matter what motivates you. Start yours at snhu.edu/brain. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Progressive. Whoever says saving money is hard doesn't know that new customers who bundle and save Save with Progressive, save hundreds. Because switching your home and auto insurance is better than cutting down on those iced lattes you love. Switch to Progressive and see if you could save. Get your quote today at progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company, affiliates, and other insurers. Not available in all states.

All over the world, people want to be free. Individual autonomy is especially prized in a country like the United States. Who decides what you study in college? You do. Who decides who you marry or where you live? You do. Who decides what food you eat, what movies you watch, what songs you listen to?

You do, you do, you do.

At Dominican University in California, psychologist Benjamin Rosenberg studies how people respond to real and imagined infringements on their sense of autonomy. Ben Rosenberg, welcome to Hidden Brain.

Thanks so much for having me.

Ben, I want to take you back many years to when you were in college and driving one day in Boulder, Colorado.

3 of your roommates were in your Jeep Cherokee.

You were headed to a nearby golf course.

Can you paint me a picture of what happened that day?

Oh goodness. So we're driving up the freeway, the 36 freeway to be specific, and we're cruising along in my Jeep just like 4 college guys do. And a small kind of Geo Metro-ish car pulls up behind us and is like tailgating us like nobody's business.

The other driver was trying to force Ben to move out of the lane.

And I really feel threatened by this. I'm like, what is this guy doing? What's happening here? I really didn't like what was going on. So as a whatever 21-year-old, what do you do but you slam on your brakes to tell the person, hey, get off my butt. So the guy takes exception to this. He pulls into the lane next to us. We're in the fast lane, the left lane. The guy pulls into the lane next to us and rolls down his window and starts shouting obscenities at my roommates and I in the car. Well, you'd think there's one of two directions my response could go, right? I could let it go, let the guy drive away. Naturally, that is not what I did. I also rolled down the window and started yelling back at the guy. And so we're having this shouting match at 70 miles per hour cruising down the freeway.

Oh my gosh.

Which is truly, looking back on it, a ridiculously unsafe thing to be doing. The guy decides he's going to speed up, pull in front of us, and then do the brake check thing back to us. He slams on his brakes.

Wow.

Luckily, we don't hit the guy. I see what's coming. I'm beyond livid at this point. I'm freaking out. My roommates basically say, dude, Chill out. You got to let it go. And it was just enough for whatever reason to get through to me. And I thankfully let the guy just kind of speed off down the highway.

Now, it turns out this wasn't a completely isolated incident, Ben, because I understand more recently you were driving in your car with your wife and children when you had another altercation On the road. Tell me what happened this time.

Yeah, I, I, I think my wife will probably kill me for sharing this, but here we go. So we had flown home to the Bay Area from a wedding in Minnesota with 2 kids. My daughter is about 3 months at the time. My son's about 4 and a half. And we go to my parents' house. It's Rosh Hashanah. We have a lovely dinner with everybody. We're quite tired though. And so we load everybody up in the car, sun's setting. To drive home. My parents live on a relatively small residential street, and so you need to do a 3-point turn in order to get going the correct direction to get back out of their neighborhood. And so I'm finishing my 3-point turn, and a new Ford Bronco flies up the street. And this is, again, a windy road. You need to go pretty slowly around here. Flies up the street at us. And I think he sees us and he stops, but It seems like he very reluctantly stops and he's like creeping towards us, revving his engine up.

Wow.

So I take this as an affront and I decide, well, you know, I'm going to finish my turn as slowly as I can just to kind of put a little salt on the wound here, because this guy clearly seems like he's really in a rush and he's annoying me. So why not make it a little more slowly?

Convinced that the driver of the Ford Bronco was infringing on his autonomy to make a 3-point turn in peace, Ben rolled down his window and yelled an insult.

The guy rolls his window back down at me and starts yelling back at us.

Wow.

At this point, my wife is already, like, beyond furious. And she knows, as I have a history of getting upset on the road, I have a road rage history. And so she's beyond upset already. I figure incident's over, you know, we're gonna drive away. So I start driving down the road. My parents live in a pretty windy, kind of hilly neighborhood, and there's some speed bumps. So, you know, you gotta go pretty slow down the road. So I start driving away, and I see in the rearview the guy pulls a 3-point turn of his own now.

Oh my gosh!

Right. And decides to pursue us, to follow us back down the street. And so—

He's coming after you?

He's coming after us! And I think to myself, oh crap, you know, what have I done? I've got my wife and my kids in the car. But at this point, we're in so deep that I have to keep going, right? So I start driving down the road again. You can't go very fast. We're going around these turns. I grew up in this neighborhood. My parents have lived there for 35 years. And I figure I'll turn off this main road before we get to the really main road and we'll lose the guy. So I take a turn up this street. Thinking I know exactly where it's gonna lead me, and it turns out to be a dead end. And we— so we ended a cul-de-sac in some person's driveway. And at this point, panic really sets in. And so I need to do this 3-point turn to get out of this cul-de-sac. And in my, you know, really heightened state, I end up just ignoring all the warning bells in her car that are beeping at me in the camera, and I wham her back bumper and her taillight into this cement wall.

