Influence: Science and Practice (48 page)

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The occurrence of the Romeo and Juliet effect should not be interpreted as a warning to parents to be always accepting of their teenagers’ romantic choices. New players at this delicate game are likely to err often and, consequently, would benefit from the direction of an adult with greater perspective and experience. In providing such direction, parents should recognize that teenagers, who see themselves as young adults, will not respond well to control attempts that are typical of parent-child relationships. Especially in the clearly adult arena of mating, adult tools of influence (preference and persuasion) will be more effective than traditional forms of parental control (prohibitions and punishments). Although the experience of the Montague and Capulet families is an extreme example, heavy-handed restrictions on a young romantic alliance may well turn it clandestine, torrid, and sad.

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 (Ruback & Juieng, 1997). 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 $200 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, longstanding 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 5,400 would obey. Yet, the newspaper reports testified that three to four weeks after passage of the law, firearms sales in Kennesaw were—no pun intended—booming.

How are we to make sense of this apparent contradiction of the reactance principle? The answer is by looking a bit closer at those who were buying Kennesaw’s guns. Interviews with Kennesaw store owners revealed that the gun buyers were not town residents at all, but visitors, many of them lured by publicity to purchase their initial guns in Kennesaw. Donna Green, proprietor of a shop described in one newspaper article as a virtual “grocery store of firearms,” summed it up: “Business is great. But they’re almost all being bought up by people from out of town. We’ve only had two or three local people buy a gun to comply with the law.” After passage of the law, then, gun buying had become a frequent activity in Kennesaw, but not among those it was intended to cover; they were massively noncompliant. Only those individuals whose freedom in the matter had not been restricted by the law had the inclination to live by it.

READER’S REPORT 7.2
From a Blacksburg, Virginia, Woman

Last Christmas I met a 27-year-old man. I was 19. Although he really wasn’t my type, I went out with him—probably because it was a status thing to date an older man—but I really didn’t become interested in him until my folks expressed their concern about his age. The more they got on my case about it, the more in love I became. It only lasted five months, but this was about four months longer than it would have lasted if my parents hadn’t said anything.

Author’s note:
Although Romeo and Juliet have long since passed away, it appears that the
Romeo and Juliet
effect is alive and well and making regular appearances in places like Blacksburg, Virginia.

A similar situation arose a decade earlier several hundred miles south of Kennesaw, when, to protect the environment, Dade County (Miami), Florida, imposed an antiphosphate ordinance prohibiting the use—and possession!—of laundry or cleaning products containing phosphates. A study done to determine the social impact of the law discovered two parallel reactions on the part of Miami residents. First, in what seems a Florida tradition, many Miamians turned to smuggling. Sometimes with neighbors and friends in large “soap caravans,” they drove to nearby counties to load up on phosphate detergents. Hoarding quickly developed and, in the rush of obsession that frequently characterizes hoarders, families boasted of having 20-year supplies of phosphate cleaners.

The second reaction to the law was more subtle and more general than the deliberate defiance of the smugglers and hoarders. Spurred by the tendency to want what they could no longer have, the majority of Miami consumers came to see phosphate cleaners as better products than before. Compared to Tampa residents, who were not affected by the Dade County ordinance, the citizens of Miami rated phosphate detergents gentler, more effective in cold water, better whiteners and fresheners, and more powerful on stains. After passage of the law, they had even come to believe that phosphate detergents poured more easily (Mazis, 1975; Mazis, Settle, & Leslie, 1973).

This sort of response is typical of individuals who have lost an established freedom; and recognizing that it is typical is crucial to understanding how psychological reactance and the principle of scarcity work. When something becomes less available our freedom to have it is limited, and we experience an increased desire for it. We rarely recognize, however, that psychological reactance has caused us to want the item more; all we know is that we
want
it. To make sense of our heightened desire for the item, we begin to assign it positive qualities. In the case of the Dade County antiphosphate law—and in other instances of newly restricted availability—assuming a cause-and-effect relationship between desire and merit is a faulty supposition. Phosphate detergents clean, whiten, and pour no better after they are banned than they do before. We just assume they do because we find that we desire them more.

Censorship

The tendency to want what has been banned, and, therefore, to presume that it is more worthwhile is not limited to commodities such as laundry soap; it also extends to restrictions on information. In an age when the ability to acquire, store, and manage information increasingly affects access to 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 concerning our reactions to observing various kinds of potentially censorable material—media violence, pornography, radical political rhetoric—there is surprisingly little evidence on our reactions to the censoring of this material. Fortunately, the results of the few studies that have been done on censorship are highly consistent. Almost invariably, our response to banned information is to want to receive that information to a greater extent and to become more favorable toward it than we were before the ban. (Ashmore, Ramchandra, & Jones, 1971; Wicklund & Brehm, 1974; Worchel & Arnold, 1973; Worchel, 1992).

