8.5 Resistance to Persuasion

Television shows such as American Idol use product placement to advertise their corporate sponsors.
[FOX via Getty Images]

Throughout this book, we have discussed how, as motivated animals, people are far from objective consumers of information. Rather, we filter information through our own preconceptions and biases. These motivated biases give us a measure of resistance when we encounter persuasion attempts that conflict with our preexisting beliefs (Lord et al., 1979).

Further, when we’re exposed to mixed evidence on a given issue, we often will focus on the information that supports, and as a consequence bolsters, our preexisting beliefs (Pyszczynski & Greenberg, 1987). This helps us to understand why it can be so hard to convince people of something they are set against. Just think about the resistance that scientists encounter when arguing to some government officials that the mounting evidence for global climate change reflects poorly on the future viability of life as we know it. Of course, in many situations, we may not have strong preexisting beliefs that arm us with skepticism about persuasive appeals. Nonetheless, resistance is not always futile. But successfully resisting persuasion depends on a few factors: We need to know what to resist, be motivated to resist it, and have strategies that will be effective.

Knowing What to Resist

In Steven Spielberg’s classic film, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, a boy named Elliott tries to lure an alien from a hiding place by laying out a trail of Reese’s Pieces. Shortly after the release of this blockbuster movie in 1982, sales for these delectable chocolate-covered peanut-butter snacks boomed. This is an especially popular example of the widespread advertising technique of product placement in TV shows and movies (York, 2001), which capitalizes on our tendency to be influenced by what we see in the media. If you are a fan of the TV show American Idol, you might recall seeing the judges drinking Coca-Cola. These famous musicians and celebrities might well be Coke fans, but their decision to consume this particular brand of soda on the show is far from a coincidence. The influence of watching celebrities or other TV or movie characters use a product extends not just to certain snack food and beverages but also to behavior that can be downright deadly. For example, the more children see movies where grownups smoke, the more positive their attitudes are toward smoking and the more likely they are to start smoking (Sargent et al., 2002; Wills et al., 2008).

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Product placement works for a number of reasons. These images make the product accessible and lead us to associate positive feelings with that product, particularly when we identify with the character using the product. Indeed, research on smoking finds the more people identify with the character smoking, the more likely they are to develop positive associations with smoking (Dal Cin et al., 2007). Placing particular products in movies also is an especially effective form of advertising because people most often do not realize they are being targeted with a persuasive appeal. Recall our discussion earlier in this chapter about source credibility and persuasive intent. If you are unaware that you’re the target of persuasion, there is little resistance for advertisers to overcome, and so positive attitudes toward the product are free to develop.

But the effectiveness of product placement also gives us an important insight about factors opposing persuasion. If we’re aware that a persuasive appeal is coming our way, we’re better able to deflect its impact. In fact, such knowledge arouses motivations and cognitions that not only bolster our ability to withstand a persuasive message but can actually provoke us to do the very opposite of what the would-be persuader is trying to get us to do.

Being Motivated to Resist

As we’ve noted, persuasion can come from many sources. Our parents, for example, often try to persuade us to act in accord with cultural values. This socialization process is a vital ingredient in the recipe for a smooth functioning society. But sometimes our parents also impose their own idiosyncratic, maybe outdated, preferences on how we style our hair, or what we wear, or whom we date. Perhaps you’ve had the experience of introducing your parents to your new boyfriend or girlfriend, only to face a later barrage of “I forbid you to see that person!” comments. Did those admonitions increase or decrease your attraction to the new boyfriend? If your experiences are similar to those of many research participants, chances are that your parents’ restrictions backfired. The Romeo and Juliet effect shows that parental opposition to a relationship partner is typically associated with deeper romantic love for that partner (Driscoll et al., 1972). The more our parents say “no way,” the more we often say “yes way.”

Why is forbidden fruit so much more tempting? Jack Brehm’s (1966; Brehm & Brehm, 1981) seminal psychological reactance theory explains why forceful, demanding efforts to compel obedience, compliance, or persuasive attitude change can backfire. This theory is based on the assumption that people have certain free behaviors, a set of things they believe they have the right and the capability to do. For example, when in high school you may have felt the freedom to be able to go to college. This would be an example of a free behavior. When people sense that their freedom to pursue such a behavior is threatened, they experience an uncomfortable emotional state, called reactance, that they are motivated to reduce. People often try to reduce reactance by performing the threatened behavior and thus restoring their sense of freedom. In fact, the motivation to reduce reactance can be so strong that it leads people to act aggressively against the person threatening their freedom (see FIGURE 8.11).

