External Control 387is made to feel personally responsible for his or her actions
(Taylor, Peplau, & Sears, 1997). Resistance to authority is
enhanced, moreover, when the resister receives social sup-
port and in situations in which he or she is encouraged to
question the motives, expertise, or judgments of the author-
ity figure (Taylor et al., 1997). It should be reiterated, how-
ever, that legitimate authority serves important social
functions and should not be viewed with a jaundiced eye
only as a necessary evil in the human condition. Policeman,
judges, elected representatives, and school crossing guards
could not perform their duties if their power were not based
on an aura of legitimacy. And as much as teachers like to be
liked and to be seen as experts, their power over students in
the classroom hinges to a large extent on students’ perceiving
them as legitimate authority figures. Even parents, who
wield virtually every other kind of power (reward, coercion,
expertise, information) over their children, must occasion-
ally remind their offspring who is ultimately in charge in
order to exact compliance from them. Obedience to author-
ity, in sum, is pervasive in informal and formal social rela-
tions, and is neither intrinsically good nor intrinsically bad.
Like many features of the human condition, its potential for
good or evil is dependent on the restraint and judgment of
those who exercise it.
Limitations of External Control
If the exercise of power always had its intended effect, both
scholarly and lay interest in social influence would be mini-
mal. Why bother obsessing over something as obvious as the
tendency of people to defer to people in a position to offer
rewards or threaten punishment? Is detailed experimentation
really necessary to figure out why we listen to experts or
model the behavior and attitudes of people we admire? And
what could be more obvious than the observation that we typ-
ically comply with the demands and requests of those who
are perceived as entitled to influence us in this way? Fortu-
nately for social psychologists—and perhaps for intellectu-
ally curious laypeople as well—the story of social influence
does not end with such self-evident conclusions, but rather
unfolds with a far more interesting plotline. There is reason to
think, in fact, that the general approach to influence outlined
previously is among the least effective ways of implementing
true change in people’s thoughts and feelings relevant to the
behavior in question. Indeed, a fair portion of theoretical and
research attention over the last 40 years has focused on the
tendency for heavy-handed efforts at influence to boomerang,
promoting effects opposite to those intended. This is espe-
cially the case for attempted influence that trades on reward
and coercive power, although the assumptions underlying
this line of theory and research would seem to hold true for
legitimate power as well.Psychological ReactanceTo a certain extent, the failure of power-based approaches to
induce change in people’s action preferences can be traced to
the fundamental human conceit noted at the outset. People
want to feel like they are the directors of their own fate (cf.
Deci & Ryan, 1985), and accordingly are sensitive to attempts
by others to diminish this self-perceived role. No one really
likes to be told what to do, and influence attempts that are
seen in this light run the risk of producing resistance rather
than compliance. Reactance theory (J. W. Brehm, 1966; S. S.
Brehm & Brehm, 1981) trades on the assumption that people
like to feel free, specifying how people react when this feel-
ing is undermined. The basic idea is that when personal free-
doms are threatened, people act to reassert their autonomy
and control. Commanding a child not to do something runs
the risk of eliciting anI won’t!rebuttal, for example, or reluc-
tant compliance that disappears as soon as the surveillance is
lifted (e.g., Aronson & Carlsmith, 1963). In effect, all the
bases of power at the parent’s disposal—reward, coercion,
referent, expert, legitimate—pale in comparison to the child’s
distaste for having his or her tacit agreement removed from
the parent-child exchange.
Considerable evidence has been accumulated over the
years in support of the basic tenets of reactance theory (cf.
Burger, 1992). Research by Burger and Cooper (1979), for
example, found that even something as basic and sponta-
neous as humor appreciation is subject to reactance effects.
Male and female college students were asked to rate ten car-
toons in terms of funniness. Some participants rated the
cartoons when alone, but others provided the ratings after re-
ceiving instructions from confederates to give the cartoons
high ratings. Results revealed that pressure by the confeder-
ates tended to backfire, producing funniness ratings lower
than those produced by participants not subject to the pres-
sure. This effect was pronounced among individuals who had
scored high on a preexperimental personality assessment of
need for personal control.
Some studies have produced rather counterintuitive find-
ings that call into question the basis for certain public policy
initiatives. In a study investigating attempts to reduce alco-
hol consumption, for example, participants who received a
strongly worded antidrinking message subsequently drank
more than did those who received a moderately worded mes-
sage (Bensley & Wu, 1991). The strongly worded message
presumably was perceived by participants as a threat to their
personal freedom, to which they reacted by drinking more