Oh, no!

And my son, who's in the back, goes, Daddy, what was that? And my wife, of course, knows I've just rammed her nice car into this wall. And so I finished the turn and start driving out. Luckily, the guy hadn't followed us into this dead end, into this cul-de-sac. But I mean, it was a really scary thing to have happen that, you know, Quite truthfully, like, I had caused, right? I was the cause of this incident.

I want to fast forward you to another story that took place in your life, Ben. Some years ago, when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, you and your wife and son were living with your parents. So you got to see your dad's reactions to COVID restrictions up close. Tell me about him and how he responded to the public health messaging around the pandemic.

This is so funny because my dad is a brilliant person, a clinical psychologist for, gosh, 40, 50 years.

Wow.

Really, really smart guy, and somebody who I look up to tremendously. He also has this side of him that is very resistant to the kind of messaging or restrictions that we all were having to follow at the beginning of COVID there. My dad feels so, I think, affronted by what's going on in the world that he decides, well, I gotta get my autonomy back somehow. And the ways that he did it were so fascinating. So he decided he would go out for drives. He decided to take these little trips, you know? And it's like, I don't even think he went in anywhere. I don't think he went to a store. I don't think he went to see buddies. Like, I think he literally would just take his car out and, you know, drive around the neighborhood or drive to the places he used to go because— He wanted to do something. He wanted to feel like he was able to do something when we weren't able really to do anything. And, you know, the other funny way we saw this play out is we were sort of potted with my parents at the time. And so we would act basically normally with them. But my sister and her husband also live in the area. And my dad, I think, found it really hard to follow the guidelines when we saw them. And so he'd find these little ways to sort of enact his freedom. And he would, like, you know, when we saw them, he, like, wouldn't wear a mask for a little while. He'd, like, see how long he could push it. Or he'd, like, you know, kind of go over and give her a hug and a kiss on the forehead when really we're trying to, you know, stay 6 feet apart or whatever. So he'd find these little kind of nuggets of ways to try to enact some modicum of autonomy.

When we come back, The many strange ways in which our drive for autonomy can keep us from doing what's best for us. You're listening to Hidden Brain.

I'm Shankar Vedantam.

Support for Hidden Brain comes from Progressive. Whoever says saving money is hard doesn't know that new customers who bundle and save with Progressive Save hundreds. Because switching your home and auto insurance is better than cutting down on those iced lattes you love. Switch to Progressive and see if you could save. Get your quote today at progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company, affiliates, and other insurers. Not available in all states. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Quince. We all have those pieces in our closet that we can count on: the versatile jacket, the perfect t-shirt. These are the pieces that make getting dressed easy, and that's what Quince does best. Quince makes elevated everyday essentials using premium materials in designs that are timeless, thoughtfully crafted, and made to be worn again and again. And when the temperatures start to drop, Quince makes it easy to build on these everyday staples with versatile layers designed to keep you warm and comfortable all season long. Find your next fall favorites at Quince. Download the Quince app for app-exclusive offers or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK too. And when Quince asks where you heard about them, let them know it was Hidden Brain.

This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. No matter our age or where we live in the world or what we do for work, we've all experienced what it's like to have people reject our requests, to be told that what we want is unfair or heavy-handed. And we've all been in the opposite position as well, finding ourselves pushing back against requests that infringe on our autonomy. At Dominican University, Ben Rosenberg has long been fascinated by these acts of rebellion what psychologists call reactance. Ben, tell me about the work of Jack Brehm.

So Jack Brehm originated this idea about psychological reactance. And he writes this book in 1966 that is steeped in a lot of other classical social psychological work in the time. So Jack Brehm actually studied with Leon Festinger, who created cognitive dissonance theory. People don't like inconsistency in their lives. And so cognitive dissonance is all about inconsistency between belief and action, and that, that doesn't make us feel good. Reactance is kind of a similar idea. And so Dr. Brehm, Jack Brehm, writes this book, this very skinny but incredibly well-written, fascinating book, laying out his ideas about what happens when people's freedom is either threatened or removed. What happens to us when we have autonomy either taken away from us entirely, or we feel like something is providing an impingement or an affront on our perceived autonomy?

So we're going to talk a little bit about psychological reactance and some of the problems with psychological reactance, but it might be good to start with why we have reactance in the first place. Jack Brehm and others argued that in some ways, this is part of our drive for self-determination, which in and of itself is not a bad thing.