Psychological reactance theory

Theory proposing that people value thinking and acting freely. Therefore, situations that threaten their freedom arouse discomfort and prompt efforts to restore freedom.

FIGURE 8.11

Reactance
When our freedoms are threatened, we experience reactance and engage in behavior to reassert our independence.

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Think ABOUT

One of the most interesting implications of reactance theory is that even if a particular behavior doesn’t much appeal to a person, if she perceives it as something she has the right to do, when her ability to engage in the behavior is threatened, her interest in engaging in that behavior increases. If you have young kids, siblings, or babysit, you can readily observe this firsthand. Pick out an action figure that has been gathering dust in the child’s closet. Tell the kid that he can’t play with that particular toy, and watch that neglected action figure become his favorite that he wants to play with above all else. Have you ever tried your hand at the popular notion of reverse psychology, whereby you tell someone to do something in the hope that they’ll do the opposite? If so, you’ve taken advantage of reactance and how people respond to it. How did it turn out?

In one of the first demonstrations of reactance, Brehm and colleagues (1966) invited students to participate in a study on marketing musical recordings. The students rated a few sample recordings and were told that they would receive one of the records as a gift. (Yes, if the study were done today it would likely be an iTunes download.) In one condition, participants were told that they would get to choose whichever record they wanted. In another condition, participants were also given the opportunity to choose, but the options were rigged so that the participants were told that their third-rated record inadvertently had been excluded from the shipment and was unavailable. Thus, in this condition, a restriction was placed on the participants’ freedom to choose what they wanted. All subjects were then asked again to indicate their ratings of the different musical samples, and it was these changed attitudes that revealed reactance. Among subjects who were given a choice but denied the freedom to choose their third most highly rated selection, 67 percent increased their ratings of this selection, compared with 42 percent of participants’ increasing their rating of this record when they had no restriction on their freedom.

So we can think about reactance as pushback against attempts to restrict our freedom to have, do, or think what we want. The amount of pushback depends on how important that freedom is to us as well as how forceful the threat is. If going to your current college or university was particularly important to you, but your parents wanted you to go to another school, there is a good chance that you may have experienced strong feelings of reactance if your parents tried to direct your decision. However, if where you went to school was not a particularly important freedom for you, then you would not have experienced much reactance if your parents tried to restrict that freedom.

Looking at reactance from the cultural perspective, we find that culture plays a big role in determining the importance people place on freedom, whose freedoms are most important, and thus how strong their reactance is. In our discussion of cultural variation in chapter 2, we saw that individual agency and a sense of personal freedom are more important to people in Western, individualistic cultures. A sense of group harmony is more important to those from collectivistic cultures, and as a result, reactance might play out differently for people from such cultures. In a study testing this idea, when European American students (who tend to value individualism) were asked to imagine trading their parking passes for a week in exchange for passes to less accessible parking locations, they showed more reactance when thinking about this limitation on their personal freedom than when thinking about the limitation on the freedom of their fellow students. In contrast, when Asian and Latin Americans (who tend to value collectivism) were presented with a similar appeal, they showed more reactance when the freedom of their fellow students was threatened than when their own freedom was (Jonas et al., 2009).

This study makes a couple of important points. It not only demonstrates the cross-cultural ubiquity of reactance but also shows how the nature of the freedom, and how much people value it, influences the amount of reactance people experience.

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APPLICATION: Reactance in Jury Decision Making

APPLICATION:
Reactance in Jury Decision Making

This research on reactance can be applied to a fairly common occurrence in jury trials. Consider the following scenario, which you’re likely to have seen in any episode of Law and Order or another such courtroom drama. As a witness faces intense questioning from the opposing attorney, he blurts out some off-limits comment about the defendant’s prior criminal record. The judge quickly intervenes, declaring, “The jury is to disregard that testimony.” When framed in terms of reactance theory, this directive can be viewed as an attempt to restrict what you are allowed to think about. And in light of what you now know about reactance, you won’t be surprised to learn that such instructions often backfire and produce a boomerang effect (Lieberman & Arndt, 2000).

In an experiment by Wolf and Montgomery (1977), mock jurors were presented with a simulated trial in which specific testimony was ruled either admissible or inadmissible. An important aspect of the inadmissible conditions was that the ruling was accompanied by a weak or a strong admonition. The weak admonition simply instructed the jurors not to consider that testimony, whereas the strong admonition declared, “I want to remind you that the testimony… was ruled inadmissible. Therefore, it must play no role in your consideration of the case. You have no choice but to disregard it” (p. 211). After considering other testimony and arguments, the mock jurors were asked to give their verdicts. Participants receiving a strong admonition actually were more influenced by the inadmissible evidence than participants in either the weak-admonition condition or the admissible control condition. Thus, forceful instructions to ignore information may arouse reactance, leading jurors to reestablish their freedom by more heavily weighing precisely the information they have been told to disregard.

