such an examination, though, it would be helpful to know when people
first show the desire to fight against restrictions of their freedoms.
Child psychologists have traced the tendency back to the start of the
third year of life—a year independently identified as a problem by
parents and widely known to them as “the terrible twos.” Most parents
can attest to the development of a decidedly more contrary style in their
children around this period. Two-year-olds seem masters of the art of
resistance to outside, especially parental, pressure: Tell them one thing,
they do the opposite; give them one toy, they want another; pick them
up against their will, they wriggle and squirm to be put down; put them
down against their will, they claw and struggle to be carried.
One Virginia-based study nicely captured the terrible twos style
among boys who averaged twenty-four months in age. The boys accom-
panied their mothers into a room containing two equally attractive toys.
The toys were always arranged so that one stood next to a transparent
Plexiglas barrier and the other stood behind the barrier. For some of
the boys, the Plexiglas sheet was only a foot tall—forming no real bar-
rier to the toy behind, since the boys could easily reach over the top.
For the other boys, however, the Plexiglas was two feet tall, effectively
blocking the boys’ access to one toy unless they went around the barrier.
The researchers wanted to see how quickly the toddlers would make
contact with the toys under these conditions. Their findings were clear.
When the barrier was too small to restrict access to the toy behind it,
the boys showed no special preference for either of the toys; on the av-
erage, the toy next to the barrier was touched just as quickly as the one
behind. But when the barrier was big enough to be a true obstacle, the
boys went directly to the obstructed toy, making contact with it three
times faster than with the unobstructed toy. In all, the boys in this study
demonstrated the classic terrible twos’ response to a limitation of their
freedom: outright defiance.^5
Why should psychological reactance emerge at the age of two? Per-
haps the answer has to do with a crucial change that most children go
through around this time. It is then that they first come to a full recog-
nition of themselves as individuals. No longer do they view themselves
as mere extensions of the social milieu but rather as identifiable, singu-
lar, and separate.^6 This developing concept of autonomy brings naturally
with it the concept of freedom. An independent being is one with
choices; and a child with the newfound realization that he or she is such
a being will want to explore the length and breadth of the options.
Perhaps we should be neither surprised nor distressed, then, when our
two-year-olds strain incessantly against our will. They have come to a
recent and exhilarating perspective on themselves as free-standing hu-
man entities. Vital questions of volition, entitlements, and control now
Robert B. Cialdini Ph.D / 185