Influencing the "Shape" of Resistance: An Experimental Exploration of Paradoxical Directives and Psychological Reactance

The deliberate employment of defiance-based paradoxical directives in psychotherapy has frequently been related to benefits derivable from accepting and utilizing client resistance toward change. The social-psychological concept of reactance, based on the need for autonomy with the consequent tendency to resist another person's directives, is here postulated as the best explanation for this resistance. The present experiment attempts, analogously, to investigate certain hypotheses about reactance arousal in a paradoxical intervention. Participating in this study were 148 undergraduates, 72 male and 76 female. These students were confronted with an anxiety-laden situation involving an extremely tempting opportunity to cheat. Asked to assume they had succumbed to this temptation, they were instructed to decide among nine alternatives for dealing with their potentially hazardous behavior and then asked to redecide after exposure to a strongly authoritative (i.e., reactance-arousing) recommendation, presented in two opposing conditions. A self-report questionnaire was used systematically to explore both their decisions. Results suggested that although reactance influenced their final choice, this choice was determined primarily by the related motives of self-efficacy and Machiavellianism.