Reverse Psychology: Why Being Told No Makes the Option Attractive

Reverse psychology is a folk tactic; the research underneath it is about psychological reactance, and the two are not the same page. Reactance is the motivational state a person enters when a freedom is threatened, and it is covered at reactance. This page is about the deliberate use of that state: telling someone not to do the thing you want them to do, and what the evidence says about whether that works.

Jack Brehm proposed the mechanism in 1966. When a person believes they are free to choose among options and something removes or threatens one of them, they experience pressure to restore the freedom, and the quickest way to restore it is to take the threatened option. The attraction is not to the option itself but to having the choice. That is why the effect grows with the importance of the freedom, the size of the threat and how illegitimate the restriction seems, and why a reason attached to a request takes much of the force out of it.

Later work asked what reactance is made of. James Dillard and Lijiang Shen ran two studies in 2005, one urging students to floss and one to limit their drinking, and found that a composite of anger and negative thoughts about the message fully accounted for the effect of controlling language on attitudes and intentions. Stephen Rains pooled 20 studies and 4,942 participants in 2013 and reported that anger and counterarguing are bound tightly enough to be treated as one reaction.

That gives the tactic a narrow window. A deliberate reverse request has to read as a genuine restriction rather than as a tactic, which is hard when the other person knows you. It needs the freedom to matter to them. And it produces anger as well as the behavior, which is a strange thing to aim for in a relationship you intend to keep. The published evidence supports the mechanism, not the technique: studies show that forceful, freedom-threatening messages produce resistance, not that asking for the opposite of what you want reliably gets it.

Where the research is strongest is in the unintended version, the boomerang. Brad Bushman and Angela Stack ran three experiments on television warning labels in 1996 and found that labels increased interest in violent programs rather than reducing it, most clearly when the label came from an authoritative source and among people high in trait reactance. Clinicians have also described paradoxical techniques built on the same idea, which belong inside a treatment relationship and are outside what this page covers.

Jack Brehm's A Theory of Psychological Reactance appeared in 1966, with the expanded statement by Sharon Brehm and Jack Brehm following in 1981. Its prediction is specific: eliminating or threatening a choice alternative increases that option's attractiveness, in proportion to the importance of the freedom and the strength of the threat. Brehm's laboratory demonstrations used choices among consumer goods, where an option removed by the experimenter was rated more desirable afterwards than before.

The first well-known field test was less tidy and more memorable. James Pennebaker and Deborah Yates Sanders published "American graffiti: effects of authority and reactance arousal" in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin in 1976. They placed signs in campus restrooms that varied two things at once: how strong the prohibition was, from "do not write on these walls under any circumstances" down to a polite request, and how much authority the signer carried. The amount of graffiti written on the signs themselves rose with both the force of the wording and the authority of the source, which is the pattern reactance predicts and the opposite of what the signs were for.

The warning-label experiments are the modern version. Bushman and Stack's three studies in 1996 set two hypotheses against each other: tainted fruit, under which a warning makes a program less appealing, and forbidden fruit, under which it makes it more appealing. The results went to forbidden fruit in all three. Labels raised interest in violent programs, the effect was strongest when the label came from an authoritative source, people high in trait reactance were most drawn to labeled programs, and warning labels did more than information labels.

What none of these studies tests is the tactic as people use it at home. Each manipulation is a restriction imposed by someone with no standing to impose it, which is the condition reactance theory says matters. A request from a partner or a manager carries a relationship, a reason and a history, and the research does not say what reversing it will do.

The pattern turns up wherever a request removes a choice instead of making a case. The rows below are illustrations, not findings from the studies cited here.

There are two counters here, because there are two positions: being the target of a restriction, and being the person making a request.

• If you feel the pull, separate the option from the instruction. Ask what you would have chosen if nobody had said anything, and write it down before answering.
• Check whether the anger is about the thing or about the telling. Reactance arrives as irritation plus arguments against the message, which says something about the situation rather than the choice.
• If you are making a request, give a reason. A restriction with an explanation threatens the freedom much less than a bare prohibition does.
• Leave a real choice in place. Naming what is still up to the other person is the cheapest way to avoid the reaction entirely.
• Drop the force. The 1976 signs that collected the most graffiti were the ones that said under any circumstances; strong wording buys resistance rather than compliance.
• Do not use the tactic on people you intend to keep. It produces anger alongside the behavior, and it stops working as soon as it is noticed.

This page gives no advice on using reverse psychology with children, and the research cited here was conducted with adults.

Reverse psychology is a tactic. Its neighbors are the state it exploits and the other things that happen when people are pushed.

• It is not reactance, which is the motivational state itself: the pressure to restore a freedom that something has threatened. Reactance is what the tactic tries to recruit, and it arises constantly without anyone intending it.
• It is not the backfire effect, where a correction is said to strengthen the belief it corrects. That concerns evidence about facts, and whether it happens at all is disputed, which is not the case for reactance.
• It is not system justification, the tendency to defend existing arrangements. It runs the other way: reactance pushes against a restriction, system justification finds reasons for it.
• It is not scarcity. An option that is rare or running out gains appeal through its value, while a forbidden option gains appeal through the freedom at stake.