Absolutely. And, you know, I think Brehm actually argued this in his original work, that psychological reactance is at least in part evolutionary in nature, that having the ability to choose how we fulfill our various needs is something that allows us to survive and thrive. And so he— and this is before the explosion in evolutionary psychology—

his—

he's really making this linkage between freedom and our ability to thrive and to be able to live the lives that we'd like to live.

So psychologists have explored the many different ways in which people try to reassert their autonomy when someone tries to take it away. Basically, people are saying, you're not the boss of me, effectively, when they're feeling psychological reactance. One such response is called The boomerang effect. What is the boomerang effect, Ben?

This is the classic psychological reactance response. So the boomerang is when somebody tells you to do something or to not do something, and you do the exact opposite, right? So this is me telling my son, hey, you can't have another cookie, you've already had 7, and him going and grabbing the entire package of cookies and eating all of them at the same time.

I want to play some tape for you. This is CBS basketball commentator Gary Parrish talking about how during the COVID pandemic, National Basketball Association player Rudy Gobert responded to public health restrictions while doing press conferences with reporters who were positioned at least 6 feet away.

And so people put mics on the table in front of Rudy Gobert, and from a distance, you ask your questions, he answers them, and then it's all captured on video. Before he leaves the media room that he was in, he makes a point to touch every microphone, like almost mocking the idea that this is happening and he's having to deal with it in this way. And then of course, not long later, he is diagnosed with coronavirus and the entire NBA is shut down.

So I have to say, Ben, this sounds like the boomerang effect in action.

Yeah. So my recollection was, you know, he's being asked all these questions about what's going to happen to the NBA. The league's going to shut down, all this stuff. And it's quite uncertain at this point. And the rumor, at least, was that he licked one of the microphones sort of on the way out. And I, again, I find that so funny. But at the same time, it makes a lot of sense. Like, his and all the other players' livelihood and the thing they care the most about perhaps is being threatened. They don't know what's going to happen.

Right.

It's possible at that point that everything will shut down, which of course it did, but he's feeling this reactance response. He's like, oh my God, I got to do something to get my freedom back.

Yeah. I understand that researchers in North Carolina once carried out a study that looked at college students' alcohol consumption when the legal drinking age in the state was raised from 18 to 21. So students between the ages of 18 and 20 had previously been able to drink legally, and then that freedom was taken away. What happened, Ben?

This is a classic study. And so the folks who were affected by the change in this law responded differently, right? They wanted to drink more. They did drink more. They were the ones who experienced reactance to the change in the law. And to take us back to something we just talked about, I think this really illustrates the importance of vested interest or stake or importance in arousing psychological reactance, right? The folks who weren't affected by the law, like, whatever, they don't care. It's not affecting me. But the people that this directly impacted, who particularly, who became newly illegal to drink, were like, whoa, this is an impingement on my freedom. I gotta do something to get this back.

One of the points that Jack Brehm makes is that when people have freedom or have autonomy in some realm, They become very protective of it if that freedom or autonomy is taken away. So it's one thing not to have freedom in the first place, but when you've had a freedom and then it's taken away, that feels especially painful?

Absolutely. And so these are, again, folks who have done this behavior, right? This is clearly, to them, a free behavior. And many of us have been college students. We know that drinking, for many people, is a big part of being college students. So this is clearly something that's Central to their identity. It's part of their college experience. So to have it and have it entirely removed in that fashion, it makes perfect sense, right? Thinking of it from a reactant's perspective, it makes perfect sense that that would be their response. This is, to use your word from earlier, a perfect illustration of a boomerang effect.

I understand that you yourself have experienced the boomerang effect. As a dog owner?

Oh gosh, yes. So, uh, I am oddly a very relaxed, calm person, but at the same time, certain things really make me reactant. And so one of those things, for whatever reason, are restrictions on off-leash dogs. And we have a very well-trained dog who I like to take off leash with me everywhere. So any sign that says all dogs must be on leash at a park or wherever you are makes me extremely reactant.

Give me some examples of how this has manifested. I understand that where you live now in Berkeley, the flouting of rules is almost never a problem. But when you lived in LA, the vibe was somewhat different. Yeah.

So in Berkeley, people have dogs off leash everywhere. I go running with the dog off leash. Every park that we take the dog to has a sign that says dogs must be on leash. And, you know, there's like 50 dogs there off leash. Police drive by, nobody cares. As you said, we lived in Los Angeles for a long time, and we lived right across the street from a park. Seemed like a logical place to take dogs off leash. We'd go to the park in the afternoon, people would be congregating with their dogs, and it was like being at a keg party when you're underage. Like, somebody'd be on lookout for the cops to drive by, and as soon as a cop would drive by, like, everybody would find their dog, put them on leash, and scatter. I mean, it was just a wild experience. So adjacent to this park, there was a tennis court, fully fenced tennis court. I figured, and, you know, again, I'm trying to flout these rules because, you know, reactance. I figured it's fully fenced, I can take my dog in here. So one morning before I go to work, before I go teach, I take the dog in there to throw the ball for her a little bit. You know, she needs to run around. She's a puppy at the time. She needs lots of exercise. So I'm in the midst of throwing the ball, And a policeman, and we're not talking like a security guard or something, a true policeman from the area where we lived pulls up to the tennis court and basically comes in and says, I'm so sorry, sir, you have to put your dog on leash. A neighbor called and reported—

Wow.

