https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boomerang_effect_(psychology)
In social psychology, the boomerang effect refers to the unintended consequences of an attempt to persuade resulting in the adoption of an opposing position instead. It is sometimes also referred to "the theory of psychological reactance", stating that attempts to restrict a person's freedom often produce an "anticonformity boomerang effect".
In social psychology, the boomerang effect refers to the unintended consequences of an attempt to persuade resulting in the adoption of an opposing position instead. It is sometimes also referred to "the theory of psychological reactance", stating that attempts to restrict a person's freedom often produce an "anticonformity boomerang effect".
Conditions and explanations
Early recognition
Hovland, Janis and Kelly first recorded and named the boomerang effect in 1953, noting that it is more likely under certain conditions:
- When weak arguments are paired with a negative source.
- When weak or unclear persuasion leads the recipient to believe the communicator is trying to convince them of a different position than what the communicator intends.
- When the persuasion triggers aggression or unalleviated emotional arousal.
- When the communication adds to the recipient's knowledge of the norms and increases their conformity.
- When non-conformity to their own group results in feelings of guilt or social punishment.
- When the communicator's position is too far from the recipient's position and thus produces a "contrast" effect and thus enhances their original attitudes.
Later in 1957, Hovland, Sherif and Harvey
further discussed the necessity of understanding these unintended
attitude changes in persuasion communication and suggested possible
approaches for analysis via underlying motivational processes,
psychophysical stimuli, as well as ego-involving verbal material. Jack
Brehm and Arthur Cohen were among the first to provide theoretical
explanations.
Jack Brehm first raised attention to the phenomenon a fait accompli
that might conceivably create dissonance if an event has led to the
opposite behavior predicted at a prior point. He conducted an experiment
to examine the behaviors of eighth graders eating a disliked vegetable.
About half of them were told that their parents would be informed on
the vegetable they ate. Then liking the vegetable was measured before
and after the procedure. The results show that for kids who indicated
little or no discrepancy between serving and actually eating the
disliked vegetable at home, they should experience little or no
dissonance in liking the vegetable from the low to the high consequence
condition. They thereby concluded that the greater was the individual's
initial dislike, the greater was the pressure produced by the experiment
to increase his liking. There was also larger resistance to change the
attitude when the initial attitude was more extreme. However, they
argued that in this experiment, the pressure to reduce dissonance
increased more rapidly with increasing discrepancy than did the
resistance against change, which verified Festinger's cognitive
dissonance theory.
In a follow up, Sensenig and Brehm focused on the boomerang effect in experiments and applied Brehm's psychological reactance theory to explain the unintended attitudinal change.
Psychological reactance theory analysis
Sensenig & Brehm applied Brehm's reactance theory
to explain the boomerang effect. They argued that when a person thinks
that his freedom to support a position on attitude issue is eliminated,
the psychological reactance will be aroused and then he consequently
moves his attitudinal position in a way so as to restore the lost
freedom. He told college students to write an essay supporting one side
of five issues and led some of them believe that their persuasive essays
might influence the decision on those issues. Therefore, the people who
had the impression that their preference was taken into account in the
decision regarding which side they would support on the 1st issue showed
attitude change in favor of the preferred position, while others who
are concerned with their freedom lost move toward the intended position
held by the communicator.
This experiment resulted in various links in the chain of
reasoning: (a) when a person's freedom is threatened, his motivational
state will move toward restoration of the threatened freedom; (b) the
greater the implied threatened freedoms, the greater the tendency to
restore the threatened freedom will be; (c) the reestablishment of
freedom may take the form of moving one's attitudinal position away from
the position forced by others.
Jack Brehm and Sharon Brehm later developed psychological reactance theory and discussed its applications.
They also listed a series of reactions reactance can evoke in addition
to the boomerang effect, which includes but is not limited to related
boomerang effect, indirect restoration or vicarious boomerang effects.
Cognitive dissonance theory analysis
The dissonance theory by Leon Festinger
has thrived the progress of social psychology research in the 1960s as
it is not confined to the prediction of intended influence but can
support almost all sub fields of psychology studies. Although Festinger
himself was ambiguous about the role of commitment in the theory, later
researchers such as Brehm and Cohen
have emphasized its importance in providing a general conceptualization
of the boomerang effect. Earlier studies by Thibaut and Strickland and Kelley and Volkhart
have also provided support to this line of reasoning by Dissonance
Theory despite that they were not phrased using the exact terminology.
According to Cohen,
dissonance theory can provide not only an explanation, but also a
prediction of both the intended and the unintended influence of
persuasion communication on attitudinal change. In his experiment, he
presented factors that can lead to a boomerang effect, while suggesting a
broader view of the unintended consequences than simply the case of a
response to attempted attitude change. Cohen proposed the following
dissonance formulation model for the unintended attitude change by
persuasive communication. First, suppose that dissonance aroused in
regard to some unspecified cognition. According to Festinger's Cognitive
Dissonance Theory, we know the dissonance could be reduced by a change
in the cognition. Now suppose the resistance to change is great because
the actual event cannot be changed and its meaning is ambiguous (for
example, the person is strongly committed to the original cognition
position), then the person will resort to other forms to reduce or
eliminate the dissonance. In this latter form, one can solve the
discrepancy problem through the addition of elements consonant either
with the original cognition, in which produced the boomerang effect.
