New Study on Reactance in Health Communication

By being asked to change their own behavior, people can feel restricted in their freedom of choice; they then react angrily and ignore the message or even reinforce the undesirable behavior. For example, various studies have shown that health messages aimed at reducing tobacco or alcohol consumption had the opposite effect, i.e., led to increased use of the drugs. While the effects of psychological reactance have been well studied in many areas, little is known about the underlying cognitive processes. In a study now published in the Journal of Health Communication, researchers from the Universities of Bamberg and Erfurt investigated the extent to which reactance influences attentional processes.

For this purpose, participants were divided into several groups. While an experimental group was asked not to consume meat in the future in order to protect their health and the environment, a control group received no such message. Subsequent measurements showed that omnivorous (meat-eating) participants in the experimental group were more upset than omnivorous individuals in the control group. Moreover, the extent of reactance in omnivorous experimental group members was related to their performance in a word grid in which meat-related terms (e.g., sausage, "schnitzel") were hidden alongside neutral words (e.g., paper, moon). The stronger the annoyance was, the more meat-related terms these subjects found in the word grid.

The result suggests that reactance triggered by health messages can shift our attention toward unhealthy consumption opportunities. Theoretically, this may impede intended behavior change and possibly even reinforce unhealthy behavior. Future studies will now investigate attentional processes and their effects on actual consumption behavior in more detail. However, the findings already indicate that health messages should trigger as little reactance as possible or correct attention shifts through appropriate measures.