That you had your dog off leash in the tennis court. And I'm thinking to myself, it's— and I actually said to the policeman, who was quite nice, I said, look, like, I need her to run around somewhere. I can't go to the park. This is fully fenced. Like, we're not harming anybody by doing this. Nobody's using this. court at the time. It's like mid-morning. And he says, you know, I'm just doing my job. I'm so sorry, you're gonna have to get out of here. So whatever, I pack up the dog, walk across the street to go home. You can take a guess as to what I did the next day, which of course was go back to the tennis court and let the dog run around off leash again. I didn't get caught that time, but I was like, you know what, screw that guy, I'm going back.

So besides the boomerang effect, reactants can sometimes change how people evaluate products or activities. The city of Miami once banned phosphate laundry detergents because they were bad for the environment. But researchers then tracked how folks in Miami came to think of phosphate laundry detergents compared to people in other cities in Florida.

Right. So the people in Miami who'd had the use of phosphate detergents banned come to like them more, right? They come to rate them more positively. And again, this is another classic reactance finding that when you've restricted somebody's freedom to choose to do something, particularly, as you mentioned before, something they had done in the past, right? These are folks who'd had the ability to use whatever detergent they wanted, that their response is going to be quite profound. And in this case, they're like, no, no, no, no, no, give me the thing. I like that thing. Give it back to me.

I want it.

So this to me highlights exactly what you said. We often conceive of reactance as this boomerang effect. I'm doing something to get back my freedom. But there's really another suite of responses that people can have, one of which is this attitudinal response, this like, well, if I can't have this thing, I'm going to really come to like it. Like, I really want this now that you've told me I can't have it.

And of course, maybe a week before the ban, people aren't even aware of what's in their laundry detergent. But now you tell them I'm taking it away, suddenly people say, I really like my phosphate laundry detergents.

Yeah, exactly. So this makes it so salient to people that, whoa, wait a minute, I could do whatever I wanted in this regard before, and now you're telling me I can't? No, that's not how this thing is going to work.

Another way reactance can manifest itself is that people get angry at the individual or institution that is restricting them. Sociologists have found that when a government officially endorses a religion, People living in that country may respond by feeling resentment toward that religion because their ability to autonomously choose their own faith has been compromised. Can you talk about this idea that one more manifestation of reactance is just we get really mad at the people who are trying to take our autonomy away?

This study was so cool. And we came across this study. We were asked to write a chapter about reactance in religion, which was like totally out of my comfort zone and my co-author's comfort zone. But it took us into this entirely different literature, right? You can see how well— and this is from a huge sample— how well their data align with reactance predictions that in states that endorse a statewide religion, that really threatens people's freedom of choice of how and what they'd like to practice.

Right.

So it makes sense that people living in these kind of places would, as they found in the study, report things like less religious attendance and being less highly identified with their religious group. And, you know, you can broaden the scope, I think, of this to think a little bit about other state-mandated or kind of county, you know, school-wide mandated things where mandating something in this way often has the opposite effect, right? It drives people away from whatever you're trying to mandate them to do.

So closer to home, Ben, I understand that you found that your 5-year-old son responds in a distinctive way when you try to set limits on his freedom. Can you give me some examples of what he does?

I wish I could tell you about times when I didn't arouse reactance in my son. The best thing to me about thinking about reactance in kids is that so many of kids' responses are not commensurate with what you've been asking them to do, right? And so they have these outlandish responses to our seemingly benign requests of them. So for example, I was asking my son the other day to put on socks before school, a seemingly reasonable request. And so I ask him this question like, you know, 15 times, and finally he's like, I've had enough, Dad. You know, this is making me extremely reactant. And he launches his socks And his shoes, which luckily were, you know, rubber Crocs, so not— weren't gonna hurt anybody, launches them at me. And I'm like, okay, dude, I get it. You're, you're reacting so badly to me asking you to put socks on.

Uh-huh.

And I'm assuming this must be the case when you're trying to tell him to get to bed or restricting the amount of candy he's eating.

