What We’re Following in Consumer Behavior

People love their independence. And they can be counted on to respond to any perceived threat to their freedom to act, choose, decide, move about, and so on with what psychologist Jack Brehm, in 1966, termed reactance—behaviors including hostility, flouting of authority, and resistance to persuasion. Hey, Expert, Don’t Tell Me What to Do… Reactance, both as a fleeting response and as an inherent trait, has wide-ranging effects on consumer behavior. Gavan J. Fitzsimons of Duke and Donald R. Lehmann of Columbia found that when an expert doles out advice that contradicts people’s opinions, they become even more likely to hold fast to their convictions. After learning that a granola bar they liked had been negatively reviewed, students in the study were 30% more likely to choose it, even though the review had come from a highly credible health magazine. Ignoring Advice Percentage of people who selected a product they favored after reading either a positive or negative review. …or Try to Pigeonhole Me… A subsequent study by Fitzsimons and two doctoral students, Eugenia Wu and Keisha Cutright, found that inherently reactant people tend to resist being labeled and often reject expert assessments of themselves. In the study, participants completed a short product-choice quiz and were given results labeling them as either more brand conscious than consumers on average, or less so. Reactant people who were told they were brand conscious were more likely to choose no-name jelly beans, as if to prove the quiz results wrong, but if they were told they were not brand conscious, they went for Jelly Bellys. Rebelling Against Labels People with low reactance acted in accordance with the labels they were given; those with high reactance rebelled. …Unless You Couch It in a Narrative Reactance often causes people to resist attempts to change their behavior. One way to overcome that is to embed persuasive messages in stories with relatable characters, say Emily Moyer-Gusé of Ohio State and Robin L. Nabi of UC Santa Barbara. The narrative keeps reactance at bay by concealing the persuasive intent. In an experiment, undergraduates were shown a teen-pregnancy warning in the form of either an episode of the TV show The O.C. or a non-narrative video from a public advocacy group. Perhaps because they viewed its message as coming from a peer, the drama was better at reducing reactance in women toward the safe-sex message. Don’t Fence Me In Impingements on physical freedom can trigger reactance. Confine people in tight spaces and they’ll respond with independence-asserting behavior, say Jonathan Levav of Columbia and Rui (Juliet) Zhu of the University of British Columbia. In a lab experiment, the researchers found that subjects who were asked to select a candy bar from an assortment made more-varied choices after being placed in a narrower, more-cramped space. The researchers replicated the findings in grocery stores: When crowding impinged on personal space, shoppers increased their purchase variety in more than 70% of product categories. A Global Phenomenon? Is reactance a mere cultural artifact, a product of the West’s emphasis on the rugged individualist, for example? Brian L. Quick of the University of Illinois and Do Kyun Kim of the University of Louisiana found strong signs of reactance in a study of hundreds of adolescents in South Korea, despite that nation’s emphasis on a “collectivist” culture. A group of (predominantly female) students were asked to respond to concocted ads for a fictitious cell phone company. One ad contained “controlling” language, the other neutral language. Reactant behaviors such as anger and a sense that the ad was trying to manipulate them were triggered much more readily by the controlling ad. The bottom line: No matter who we are or where we live, “we don’t like being told what to do,” Quick says. Reactance Is Universal Non-Controlling Language “The TMX-890 is a quality camera phone for you…Purchasing the TMX-890 makes sense. The TMX-890 is a camera phone made for you!” 31% perceived this ad as a freedom threat. Controlling Language “It is impossible to deny all the evidence that the TMX-890 is the only camera phone for you…No other conclusion makes sense.” 40% perceived this ad as a freedom threat.

What We’re Following in Consumer Behavior

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