Is There Such a Thing as Reverse Psychology?

As little children, we were frequently admonished by our parents to “eat our vegetables.” After the broccoli sits on our plate for a half hour, our exasperated parents decide to take control of the situation. “Fine,” they say. “Don’t eat your vegetables. I bet you can’t finish your plate anyway.” Defiantly, we shove all the vegetables in our mouths, chew, and swallow. It is not that we’re happy we ate the vegetables—more so that we’ve emerged victorious over what we’ve been told not to do. Meanwhile, our parents have actually claimed victory over us using the tactic commonly known as reverse psychology.

Reverse psychology, better known in the psychology literature as strategic self-anticonformity (SSA), is defined as a requestor’s advocacy of a position that is opposite of his or her true position (MacDonald et al. 2011; Nail et al. 2013). Research on reverse psychology, as a compliance technique, is recent in the psychology literature and has been limited to interpersonal communications (MacDonald et al. 2011; Nail et al. 2013). However, a recent trend in marketing promotions expands this notion of reverse psychology to include not only interpersonal communications but also communications to a wider target base. More specifically, marketers have utilized reverse psychology as a way to: (1) promote a product to the entire market, without deliberatively excluding a specific market segment (e.g. Little Caesar’s “Do not call this number” “Do not visit our website” campaign), (2) promote a product to a certain targeted segment while purposefully excluding another (e.g. Dr. Pepper’s “Not for women” campaign), and finally, (3) promote a certain company or brand image (e.g. Patagonia sustainability initiative “Do not buy this jacket”).

Generally, the success of reverse psychology, SSA, as an influence technique is attributed to the source’s ability to conceal the fact that s/he is using a persuasion tactic (MacDonald et al. 2011; Nail et al. 2013), and his or her knowledge of the expected negativity, contradiction and disagreeableness from the influence target (MacDonald et al. 2011). The expected negativity, disagreeableness and contradiction is akin to the concept of psychological reactance, which suggests that if an individual’s freedom is reduced or threatened, he or she will be motivated to reestablish the lost freedom (Brehm 1966).

The purpose of this research is further the understanding of reverse psychology as a persuasion technique (MacDonald et al. 2011; Nail et al. 2013). Specifically, we would like to examine when and why reverse psychology can be used effectively or ineffectively as a persuasion technique? How does framing play into the effectiveness of the persuasion attempt? And finally, how does reactance to a specific reverse psychology attempt affect behavioral intentions, attitude towards the behavior and pass-along rate? By understanding this persuasion technique, we hope to extend it to marketing promotions.