I mean, any, anything and everything. I, I was— this is a common occurrence. We're at the park, which of course he's having fun, he's riding his scooter, and I'm like, Dude, we got to go help Mom with dinner. Like, you know, we got to go. We're already running late. And so I'm asking and asking and asking him, and he just perceives this as such an impingement on his freedom to stay and hang out at the park. And he goes, you are the worst daddy in the world. Which, like, of course I know he doesn't really believe, right? But it's like, we talk in reactance about source derogation, like, you know, talking crap about the source of the restriction. And it was like, Whoa, he's really derogating the source in this case.

So you explained that one of the things that drives reactance is how much we care about the thing where we feel our autonomy is being threatened. Another factor that influences the intensity of our reactance has to do with our perceptions of the intent of the authority figure who is restricting our freedom. Can you explain this idea, Ben?

Absolutely. And importantly, I would say it doesn't even have to be an authority figure. I think this is one of the reactance theory propositions that I find has the most implications, because if you think about it, almost any of our social interactions have some component of persuasion, right? We're trying to get people to believe what we believe, to go along with us, to comply with what we're asking them. And so The thought is that just perceiving, just my thinking, wait a minute, is Shankar trying to persuade me to do something or act in a certain way? Just that perception is profound enough of an affront to our freedom to make us be reactant. And in turn, we're going to push back, right? Either attitudinally or behaviorally, we're going to push back against whatever that request is or whatever the persuasion target is.

And I guess if we perceive that the person who is trying to influence us, in fact, is trying to influence us. In other words, they're deliberately trying to change our view about something. I now perceive this as a more direct assault on my autonomy, and presumably my reactance is going to be higher.

100%. If it's really clear that somebody is trying to convince you to believe in their side of a political debate or trying to persuade you to come and eat vegan with them or whatever, if it's really, really evident, then absolutely the reactance is going to be higher. And this has been borne out in reviews and meta-analyses that have shown, like, this is quite a strong effect, right? As soon as we perceive somebody's trying to persuade us, particularly in this really strong and clear way, that we are pushing back. We do not like our freedom to be taken away from us in that way.

So we've been talking about the various situational factors that can affect the intensity of the psychological reactance we feel. Do you think there might be a gender component to it? I mean, many of the examples of psychological reactance that we've talked about involve men, and that might be my stereotype, that men are more prone to reactance than women. Is there any truth to that?

To be sure, that fits our stereotype. And unfortunately, there hasn't been a ton of research on this specific question. And I think my observations certainly align with yours. And there are a few studies out there that would suggest, particularly on trait reactance, which we were just talking about, that men tend to be more prone to reactance than women. But there's also some studies on the other side that show there's no difference. So my observations align with yours. I'm not sure we have the data to claim that that's an evidence-based conclusion. My intuition is that you're probably right, though.

So as a psychologist who had been studying reactance for years, when the COVID pandemic hit in 2020, You say that the restrictions that were put in place in some ways created a perfect storm in terms of generating psychological reactance. How so, Ben?

Well, mandating anything is tough, right? Mandating anything, you're going to run into reactance, as we've been talking about. You're going to run into people who say, no, no, no, this doesn't apply to me. Quit taking away my freedom of behavior. I'm not going to do it. I'm not going to comply.

And when you're telling people to wear a mask, they feel, I've been walking around for years without a mask, and you're taking away that freedom. When you're asking people to socially distance, people are saying, you're taking my freedom away. You tell people to get vaccinated, people say, you know, it's my body, my choice. And in all of these cases, you really have the same pattern of people feeling like their autonomy is being— is under fire.

100%, you do. And if you think back to Some of those early recommendations, I remember walking around and seeing signs on stores that said, you must wear a mask to enter. Actually, here at Dominican, we had signs on the campus door that said, you must be vaccinated, you must wear a mask to enter these buildings. And, you know, look, I was following the guidelines, as I think most people were, but it's so clear that would be an affront to many people's freedoms, right? To your point, I've gone into stores my whole life without a mask. I've come to work without a mask my whole life. So to feel like you're now telling me what I must do when I come to do these things I've done for many years is a really tough proposition.

Yeah, and many people, I think, responded not just saying, I'm not gonna follow the rules, but they responded with anger. They responded saying, this is an outrage.

Yeah, I mean, you saw that play out, especially with travel, right? I mean, travel, I think, became such a flashpoint as people were arguing about masking or You know, not wanting to follow some of these guidelines. And it was like, I remember taking probably my first flight after, you know, sort of post or really it was during COVID 2021 or something. And most people were following the rules, but there were a handful of people that were like, you know, had their mask under their nose or like would take it off to eat something on the plane and then they just would leave it off for a really long time. And it's like, that's a pretty keen way of reasserting your freedom, right? You're Wearing your mask in air quotes, but you've now just figured out a way to take it off for a little bit and get back some of that autonomy.

Now, it's important to offer a disclaimer or two here, Ben. There are authoritarian regimes that are so powerful that everyone falls in line because they're afraid that they're going to get sent to prison or be shot if they don't comply. But it's also the case that sometimes people embrace authority figures and voluntarily surrender their freedoms.