Cohen formulated a situation of "mutual boomerang effect", in which the
communicator is strongly committed to convince the other person of his
attitudinal position by means of a persuasion communication. Because of
this strong original attitude position the communicator holds, Cohen
predicts that the more distant the target person's original attitude,
the more dissonance will be also experienced by the communicator. The
expected "unintended influence" arises when the communicator tried to
persuade the other of the worth of his own position by becoming even
more extreme in that position. He asked his subjects write a strongly
persuasive essay to the partners with an opposite side of attitude on an
issue, who are actually confederates. The subjects here thus act as the
communicator to bring their partners over to their own sides. The
subjects were also asked to rate the partners' likability and
friendliness before they read "their partner's essay" returned. Cohen
used attitude change of the partners as the manipulation of dissonance
where he randomly allocated his subjects into high-dissonance group and
low-dissonance group. The results exposed strong boomerang effects for
high-dissonance group. He also found out that the response to the
likability and friendliness of the partners are relevant. The data
showed that the difference between dissonance conditions was largely
confined to and exaggerated for those subjects who originally rated
their partners to be relatively more likable and friendly.
Cohen's study on boomerang effect has broadened the scope of
persuasive communication from merely the recipient's reaction to the
persuasive message to the communicator's attempt to influence the
target. Dissonance theory suggests that the basic issue is under what
conditions a person strengthens his original attitude as a way of
reducing some attitudinal inconsistency. Cohen suggested that, one can
reduce the dissonance via boomerang when dissonance is created (a) with a
strong commitment to convincing the other person, (b) with no
anticipation of a further influence attempt, and (c) with no easy chance
to repudiate the other person. His results on the likability have
strengthened the interpretation as the low-dissonance group who found
their partners likable and friendly move toward them in the attitudes
more, while likability only increased dissonance for the highs.
In other words, the dissonance can be reduced by becoming more
extreme in the original position, thereby increasing the proportion of
cognition supporting the initial stand and decreasing the proportion of
dissonant cognition.
Other analysis
Boomerang
effect is sometimes also referred to the attribution/attitude boomerang
effect. Researchers applied Heider's attribution theory
to explain why it would occur. For example, Skowronski, Carlston, Mae,
and Crawford demonstrated association-based effects in their study on
spontaneous trait transference.
Despite that the descriptions of other people are independent of the
communicator, simple associative processes link the two together and
produce boomerang phenomena.
Examples of applications
Consumer behavior
Wendlandt and Schrader
studied the resistance of consumers against loyalty programs
encountered in relationship marketing. They found that (a) contractual
bonds provoke reactance effects, (b) social-psychological bonds
increased neither reactance nor perceived utility of the program, (c)
economic bonds raised perceived utility to a certain threshold level,
from which the reactance effect dominated afterwards. Their results
helped managers to evaluate the effects from implementing consumer
retention measures and advised a cautious and limited application of
loyalty programs.
Deliberate exploitation
The tactic of reverse psychology,
which is a deliberate exploitation of an anticipated boomerang effect,
involves one's attempt of feigning a desire for an outcome opposite to
that of the truly desired one, such that the prospect's resistance will
work in the direction that the exploiter actually desires (e.g., "Please don't fling me in that briar patch").
Persuasive health communication
Researchers
have reported that some public health interventions have produced
effects opposite to those intended in health communication such as
smoking and alcohol consumption behaviors, and thus have employed
various methods to study them under different contexts. Ringold argued
that some consumer's negative reactions on alcoholic beverage warnings
and education efforts can be explained concisely by Brehm's
psychological reactance theory.
These results suggested that boomerang effects should be considered as
potential costs of launching mass communication campaigns. Dillard and
Shen also emphasized the importance of reactance theory to understand
failures in persuasive health communication but argued that there be a
measurement problem.
They thereby developed four alternative conceptual perspectives on the
nature of reactance as well as provided an empirical test of each.
Environmental behaviors
Mann and Hill
investigated the case of litter control and showed that the combination
of different positive influence strategies could actually create
boomerang effect and decrease the amount of appropriate disposal of
waste.
Schultz et al. (2007) conducted a field experiment in which the
normative messages were used to promote household energy conservation
where they found the descriptive message of neighborhood usage created a
boomerang effect depending on the high prior household consumption.
They also eliminated the boomerang effect by adding an injunctive message
about social approval. Their results offered an empirical evidence for
prior research on the theoretical framework for boomerang effects.
Helping
Schwartz
and Howard discussed the occurrence of boomerang effects in helping as
they found out the presence of certain factors presumed to activate
norms favoring helping actually result in decreasing helping.
They identified three related forms of such boomerang effect in helping
behavior. First, when individuals perceived the framing of a help
appeal to have excessive statements of need, they become suspicious and
concern the motive and the true severity of the original request (i.e.,
mistrust). Reactance theory was used to provide the second explanation.
They stated that individuals would respond to threatened freedoms by
either acting counter to the attempted social influence, or declaring
themselves helpless. The third type involves undermining internalized
benefits by external sanctions.
National and human security
Liotta
attempted to understand policy decisions and future choices driven by a
blurring of concerns that involve state-centric security and human
security. She suggested that a boomerang effect occurs in the area in
which excessive focus on one aspect of security at the expense or
detriment of the other is a poor balancing of ends and means in a
changing security environment and instead we should focus on both
national and human security.
Political beliefs
Nyhan & Reifler
conducted experiments in which subjects read mock news articles
including a misleading claim from a politician, or such a claim followed
by a correction. They found that the corrections frequently fail to
reduce misconceptions for the ideological group targeted by the
misinformation. They also found cases of what they called a "backfire
effect" (i.e. a boomerang effect) in which the corrections strengthened
belief in the misinformation. They attribute this to motivated reasoning
on the part of the affected participants. Later research did not find
evidence of this effect though, suggesting it was at least not
prevalent.
