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*Everything* in psychology has a cognitive dissonance angle.
Like, I'm reading up on Reactance right now, where we humans will lose our shit if we think a freedom is being taken from us. BUT, not if it's temporary or justified.
That's dissonance happening right there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reactance_(psychology)
That's dissonance happening right there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reactance_(psychology)
This is exactly the same as when subjects were asked to lie about their opinion for money, and the subjects given $20 remembered the lie and their original opinion, but those only given $1 replaced their original opinion with the lie.
That is, if we're given believable justification for our loss of freedom (like having to wear a mask to protect others from Covid), then we're cool with it. Our dissonance is resolved and we don't turn into freedom-fighting monsters.
But when we're given no justification (or we think the justification is fake news), then we show up at covid parties and lick one another, just to prove we can.
That reaction, covid protests and rude mask behavior, are all assertions of a sense of lost freedom. It is resolving the dissonance through actions.
The technical term for this is Reactance, but it is just as easily described by dissonance theory.
This paper is more interesting (and readable) than the Wikipedia article on Reactance. Explains a lot about a lot. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4675534/
Yeah, see, good, psychologists agree with me.
"Psychological reactance theory was born out of the tradition of cognitive inconsistency theories, and more specifically, out of cognitive dissonance theory." From a literature review:
https://scholar.dominican.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1002&context=psychology-faculty-scholarship
"Psychological reactance theory was born out of the tradition of cognitive inconsistency theories, and more specifically, out of cognitive dissonance theory." From a literature review:
https://scholar.dominican.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1002&context=psychology-faculty-scholarship
I make a halfway decent half-assed armchair academic.
In fact, the author of Reactance theory studied under Festinger, the author of Dissonance theory, and helped with the early research.
Haha this paper used the term "threatening agent" and I was like, wait, is psychological reactance a cyber attack??
(In social engineering terms, it actually can be.)
(In social engineering terms, it actually can be.)
In fact, reading this I'm thinking of the Second Amendment fanatics and seeing how Psychological Reactance is being intentionally drummed up in them to get them to support corrupt actors.
It only takes a *threat* to freedom to trigger reactance. Telling people that the Democrats are gonna take their guns is mashing that button harder than I do when playing twitchy fighting games.
That said, it works on our side of politics, too, and I'm biased because I see Reactance as a hopeful mechanism when it comes to *our* freedoms being taken away.
Reactance basically says that you can't take away people's freedoms without a fight.
Now I'm thinking of Reactance in terms of a [cn: domestic abuse] situation. In terms of my own situation, I willingly gave up freedoms because I 1) wasn't totally conscious of the loss, and 2) I was getting something that seemed better in exchange. It felt like a choice.
BUT, I'm thinking of times when I felt like my freedom of choice was being threatened, and I did react quite strongly. This was the source of many of our worse and/or longest-running fights.
His attempts to soften or disguise the loss of freedom started to wane towards the end, in the Discard phase, and my Reactance during this phase was quite high.
Pretty interesting to think about.
Pretty interesting to think about.
I'm getting to the part in the literature review that mentions learned helplessness. That's what happens when the reactance fails as a resistance mechanism and the subject simply gives up the fight.
Reactance studies have had an impact on therapy methods. When clients feel they have no choices, therapeutic methods are resisted and thus, far less effective. Most therapists today provide client-directed care.
I wonder how this concept fits in with the idea of authoritarian-type personalities. I wonder if studies have been done on that intersection.
"These studies typically contrast two types of messages: controlling (e.g., “must,” “ought,” “should,”) and autonomy-supportive (e.g., “perhaps,” “possibly,” “maybe...”)"
Students seeing anti-drinking messages with the former language were more likely to drink.
Students seeing anti-drinking messages with the former language were more likely to drink.
This is interesting based on the trend in liberal (anti-authoritarian) culture to move away from "shoulds" and replace them with softer language. Perhaps (see??) this is our superpower?
The studies on "how to not trigger reactance when trying to persuade" section starts on page 13. There's a part in there I'm going to quote:
"In a complementary investigation, Richards & Banas theorized that exposing participants to a pre-message warning that they might experience reactance..would decrease reactance to an ensuing target message, resulting in increased persuasion." They were right.
So basically, if you tell people about reactance, then hand them a leaflet against college binge drinking, the leaflet will be unpersuasive, and they go off drinking anyway.
The short summary of this section is, if you want to manipulate people, just tell them that their freedoms are being threatened.
Honestly, I wish this literature review (Rosenberg and Seigel) were the Wikipedia article. Like, it just needs some clean-up to make some sections in more clear language. But it is thorough and full of lots of interesting stuff.
Jumping from an actual paper back to Wikipedia is a trip. I'm reading sentences over and over, wondering if "that word" is even supposed to be used that way, and totally giving up on trying to understand it.