Why would this be the case?

So some of the work we've done is actually approach this exact question. One factor, it seems, is the level of uncertainty that people feel about their ability to live their lives as they would like, their uncertain about their future, about their present, where maybe they're going to feed their family or where they're going to work. And so in this context, it does seem from some of the work that we've done that when people feel uncertain, they are less reactant to these sort of authoritarian, kind of demanding type messages, which I think to your point has some, has some corollaries with these authoritarian regimes, right? So if people that are living under this kind of duress feel uncertain about the future, they feel uncertain about their lives and their ability to handle whatever's coming their way.

Hmm.

way in life, they might be like, you know what? I don't need any freedom. I just need somebody to tell me how to survive, right? And how to kind of get through this feeling, this distinct feeling of uncertainty.

You know, I'm thinking about Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs pyramid here, and I know that work is somewhat dated and contested today, but if you buy his idea that we have basic needs for food and security and then higher needs for Autonomy and self-determination. Reactance might be something that's more common at the higher end of the pyramid. When you actually have your basic needs taken care of, now you can get mad at someone if they are hurrying you as you're taking a 3-point turn. But for people who have more pressing needs, needs about home and security and safety, is it possible that that's a point where you don't care so much about autonomy, you just care about—

Yeah.

those basic needs being met?

There does seem to be a sort of privilege component, I think, is what you're getting at when you say that, right? Like, yes, I have the privilege to become reactant about a 3-point turn, whereas somebody who doesn't know where their next meal is coming from isn't going to be reactant about the same things. And I wonder if reactance is a core human motivation, but we've primarily only studied it with people that are sort of have the privilege to be reactant to— like, some of the classic studies would give people a choice of a painting and then tell them they couldn't have it, right? It's like, that's a very privileged kind of thing, a very privileged way to test that idea. So I wonder how much of it is that we haven't tested it with folks who have somewhat less privilege, and how much of it is that we, we just don't experience it at those lesser levels of privilege.

When we come back, how to craft messages that are less likely to trigger psychological reactance. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

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This is Hidden Brain.

I'm Shankar Vedantam. Life offers us many opportunities to learn from others, but lots of us have a contrarian streak And we don't like to be told what to do. If a teacher or a parent or a manager tells us not to do something, we are drawn to doing it. At Dominican University in California, psychologist Ben Rosenberg studies the phenomenon of psychological reactance— how we respond with anger or defiance when someone tries to change our behavior. Ben, I understand that one strategy for preventing reactance is to pay attention to the language We use. Researchers once studied the effects of 2 kinds of anti-drinking messages that were aimed at college students. One set of messages said there was conclusive evidence that drinking was bad and that, quote, any reasonable person must acknowledge these conclusions. Others were given the same data about the risks of alcohol, but were told, you may wish to carefully consider the evidence. What were the differences between these messages and how did they go over?

So this is a really seminal study in the reactance literature, and it set off a cascade of a new way to study reactance and this messaging context that you mentioned. So one of the messages, as you briefly summarized, had this very strong language, sort of strong-handed, you know, you must not do this thing, right? The other message is a little bit softer in the way that it's portrayed, and The difference that they find and has been found over and over again in the years since is that people who are exposed to those really strongly worded, those highly controlling messages have much more reactance to the message than people who are exposed to a slightly more softly worded message, right? That says you should consider or things like that versus the you must kind of wording.

And of course, when I'm thinking about the COVID pandemic, you know, what we heard most often was the very strong language, right? We heard mandates.

Yeah, and that was one of my biggest critiques, honestly. I, for a long time, I think was on a soapbox yelling at no one talking about this. But yeah, that was one of my biggest critiques. It's like we could so easily reduce the amount of freedom threat and amount of reactance that at least many people feel in response to these messages simply by saying it a little bit more softly, right? Not, you must wear a mask here, but please consider wearing a mask here, right? Like, that comes across so much more differently.

It was also the case that sometimes we would hear a recommendation from public health authorities, and then that recommendation would change in the following weeks and months. And of course, this happened because the situation was highly uncertain, and it wasn't entirely clear what we should do. But talk about the effect that this had in terms of psychological reactance?

I think this waffling back and forth between recommendations made it all the more likely that people would be reactant to being told you must do something, right? You've— last week you told me I must not wear a mask, and now this week you're telling I must wear a mask. Like, where does the answer lie? So it became easier, I think, for a lot of people just to flout all of the recommendations, right? Just to write off all of the recommendations. And it really decreased the amount of I think trust and the amount of authority really that the CDC and other messaging, you know, public health messaging organizations had to tell people what to do or to instruct them about what they should be doing.