The intriguing finding about the effects of censored information on an audience is not that audience members want to have the information more than 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 opposing coed dorms on campus would be banned, they became more opposed to the idea of coed dorms (Worchel, Arnold, & Baker, 1975). Thus, without ever hearing the speech, the students became more sympathetic to its argument. This raises the worrisome possibility that especially clever individuals holding a weak or unpopular position on an issue 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 censorship. 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 trying to minimize the chance that new political notions would win support via the irrational course of psychological reactance.
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Evidence that reactance can cause people to take political action they would otherwise not have taken comes from a study by Heilman (1976). Supermarket shoppers were most likely to sign a petition favoring federal price controls after they had been informed that a federal official had opposed the distribution of the petition.

Of course, political ideas are not the only kind that are susceptible to restriction. Access to sexually oriented material is also frequently limited. Although not as sensational as the occasional police crackdown on “adult” bookstores and theaters, regular pressure is applied by parents and citizens groups to censor the sexual content of educational material ranging from sex education and hygiene texts to school library books. Both sides in the struggle seem to be well intentioned and the issues are not simple, as they involve such matters as morality, art, parental control over the schools, and freedoms guaranteed by the First Amendment. From a purely psychological point of view, however, those favoring strict censorship may wish to examine closely the results of a study done on Purdue University undergraduates (Zellinger, Fromkin, Speller, & Kohn, 1974). In this study, students were shown some advertisements for a novel. For half the students, the advertising copy included the statement “a book for adults only, restricted to those 21 years and over”; the other half of the students read no such age restriction on the book. When the researcher later asked the students to indicate their feelings toward the book, they discovered the same pair of reactions we have noted with other bans: Those who learned of the age restriction wanted to read the book more and believed that they would like the book more than did those who thought their access to the book was unlimited.

Those who support the official banning of sexually relevant materials from school curricula have the avowed goal of reducing the orientation of the society, especially of its youth, toward eroticism. In the light of the Purdue study and in the context of other research on the effects of imposed restraints, one must wonder whether official censorship as a means may not be antithetical to the goal. If we are to believe the implications of the research, then censorship is likely to increase the desire of students for sexual material and, consequently, to cause them to view themselves as the kind of individuals who like such material.

I believe something quite similar happened recently in Choteau, Montana when Kevin St. John, the local school superintendent, canceled a speech to be given to high school students by Dr. Steve Running, who shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for his work on the dangers of climate change (Brown, 2008). Some members of the Choteau School Board pressured Mr. St. John to bring in someone with an opposing opinion because they feared that Dr. Running’s views on global warming would be seen as anti-agricultural. Although the superintendent maintained that under the circumstances, choosing to cancel the speech was “the neutral option,” I’m convinced that he granted a large victory to one side of the debate—the global
warming position. Based on what we know about the psychological effects of official censorship, it is likely that in the aftermath the majority of Choteau High School students, and perhaps Montanans, became more favorable to Dr. Running’s case . . . without ever hearing him make it. Indeed, one of those students wrote subsequently—and indignantly—that the School Board’s action denied its students a unique opportunity to learn “valuable information about the future of our planet,” while another equally indignant writer called it a “misguided effort to protect students from the truth” (Barhaugh, 2008).

The term
official censorship
usually makes us think of bans on political or sexually explicit material, yet there is another common sort of official censorship that we don’t think of in the same way, probably because it occurs after the fact. Often in a jury trial, a piece of evidence or testimony will be introduced, only to be ruled inadmissible by the presiding judge, who may then admonish the jurors to disregard that evidence. From this perspective, the judge may be viewed as a censor, though the form of the censorship is odd. The presentation of the information to the jury is not banned—too late for that—it’s the jury’s use of the information that is banned. How effective are such instructions from a judge? Is it possible that, for jury members who feel it is their right to consider all the available information, declarations of inadmissibility may actually cause psychological reactance, leading the jurors to use the evidence to a greater extent? Often, this is precisely what happens (Lieberman & Arndt, 2000).

The realization that we value limited information allows us to apply the scarcity principle to realms beyond material commodities. The principle works for messages, communications, and knowledge, too. Taking this perspective, we can see that
information may not have to be censored for us to value it more; it need only be scarce
. According to the scarcity principle, we will find a piece of information more persuasive if we think that we can’t get it elsewhere. This idea—that exclusive information is more persuasive information—is central to the thinking of two psychologists, Timothy Brock and Howard Fromkin, who have developed a “commodity theory” analysis of persuasion (Brock, 1968; Fromkin & Brock, 1971).

The strongest support I know for Brock and Fromkin’s theory comes from a small experiment done by a student of mine (Knishinsky, 1982). At the time, the student was also a successful businessman, the owner of a beef-importing company, who had returned to school to get advanced training in marketing. After we talked in my office one day about scarcity and exclusivity of information, he decided to do a study using his sales staff. The company’s customers—buyers for supermarkets and other retail food outlets—were called on the phone as usual by a salesperson and asked for a purchase in one of three ways. One set of customers heard a standard sales presentation before being asked for their orders. Another set of customers heard the standard sales presentation plus information that the supply of imported beef was likely to be scarce in the upcoming months. A third group received the standard sales presentation and the information about a scarce supply of beef, too; however, they also learned that the scarce supply news was not generally
available information—it had come, they were told, from certain exclusive contacts that the company had.
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Thus, the customers who received this last sales presentation learned that not only was the availability of the product limited, so too was the news concerning it—the scarcity double-whammy.