388 Social Influence and Group Dynamics
rather than less in an effort to assert their sense of control.
Findings such as these cast into doubt the wisdom of the Just
say nomantra of many contemporary drug education pro-
grams aimed at young people. The slogan itself may promote
the very behavior it is intended to discourage, because it rep-
resents a rather direct short-circuiting of targets’ personal
decision-making machinery. There is evidence, in fact, that
theJust say noapproach has backfired in some instances,
producing increased rather than decreased consumption of
illegal substances—although it is not entirely clear that this
effect is due primarily to reactance (Donaldson, Graham,
Piccinin, & Hansen, 1995).
The experience of psychological reactance is not limited to
influence techniques that trade on power per se. Indeed, the
concern with protecting one’s self-perceived freedom can cur-
tail the effectiveness of any influence attempt that is seen as
such. The use of flattery to seduce a target into a new course of
action, for example, can backfire if the target is aware—or
simply suspicious—that the flattery is being strategically em-
ployed for manipulative purposes (e.g., Jones & Wortman,
1973). Indeed, any attempt to gain influence over another per-
son by becoming attractive to him or her runs a serious risk of
failure if the attempted ingratiation is transparent to the per-
son. Jones (1964) has referred to this stumbling block to inter-
personal influence as the “ingratiator’s dilemma.” Normally,
we like to hear compliments, to have others agree with our
opinions, and to interact with people who are desirable by
some criterion. As intrinsically rewarding as these experi-
ences are, they also make us correspondingly vulnerable to re-
quests and other forms of influence from the people in
question. When their compliments become obsequious or if
their desirability is buttressed by a little too much name-
dropping, we become suspicious that they are playing on this
vulnerability with a particular agenda in mind. The result is
resistance rather than assent to their subsequent requests, even
requests that might otherwise seem quite reasonable.
Reactance, in short, is a pervasive human tendency that
sets clear limits on the effectiveness of all manner of social
influence. Power-based forms of influence are particularly
vulnerable to reactance effects, not only because they are
linked to a restriction of freedom for targets, but also because
they tend to be explicit and thus transparent to targets. Letting
someone know that you are trying to influence him or her is a
decidedly poor strategy—unless, of course, your real goal is
to get him or her to do the opposite.
Reverse Incentive Effects
Twentieth-century social psychology is a story of two seem-
ingly incompatible perspectives on human nature. For the
first half of the century, social psychology accepted as
received wisdom the notion that the behavior of organisms,
humans included, is ultimately under the control of external
reinforcement. The mindless S-R models invoked by radical
behaviorists may not have been most theorists’ cup of tea, but
no one seriously challenged the assumption that contingen-
cies of positive and negative reinforcement play a pervasive
role in shaping people’s psychological development as well
as their specific behavior in different contexts. People’s con-
cern over personal freedom was certainly recognized by
social psychologists, but more often than not this penchant
was considered an independent force that competed with re-
inforcement for the hearts and minds of people in their daily
lives. Thus, people struggled to control their impulses, resist
temptation, delay gratification, and maintain their dignity in
the face of incentives to do otherwise.
After mid-century, something akin to a phase transition
began to take place in social psychology. Fueled in large part
by an emerging emphasis on the importance of cognitive me-
diation, theory and research began to question the imperial
role of rewards and punishments in shaping personal and in-
terpersonal behavior. People’s latent preoccupation with self-
determination, for example, came to be seen not simply as a
force that competed with reinforcement, but rather as a con-
cern that was activatedby explicit reinforcement contingen-
cies (cf. de Charms, 1968; Deci & Ryan, 1985). Thus, the
awareness of a contingency was said to sensitize people to
the potential loss of self-determination if they were to adjust
their behavior in accordance with the contingency. In effect,
awareness of a contingent relation between behavior and re-
ward weakened the power of the contingency, leaving the de-
sire for self-determination the dominant casual force. This
reasoning, of course, is consistent with the assumptions of
reactance theory, described above. The dethroning of rein-
forcement theory, however, went far beyond a recognition of
people’s need for autonomy, freedom, and the like. Two
major perspectives in particular captured the academic spot-
light for extended periods of time, and today they still stand
as basic insights into human motivation—including motiva-
tion relevant to social influence.
The first of these, cognitive dissonance theory (Festinger,
1957), sparked psychologists’ imagination in large part
because of its seemingly counterintuitive take on the role of
rewards in shaping thought and behavior. The essence of the
theory is a purported drive for consistency in people’s
thoughts and feelings regarding a course of action. When
inconsistency arises, it is experienced as aversive arousal,
which motivates efforts to eliminate or at least reduce the
inconsistency so as to reestablish affective equilibrium. This
sounds straightforward enough, but under the right conditions