How, then, can you undermine reactance and prevent it from disrupting your efforts to persuade little Johnny that it’s time to stop playing with the superhero action figure? One way to undermine reactance is through the characteristics of the person doing the persuading. In one study, researchers manipulated whether the person doing the persuading was similar to the participant by giving the persuader the same first name and birthday as half of the participants (Silvia, 2005). The other participants were faced with a persuader who did not have the same name and birthday. When the persuader was highly similar to the participants, they agreed strongly with the message that was delivered, regardless of a strong or a weak threat to their decision freedom. This occurred because the similar persuader was liked more (and therefore was viewed as less of a threat). This increased the force toward persuasion and decreased the force toward reactance.

Resisting Strategically: Attitude Inoculation

Think about what people do to protect themselves from a virus. A weak dose of a virus is administered in the form of a vaccination. The dose is strong enough to trigger the body’s production of resistant antibodies but weak enough that it does not overwhelm the body’s resistance. The body more effectively can marshal defenses to ward off stronger exposure to the virus that may come later.

William McGuire (1964) applied the logic of vaccination against disease in a method to increase resistance to persuasion. He was inspired by the alarming decision of nine U.S. Army prisoners to remain with their captors in the aftermath of the Korean War, and the popular theory that they must have been brainwashed. He reasoned that, prior to their capture, the soldiers had rarely if ever been exposed to anticapitalist or procommunist arguments. Therefore, they were unprepared and had no ready defenses or counterarguments when their North Korean captors launched their persuasive attack. This led McGuire to the idea of attitude inoculation as a strategy that enables people to resist persuasion. The basic idea behind attitude inoculation is that exposing people to weak forms of a persuasive argument, much like inoculating people with a small amount of a virus, should motivate them to produce the cognitive equivalent of antibodies—that is, counterarguments—against this weakly advocated position. When later exposed to strong forms of the persuasive attempt, people already possess the motivation and counterarguments to use in their defense and thus more effectively resist the persuasive appeal.

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McGuire and Papageorgis (1961) initially tested the idea of attitude inoculation by studying how people fend off challenges to cultural truisms, beliefs that people accept without questioning them. For example, most people are told and typically unquestioningly believe that the effects of penicillin have been, almost without exception, of great benefit to humanity.

How do people respond when their truisms are called into question? The researchers inoculated some participants by exposing them to weak arguments against these truisms (“Vaccination shots can cause bleeding or infection”) along with counterarguments. Two days later, these and other participants (not previously exposed to the weak arguments) were presented with stronger, logically based arguments that the truisms were not in fact true (“A substantial minority of people have potentially dangerous allergic reactions to penicillin”). Participants who had previously been exposed to the weak arguments were less persuaded by the stronger arguments than those who were not exposed to this inoculation.

Since this initial research, attitude inoculation has been widely studied across a variety of domains, such as politics, advertising, and health care, and has been shown to be a potent means of strengthening resistance to persuasion (Wan & Pfau, 2004). As McGuire originally suggested, when exposed to a weak form of an argument, people tend to generate counterarguments that act like barriers around their initial attitudes, making it harder for a stronger persuasive attempt encountered later to influence their attitudes. This occurs in part because these initial counterarguments make the opposing attitude more accessible (Pfau et al., 2003). As we’ll soon see, accessible attitudes have a stronger influence on judgments and behavior.

But some forms of attitude inoculation work better than others. More specifically, the power of inoculation is greater when people play an active role in generating counterarguments (Bernard et al., 2003). In one study (Banerjee & Greene, 2007), junior high students participated in one of two workshops on resisting smoking advertisements or in a third group that did not participate in a workshop. In both of the resistance workshops, students discussed and analyzed antismoking ads. But one workshop went further, encouraging students to create their own antismoking ads. Although both workshop groups were effective in reducing students’ intentions to smoke, the group of students who also created their own ads (and thus their own counterarguments) showed the lowest intentions to start smoking.

Thus, one of the catchphrases used to summarize the literature on resistance to persuasion is “Forewarned is forearmed.” When we know persuasion is going to attack, we can better arm ourselves. However, a number of interesting consequences can stem from these efforts. Some bode well for our ability to process and reason about persuasion attempts more carefully; others, however, offer a less optimistic forecast.

