committing themselves more firmly to the partnership and falling more
deeply in love? According to a study done with 140 Colorado couples,
that is exactly what they do. In fact, the researchers found that although
parental interference was linked to some problems in the relation-
ship—the partners viewed one another more critically and reported a
greater number of negative behaviors in the other—that interference
also made the pair feel greater love and desire for marriage. During the
course of the study, as parental interference intensified, so did the love
experience; and when the interference weakened, romantic feelings
actually cooled.^7
Although the Romeo and Juliet effect among modern teenagers may
seem cute—to outside observers—other manifestations of teenage re-
actance can prove tragic. For more than a decade, the major message
of a massive advertising campaign for Virginia Slims cigarettes has
been that today’s women “have come a long way” from the old days
when they were required by social norms to be subdued, proper, and
ladylike. No longer, imply these ads, should a woman have to feel
bound by chauvinistic and outmoded constraints on her independence
and, pointedly, on her freedom to smoke cigarettes. Has the message
been successful in triggering defiance of the old strictures among the
target audience? One dismaying statistic suggests a lamentable answer:
During the lengthy duration of this campaign, the percentage of cigarette
smokers has risen in only one U.S. demographic group—teenage wo-
men.
For twos and teens, then, psychological reactance flows across the
broad surface of experience, always turbulent and forceful. For most
of the rest of us, the pool of reactant energy lies quiet and covered,
erupting geyserlike only on occasion. Still, these eruptions manifest
themselves in a variety of fascinating ways that are of interest not only
to the student of human behavior but to lawmakers and policymakers
as well.
For instance, there’s the odd case of Kennesaw, Georgia, the town
that enacted a law requiring every adult resident to own a gun and
ammunition, under penalty of six months in jail and a two-hundred-
dollar fine. All the features of the Kennesaw gun law make it a prime
target for psychological reactance: The freedom that the law restricts is
an important, long-standing one to which most American citizens feel
entitled. Furthermore, the law was passed by the Kennesaw City
Council with a minimum of public input. Reactance theory would
predict that under these circumstances few of the adults in the town of
fifty-four hundred would obey. Yet newspaper reports testified that
three to four weeks after passage of the law, firearms sales in Kennesaw
were—no pun intended—booming.
Robert B. Cialdini Ph.D / 187