So when you tell people you should consider wearing a mask instead of you must wear a mask, the difference that I'm hearing is that the low-controlling language underlines and supports people's autonomy. Is that the idea here, Ben?

Absolutely. The idea, uh, that by not mandating people do something, we're reminding them that ultimately it's up to them, right? And that's actually one of the lines that you'll see in a lot of these more low-controlling messages in some of the experimental work, is like they'll say some stuff about how you should consider this or this, and then the last line— and we've used this in some of our studies— the last line is like, but ultimately the choice is yours.

Mm-hmm.

Right. And so it really puts the onus back on people. It gives them their autonomy back, right? It gives them their freedom to make a decision back while also informing them of what they should normatively be doing.

Another strategy to avoid reactance is to offer people choices. One study looked at interventions to protect people from skin cancer. Tell me what the study did and what it found.

So in this study, they— the authors gave people an option saying you could use sunscreen, wear protective clothing, instead of asking people to do both of these things, right? And so giving them a choice, giving them options, was enough to reduce the amount of reactance that they experienced in response to the message. And I think this strategy for reactance reduction is particularly applicable Right, because rather than asking your friend or your kid to do this one particular thing, you might say, hey, how about we do one of these couple of things, right? And I think they're gonna be more likely to respond in a positive way. There's multiple options for fulfilling this request. I mean, I think that's really what is at the nut of this idea and at the nut of this study is that you have a variety of ways in which you can comply with this request I'm making of you rather than just one.

Right. What I'm taking away from this is that when you give people choices, sometimes you're actually giving people choices, but sometimes perhaps all you're doing is you're giving people the illusion of a choice, but the illusion of a choice gives people the opportunity to exercise a certain degree of autonomy. I remember when my own child was small, there were some parenting books that recommended giving your child You know, closed options. So you ask the child, would you like to go to sleep in 5 minutes or 15 minutes? You know, you're not asking the child, would you like to go to bed, period? You're just saying the options are 5 minutes, 15 minutes. You have the autonomy to choose.

Yeah, perfect example, right? So we're not saying, hey, do whatever the heck you want, but we're saying, here are some very specific ways in which you can fulfill my request or in which you can comply with what I'm asking you to do. That I've chosen, right? I've selected because all of these will meet my aims as the requester, but I know that offering you a handful of ways to do it will reduce the amount of reactance you feel and make it less likely that you're gonna push back and not do any of the things I want you to do.

So like many aspects of our behavior, uh, one reason reactance might be so powerful is that people are usually not aware that they're behaving reactively. So the parent, really does seem like a party pooper to the kid. The manager really does appear clueless to the employee. One way to avert psychological reactance that you and others have studied is to get people to notice that they are experiencing reactance, to warn them ahead of time that they may experience this phenomenon. How would this work, Ben?

So these kind of studies are all about inoculation. And I think this is such a fun idea because it It inoculates somebody just like a vaccine inoculates us, prepares us for the arrival of some pathogen. And in this case, we're thinking of reactance like a pathogen. So if we tell people, hey, your freedom might be threatened by this thing I'm going to ask you to do, they tend to respond a little bit more mildly, right? It seems to have the effect of defusing their reactance to whatever your ultimate proposition of them might be.

Another interesting technique to circumvent psychological reactance is to frame the request or the advice in the context of a story rather than in the form of instructions. Explain how this works, Ben.

So really, the idea here is twofold. So on the one hand, the narrative story works as a more subtle form of persuasion, right? In the past, earlier on in our conversation, we're talking about this really clear, overt kind of persuasion and how that often doesn't work. So if you think about a persuasive message being folded into a story with characters that the audience like or that they care about, they aren't gonna notice in the same way that you're trying to persuade them. That perceived persuasive intent that we talked about earlier won't quite be there in the same way.

Mm-hmm.

And so the result, hopefully, is that they won't become reactant. Even though you're requesting that they do something, you're trying to persuade them of something, they're not gonna become reactant in the same way because they're not perceiving That is a persuasive message. They're getting caught up in the story. And so that by itself, that turning off or turning down that reactance should be enough to get people's attention and allow them to more freely process the message rather than kind of tuning it out.

Hmm.

The second part of this is that if the narrative is well done, ideally people will come to identify with the characters in the story. We like to listen to people that we like, or who we identify with, or who we perceive as being similar to. And so that kind of getting folded up, getting caught up in that narrative can also increase persuasion and reduce reactance.

You say, Ben, that we can also leverage the power of psychological reactance for good.

How do we do that?