Consequences of Forewarning

Recognizing Legitimate Appeals

Forewarnings about persuasion can improve our ability to process incoming information accurately. Whereas inoculation gives us a taste of the arguments a would-be persuader will use so that we can better resist them, other types of forewarning give us other tools to pierce the deceptions we may confront as the target of a persuasion attempt. This can help us to not only resist persuasion that relies on deceiving us but can also make us more open to legitimate appeals. This is important because sometimes people try to persuade us to do things that are good for us, and it behooves us to listen to such messages with an open mind.

FIGURE 8.12

Knowledge Is Power
When participants in this study were trained to spot deceptive advertising tactics, they were less persuaded by testimonials given by actors (illegitimate authorities) than were control participants not given this training. They were also more persuaded than untrained participants by testimonials given by legitimate authorities.
[Data source: Sagarin et al. (2002)]

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This receptivity is evident in research by Sagarin and colleagues (2002). They trained some of their participants to be suspicious of advertisers’ manipulative intent. For example, students were taught clues to diagnose whether a spokesperson in a television commercial is an actual expert or just a model posing as an expert. (“Is that an actor pretending to be a doctor or an actual doctor promoting a brand of pain-reliever?”) Other participants were not given this training. Then all subjects were presented with a series of persuasive appeals by both legitimate and illegitimate authorities and were asked to indicate how much they agreed with the position advocated by the authority presented in the commercial.

As you can see in FIGURE 8.12, those participants who were given the training were not only more resistant to deceptive persuasion (i.e., when the authority was not actually an authority, such as a model dressed as a stockbroker pitching the Wall Street Journal) but also were more likely to be persuaded by commercials by legitimate authorities (e.g., the president of a financial institution pitching an investment fund). Importantly, subsequent studies showed that these skills can last. When participants were given the training and were exposed to commercials a week later, they still were more discriminating.

This research makes two critical points. First, people are most likely to resist persuasion when (a) their motivation to resist is increased (i.e., by being told that advertisers will try to deceive them); and (b) when given the means to do so (i.e., strategies for recognizing illegitimate authorities). Second, when people are armed with the means to resist persuasion, they are also more open to appeals by legitimate authorities.

Making the Effort to Resist

Finally, as much as we might want to resist persuasion in certain contexts, we should recognize that it takes cognitive effort to do so. Recall from chapter 6 our discussion of self-regulatory depletion. People’s ability to control their thoughts, desires, and intentions is a limited resource. Much like a physical muscle, this ability can be strengthened with exercise but also can be weakened with repeated use. As a form of self-control, resistance to persuasion falls prey to the processes of self-regulatory depletion.

Burkley (2008) examined this connection in a few different ways. In one study, students had to squeeze a handgrip exerciser continuously for either a short or a long time. They were then exposed to an argument for shortening summer vacation to only one month. Obviously this argument advocated a position with which most students would not agree. Yet those students who engaged in continuous handgrip activity were more persuaded by the argument than those who did not. This shows that when people have expended their self-regulatory resources (focusing on squeezing the hand grip), they are less able to resist persuasion. Further, in another study, when all students were presented with such arguments (or not) and then asked to squeeze the hand grip, those who resisted the appeal were unable to squeeze the handgrip for as long as those who did not resist persuasion.

These findings show that although resistance to persuasion and physical exertion seem like unrelated tasks, they draw on the same supply of self-regulatory resources. When people deplete that supply by expending physical energy, they have fewer resources left over to resist persuasion, and vice versa. On a considerably more dramatic scale, we see such effects in various forms of intense indoctrination or interviewing, from police interrogation to more unsavory tactics of torture. The subjects may be deprived of basic sustenance needs such as food or sleep in an effort to wear them down, that is, to fatigue them to the point that they will be more open to the examiner’s questions. This can be considered the ultimate way of breaking down resistance to persuasion, paving the way for changing someone’s attitude.

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SECTION review: Resistance to Persuasion

Resistance to Persuasion

Resistance is not always futile.

Awareness

If we’re aware of a persuasive appeal, we’re better able to resist it.

Motivation

Reactance theory explains why people resist persuasion attempts that infringe on their freedom.

Culture influences how much people value freedom, and thus how strongly they react to persuasion attempts.

Inoculation

As with a vaccine, people can build up resistance by defending themselves against weaker arguments first.

Consequences of Forewarning

Given the motivation and the means to resist opens people’s minds to legitimate appeals.

Resistance takes cognitive effort that can be depleted.