Things probably aren't as bad as you think

The more our parents say no way, the more we often say yes way. Why is forbidden fruit so much more tempting? Jack Brehm's (1966; Brehm & Brehm, 1981) seminal psychological reactance theory explains why forceful, demanding efforts to compel obedience, compliance, or persuasive attitude change can backfire. This theory is based on the assumption that people experience an uncomfortable emotional state, called reactance, when they feel a threat to their freedom to think, feel, or act in the way they would like. People are motivated to reduce reactance and restore their sense of freedom by doing or expressing the very thing that they are told they shouldn't do. In fact, the motivation to reduce reactance can be so strong that it leads people to act aggressively against the person threatening their freedom (see FIGURE 8. Psychological reactance theory Trying to move in a positive direction in the midst of a terrible situation takes fortitude. Being hopeful is, in many ways, the more difficult path than despair and cynicism. Hope doesn't protect you from feeling disheartened or sickened by the scale and horror of the fires in the Amazon, Australia, California, or Western Canada. Especially when the frequency and severity of fire weather is increasing with climate change. Feeling furious and upset at deforestation, coal-fired power plants, and politicians who fail to lead urgently needed climate reforms, or angry that you've inherited a screwed-up situation from previous generations, is justified. Outrage shows you know what's going on and you know what absolutely must change. Reaching the point of enough is enough spurs us to protest, boycott, and stand up for the things we love and believe in. Anger and hope are not opposites. They have a symbiotic relationship. Both anger and hope are mobilizing emotions. If you would like a longer experience, simply tense each muscle group two times for a more complete relaxation. Take a moment to notice your breathing.

Feel the rise and fall of your chest. You have a unique rhythm to your breath that belongs to you alone. Take some time to just be mindful and appreciative of this rhythm. Take in the awareness of how your body feels as it is supported by the furniture that you rest on. In your mind, scan your body from bottom to top and notice any areas of tension or pain. You are first going to relax your feet. Take a deep breath in and as you do, curl your toes downward to tense up the muscles in your feet. Hold that tension for a moment and then exhale, releasing both your breath and the tension in your feet. A theory which proposes that people value thinking and acting freely. Therefore, situations that threaten their freedom arouse discomfort and prompt efforts to restore freedom. When our freedoms are threatened, we experience reactance and engage in behavior to reassert our independence. The illustration shows Reactance at the center. An arrow from each of the two blocks on the left points toward Reactance. The text in the first block reads, Free behavior (I can play with my toys). The text in the second block reads, Threat to freedom (you can't play with that toy). Reactance is shown to lead to Mental/emotional Effect (discomfort); Attitude effect (threatened freedom becomes more attractive); THINK ABOUT The 2019 climate strikes that drew millions of people around the world to demonstrate demand for change represent a mass social movement fueled by both anger at the injustice of what is and hope for what should be. Hope is what sustains us to keep fighting for social and ecological justice.

Multiple conceptions of hope The word hope, for lots of people, rubs them the wrong way. It symbolizes a naive notion of thinking positively or searching for a single shiny solution to cure the vast complexity of environmental woes. I sense it's this definition of hope that Greta Thunberg railed against in her speech in Brussels on February 21, 2019, when she said: You can't just sit around waiting for hope to come. Then you are acting like spoiled, irresponsible children. I'm not advocating that you, or anyone else, put on a smile and trust that everything will work out fine. To me, that's not actually hope. It's wishing. Allow your foot to fall limp and relaxed. Next, you will focus on the calf muscles in your lower legs. You can tense these muscles by pointing your toes downward. Do this now while breathing in a deep cleansing breath. Hold the tension. Now release. Exhale and allow your calf muscles to relax completely. Move to the muscles in your upper legs now. You put much strain on this part of your body from walking around all day and when you exercise. You can tense these muscles by pushing your feet into the ground while sitting or by stretching your legs out straight while lying down. Have you ever tried your hand at the popular notion of reverse psychology, whereby you tell someone to do something in the hope that they'll do the opposite? If so, you've taken advantage of reactance and how people respond to it.

How did it turn out? In one of the first demonstrations of reactance, Brehm and colleagues (1966) invited students to participate in a study on marketing musical recordings. The students rated a few sample recordings and were told that they would receive one of the records as a gift. In another condition, participants were also given the opportunity to choose, but the options were rigged. Participants were told that their third-rated record inadvertently had been excluded from the shipment and was unavailable. Thus, in this condition, a restriction was placed on the participants' freedom to choose what they wanted. All participants were then asked again to indicate their ratings of the different musical samples, and it was these changed attitudes that revealed reactance. Among subjects who were given a choice but denied the freedom to choose their third-most-highly rated selection, 67% increased their ratings of this selection, compared with 42% of participants' increasing their rating of this record when they had no restriction on their freedom. Wishing and hoping are often entangled together, but they ask quite different things of us. Hopeful people, according to Shane Lopez, a cognitive psychologist and hope researcher, plan for and show up in ways they believe will help the future improve. Hope, in his definition, is active. There is an essential connection between hope and agency--our sense that we can take action. Studies show hope helps us to cope, which keeps us from disengaging from difficult situations. Wishful people, in contrast, see the positive outcome they are yearning for as out of their hands. Wishing demands no effort on our part. It's the fantasy that things will just magically turn out okay. Hope is not a new topic. Exactly what people mean by hope is hotly debated. Take a nice deep breath and tense the muscles in your thighs. Hold it for just a moment and then release everything.

Notice the flow of blood into your muscles, which are now more soft and relaxed. It might feel tingly and warm. