A Preview From My Upcoming Book, What Moves People.
On a drizzly Sunday, you head to the museum. You approach a solitary marble statue — and next to it, a sign reading "Do Not Touch The Art!" You're a rule-abiding person. And yet…
You find yourself wanting to touch that damn art. There's nothing special about it — you know what marble feels like — but there's something about being told what to do (or not to do) that just makes you want to revolt. The phenomenon has a name: psychological reactance. And understanding it changes everything about how you try to move someone.
This month, instead of the usual research digest, I'm sharing the first few pages of Chapter 4 of my upcoming book — "Minds Open from the Inside" — covering:
- Why we instinctively rebel against being told what to do — and Jack Brehm's 1966 argument that this "anti-coercion detection system" likely had genuine survival value.
- Nisbett & Cohen's culture-of-honor work and a 2021 global study by Cao, Enke, and colleagues showing the psychological residue of herding societies still shows up across dozens of countries today.
- The "paradoxical physics of persuasion" — why the more force you apply to an argument, the less likely you are to move the person on the other side of it (and what to do instead).
Read the full preview on the archive page — and subscribe to receive next month's issue in your inbox.