Psychological Reactance

Psychological reactance is an unpleasant motivational and emotional arousal that emerges when a person perceives that one of their free behaviors is being threatened with restriction or elimination, driving them to act in ways aimed at restoring that lost or threatened freedom. The psychologist Jack Brehm developed reactance theory in 1966, and his later work with Sharon Brehm formalized the framework still used today. The theory identifies a chain of elements: a person must first perceive that a freedom exists, then experience a threat to that freedom, which triggers reactance as an emotional and motivational response, which in turn drives an attempt to reclaim the threatened autonomy. The intensity of the reaction depends on how important the threatened freedom is to the person, what proportion of a person's freedoms are threatened at once, and how severe the threat itself is. Reactance commonly produces a boomerang effect, in which heavy-handed persuasion attempts, censorship, or blunt warnings against a behavior paradoxically increase a person's interest in or attraction to exactly what was restricted, an outcome that underlies the deliberate technique of reverse psychology and has been proposed as a driver of the so-called Streisand effect, in which attempts to suppress information cause it to spread more widely instead.