Introduction

After the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) a pandemic (March 11^th-2020), precise recommendations about ways to prevent and to contain the infection have been indicated. More specifically, a review commissioned by WHO showed that quarantine combined with other public health measures, such as hand washing, face covering, and social distancing, help prevent incidence and mortality during the COVID-19 pandemic (Nussbaumer-Streit et al., 2020). However, many people in Italy refused to obey the above recommendations.

This irrational behavior has been observed especially among young, who even after the closure of schools and colleges, continued to host house parties, meet with friends at parks without social distancing, travel, and so on. Not only young people, but also many adults manifested a low willingness to cooperate in order to prevent and contain the spread of the coronavirus, refusing for example to wear a mask at the grocery store or to practice social-distancing. The illogical behavior of Italians during the COVID-19 pandemic can be explained through a well-known psychological mechanism, named psychological reactance.

1. Psychological Reactance

Psychological reactance can be defined as the unpleasant feeling that humans have when they perceive that someone or something is threatening their behavioral freedom. As a response, they tend to go in an opposite direction, in the attempt to re-establish their freedom (Brehm, 1966;Steindl, et al., 2015). An example of reactance can be observed among underage drinkers who deliberately choose to break the alcohol consumption laws as a reaction to the authority who restricted their liberty (Allen, Sprenkel, & Vitale, 1994). Another example is when adolescents smoke in order to regain their freedom of action that was taken away BY their parents (Miller, et al., 2006).

Psychological reactance was investigated by many researchers, in various domains, and with different populations. A pioneer study by Brehm and Sensenig (1966) tested psychological reactance in a game that required cooperation. A participant, who was actually a confederate of the researchers, was instructed to pass a note to another participant. In a condition, this note suggested a preference among a list of possible course of actions. In another condition, the note imposed a particular course of action. It was observed that about 70% of participants accepted to do what was suggested, whereas only about the 40% accepted to do what was imposed.

Another study, conducted with children, further confirmed psychological reactance. In particular, Allen and Allen (1974) tested the attractiveness of forbidden objects among children. In the first phase of this study, children were asked to rank five toys, from the most favorite to the least favorite. Then, the experimenters allowed the children to play with all the available toys except with the one that was rated as intermediate in attractiveness, which was put to the side. After a few minutes, children were asked to rank again the five toys, feeling free to either change their previous ranking of leave it the same. It was observed that, in the new ranking, children ranked the forbidden toy more attractive, showing thus reactance.

Given the above findings about the typical reaction of humans to freedom restrictions, it is easy to understand that many irrational behaviors of Italians during the COVID-19 pandemic resulted from the same psychological mechanism of reactance. The numerous imposition coming from authorities, politicians, scientists and public health experts to wear masks, wash hands frequently, reduce trips to the grocery store, avoid meeting with friends and family members, cancel events, keep distance from others, and stay-at-home in general, created a motivation to push back these orders and regain the liberty taken away. As a consequence, people not only ignored instructions about the infection prevention and control measures but suddenly started to crave activities that they were not very interested in before the pandemic.

Interestingly, indeed, it was observed that certain activities that were not, before the pandemic, considered very exciting, suddenly became an unobtainable object and, thus also highly desirable. For example, people who did not have the habit to run, became extremely interested in running, people who were not fascinated in going to the beach or for a walk, suddenly became frustrated because they could not do that during the lockdown. In other words, people started to desire to do the exact opposite of what it was advised. Like in Dostoevsky’s mind game, where his brother could not stop thinking about a white bear simply because he was told not to think of a white bear (see also, Wegner, et al., 1987), Italians placed in front of a series of limitations, started to think more often of (and desire to engage in) those activities that were restricted, no matter how important they were before the pandemic.

2. Solutions to increase people’s motivation towards the recommended health measures

Many researchers have shown that psychological reactance can be attenuated or even eliminated through the use of certain techniques. One of these techniques is “reverse psychology”, consisting in requesting a person to do something in order to obtain the opposite behavior. An example could be to ask a child not to eat any vegetables in order to persuade him/her to actually eat them. Reverse psychology was used for the first time by psychiatrist Milton Erikson to make his patients more susceptible towards hypnosis. He indeed, found out that telling people to fight against the hypnosis as hard as possible made them actually easier to hypnotize. In the pandemic, opposite communications might lead people to react against and do what is proper.

Another technique to reduce reactance is the adoption of a communication style without orders and threats. Previous research has indeed demonstrated that compliance increases when the message does not control nor reduce personal freedom. Compliance, also, increases when solid and clear information on how to prevent a risk (e.g., the spread of infection) is provided. Instead, abstract and ambiguous messages generate a low level of attention and can lead people to perceive the source of the messages not credible (Miller, et al., 2006). During the current pandemic, clear messages, framed as suggestions rather than orders, accompanied with a rationale (e.g., save other lives), and provided by credible sources (for example, celebrities rather than politicians), might help people to act based more on rationality and less on reactance.

Referencias

Allen, V. L. & Allen, P. S. (1974). On the attractiveness of forbidden objects. Developmental Psychology, 10, 871-873

Allen, D. N., Sprenkel, D., & Vitale, P. A. (1994). Reactance theory and alcohol consumption laws: further confirmation among collegiate alcohol consumers. Journal of Studies on Alcohol, 55, 34-40.

Brehm, J. W. (1966). A Theory of Psychological Reactance. New York: Academic Press.

Brehm, J. W. & Sensenig, J. (1966). Social influence as a function of attempted and implied usurpation of choice. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 4, 703-707.

Miller, C., Burgoon, M., Grandpre, J. R., Alvaro, E. M. (2006). Identifying principal risk factors for the initiation of adolescent smoking behaviors: the significance of psychological reactance. Health Communication, 19, 241-252.

Nussbaumer-Streit, B., Mayr, V, Dobrescu, A. I., Chapman, A., Persad, W., Klerings, I., Wagner, G., Siebert, U., Christof, C., Zachariah, C., & Gartlehner, G. (2020). Quarantine alone or in combination with other public health measures to control COVID-19: a rapid review. The Crochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, Apr 8; 4(4): CD013574.

Steindl, C., Jonas, E., Sittenthaler, S., Traut-Mattausch, E., & Greenberg, J. (2015). Understanding psychological reactance. Zeitschrift für Psychologie, 223, 205-214.

Wegner, D. M., Schneider, D. J., Carter, S. R., & White, T. L. (1987). Paradoxical effects of thought suppression. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 53, 5–13.