begin to assign it positive qualities to justify the desire. After all, it is
natural to suppose that if one feels drawn to something, it is because
of the merit of the thing. In the case of the Dade County antiphosphate
law—and in other instances of newly restricted availability—that is a
faulty supposition. Phosphate detergents clean, whiten, and pour no
better after they are banned than before. We just assume they do because
we find that we desire them more.
The tendency to want what has been banned and therefore to presume
that it is more worthwhile is not limited to such commodities as laundry
soap. In fact, the tendency is not limited to commodities at all but ex-
tends to restrictions on information. In an age when the ability to ac-
quire, store, and manage information is becoming increasingly the de-
terminant of wealth and power, it is important to understand how we
typically react to attempts to censor or otherwise constrain our access
to information. Although much data exist on our reactions to various
kinds of potentially censorable material—media violence, pornography,
radical political rhetoric—there is surprisingly little evidence as to our
reactions to the act of censoring them. Fortunately, the results of the
few studies that have been done on the topic are highly consistent. Al-
most invariably, our response to the banning of information is a greater
desire to receive that information and a more favorable attitude toward
it than before the ban.^9
The intriguing thing about the effects of censoring information is not
that audience members want to have the information more than they
did before; that seems natural. Rather, it is that they come to believe in
the information more, even though they haven’t received it. For example,
when University of North Carolina students learned that a speech op-
posing coed dorms on campus would be banned, they became more
opposed to the idea of coed dorms. Thus, without ever hearing the
speech, they became more sympathetic to its argument. This raises the
worrisome possibility that especially clever individuals holding a weak
or unpopular position can get us to agree with that position by arranging
to have their message restricted. The irony is that for such
people—members of fringe political groups, for example—the most
effective strategy may not be to publicize their unpopular views, but
to get those views officially censored and then to publicize the censor-
ship. Perhaps the authors of this country’s Constitution were acting as
much as sophisticated social psychologists as staunch civil libertarians
when they wrote the remarkably permissive free-speech provision of
the First Amendment. By refusing to restrain freedom of speech, they
may have been attempting to minimize the chance that new political
Robert B. Cialdini Ph.D / 189