You're probably familiar with reverse psychology: it's when you try to get someone to do something by telling them to do the opposite.
In theory people don't like to have their freedom restricted so they rebel. But what does the psychological research tell us? Do people really react to restrictions on their freedom by wanting the restricted object more?
Under some circumstances, the answer is yes, as these two experiments demonstrate:
Warning labels can have the same perverse effect:"...two-year-olds who are told not to play with a particular toy suddenly find that toy more appealing. [...] Students who are told they have their choice of five posters, but then are told one of them is not available suddenly like that one more..." (from the excellent textbook Social Psychology and Human Nature)
The idea is that when you are told you can't have or do something, the following three things happen:"...warning labels on violent television programs across five age groups (ranging from 9 to 21 years and over) were more likely to attract persons in these groups to the violent program than information labels and no label." (Chadee, 2011)
- You want it more.
- You rebel by reasserting your freedom.
- You feel angry at the person restricting your freedom.
Forbidden fruit
Reverse psychology works best with people who are contrary or resistant. In contrast agreeable people are likely to go along with you anyway so you don't need to use it.
Watch out, though, people hate being manipulated. If they sense you are trying to get them to do something by telling them to do the opposite, a form of reverse reverse psychology may operate. So they end up doing what you tell them, just to spite your attempts to control them.
Reverse psychology is a tricky customer both in real life and in the psych lab. Researchers have found it difficult to pin down exactly when reverse psychology works and when it doesn't. Here are a few factors likely to increase psychological reactance:
- The more attractive and important the option that's being restricted, the greater the psychological reactance.
- The greater the restriction of freedom, the greater the psychological reactance.
- Arbitrary threats produce high reactance because they don't make sense, which makes people more rebellious.
It is a form of attention re-director.
I do not recommend using "reverse psychology" on people in order to control them. Try to get them to talk about what they have their attention on, then help them free their stuck attention by directing it to other things in their environment.
People tend to focus their attention on things they think are wrong or unjust. It relates to the emotional response you get from being prevented from doing something, or when you do something you would expect to be prevented from doing.
Stuck attention is also related to how easy someone is to hypnotize. Hypnosis usually relies on the fixing of attention.
Free attention is a form of spiritual freedom and is worth cultivating, and helping others to achieve.
A person with lots of free attention will look at a restriction or sudden change in the rules of the game and simply decide whether to continue in the game or bail out.
Oddly, not having attention on something doesn't necessarily mean that you won't have the opportunity to communicate with it; usually the opposite. Since attention tends to focus on points of no communication, the fact of no communication tends to become more real for someone who has a lot of attention on something. Someone with a lot of free attention, on the other hand, tends to pull in people and things to communicate with.
If you are an older person, you can usually demonstrate this to yourself by comparing how many close friends you had before you thought friends were hard to find with after. As a person gets older, one tends to fix attention on losses, which only makes it harder to win!