I know we’ve all been there; when you’re mentally preparing yourself to tackle the task of cleaning your ‘depression room’, and then your mom walks past your room and peeks her head in and says, ‘Hey, how about you tidy up this room sometime today?’ and all of a sudden, the motivation goes away and it’s the last thing you want to do.

How about the time you were driving around the neighborhood and drove past a stop sign saying to your friends, ‘No cop, no stop!’

Being reluctant to do what has been asked of you is called the Reactance Theory. This means that psychological reactance, a state of motivation aiming to obtain freedom, happens when people feel their freedom of choice is restricted. As a result, people often do the opposite of what they are asked to do.

On an individual level, psychological reactance can help people stand up for their rights and avoid manipulation, but it may also lead to harmful behaviors. For instance, someone might ignore crucial advice simply because it feels forced on them. This resistance can cause frustration and conflict in relationships. For example, if a parent asks their child to do something, and that child reacts reluctantly; this creates a hostile environment and can damage the relationship.

On a societal level, reactance often leads to negative results, such as resisting important health messages and spreading misinformation.

Sometimes, psychological reactance can be avoided with message framing; where you frame what you want to say in a specific way to make it sound less negative and unrewarding. Say you were promoting a winter coat; you wouldn’t want to say, ‘avoid getting cold this winter,’ you would frame it more positively, saying, ‘stay nice and warm this winter.’ The connotation associated with ‘avoid,’ and ‘cold,’ is more negative than ‘nice,’ and ‘warm.’ Even though these two sentences promote the same thing, the second sentence sounds more appealing because of the way the sentence is framed.

Regardless of these tendencies to not follow the rules, sometimes following them is in your best interest. You probably should clean that room, and you should stop at the stop sign even though no one is watching.