This is such a cool and innovative approach, and I liken it in some ways to reverse psychology. So most of the time, we're thinking reactance bad, right? Avoid it. What if— and this was, uh, originally kind of pioneered by Brian Quick and colleagues, um, and so Brian had this idea of like, well, what if we make the thing that we want people not to do the source of the freedom threat? So if we make, say— and they were studying in particular, um, anti-smoking, right, and, and trying to get people not to smoke. So they framed in their study secondhand smoke as being a freedom They convinced people— they were trying to persuade people to be pro-smoking regulations. So they made secondhand smoke the freedom threat. And this was the thing that they're trying, trying to reduce, right? So they said, look, if secondhand smoke is threatening your freedom to breathe clean air and act in the way you'd like and going the places that you would like, it turns out that people come to perceive secondhand smoke as a freedom threat. And they show that they come to support clean air policies, right? So it's really— it's turning the idea of reactance on its head.

After all these years of research, do you feel like you've gotten better and more skilled at not eliciting reactance from others?

I would like to think so. I've at the very least, if not gotten better, I've at the very least become more aware of the kinds of approaches that will arouse reactance in other people, the ways that I frame questions or requests to other people. That's not to say that I can entirely avoid it. Certainly in situations with my son, who again is 5 and a half, I find myself saying, you know, you have to do this, you must do this, and immediately think to myself, that's not the right way to frame that, right? So I think if nothing else, it's made me much more aware of the ways in which our normal day-to-day conversations, as well as bigger requests, can elicit these— this reactance response, can make people feel like their freedom is impinged. And really that we should try as best we can in those interactions, particularly with people who we care about and that we love, to frame things in a way that's gonna make them feel autonomous, that's gonna make them feel like they have volition Rather than impinging upon their freedom.

Benjamin Rosenberg is a psychologist at Dominican University in California. Ben, thank you so much for joining me today on Hidden Brain.

Thanks so much for having me, Shankar.

If you have follow-up questions for Ben Rosenberg that you'd be willing to share with members of the Hidden Brain audience, please find a quiet room and record a voice memo and email it to us at ideas@hiddenbrain.org. That email address again is ideas@hiddenbrain.org. 60 seconds is plenty, and please use the subject line Reactance. If you want to write out a question, Please be sure to tell us how to pronounce your name. Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Our audio production team includes Annie Murphy-Paul, Kristen Wong, Laura Quirrell, Ryan Katz, Autumn Barnes, Andrew Chadwick, and Nick Woodbury.

Tara Boyle is our executive producer.

I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor. We end today with a story from our sister show, My Unsung Hero. This My Unsung Hero segment is brought to you by Discover. Our story comes from Moss Masumoto. Growing up, Moss was vaguely aware that he had an aunt who had been separated from the family in the 1940s. Her name was Shizuko Sugimoto. Shizuko had an intellectual disability. And as was often done in those days, she became a ward of the state. The family never talked about her and assumed she had passed away. But one day in 2012, Moss got a surprising message from a funeral home worker named Renee Johnson. She was helping to plan the funeral of a woman in hospice, a woman named Shizuko Sugimoto. Shizuko was in her 90s.

So she looked up in the 1930 census, found Shizuko's name with my mom's name, and proceeded to phone me so Shizuko would not die alone. It was amazing for Renee to go through all that work when she didn't have to, because she got the contract for this, uh, Shizuko Sugimoto, who had no family apparently on the records, and they were just gonna take care of the body and she would pass away in a, you know, in a very simple way. But it was Renee who said no, she wanted to see if family could be reunited with this person. When I told my mom and my aunt and uncle, I said, okay, I want you to sit down because I have this news. And I said, you remember Aunt Shizuko? And they all said, oh yeah, yeah, she passed away a long time ago. And I took a deep breath. And I said, no, Sisako's alive. And then everyone said, no, that can't be. That can't be right. And then I told them the story of what happened, and they all paused and said, we need to see her. We need to go see her. Renee opened the door to a family secret, and especially dealing with someone with a I think that having a disability, and in this case, intellectual disability, for my parents' generation and grandparents', this was a secret that people had, and it brought shame to a lot of people, and people were treated wrongly by becoming invisible and hiding these kind of facts. So, Renee, I want to thank you for opening the doors For our family to explore this traumatic history that's full of choices and circumstances beyond control, you know, we were forced to reexamine and probe our own family secrets. And I want to thank you for that because you have changed our family history and also opened my own eyes to understand this is part of the legacy that I carry, and all thanks to you. Thank you.

Mas Masumoto of Delray, California. The family did get to meet Shizuko, who lived another 2 years after they reunited. This segment of My Unsung Hero was brought to you by Discover. Discover believes everyone deserves to feel special and celebrates those who exhibit this spirit in their communities. I'm a longstanding card member myself. Learn more at discover.com/creditcard. For more Hidden Brain, be sure to check out our free newsletter. In every issue, we bring you the latest research on human behavior. Plus, we always include a brain teaser and a moment of joy. You can sign up at news.hiddenbrain.org. That's news.hiddenbrain.org. Thanks for listening. I'm Shankar Vedantam. See you soon.

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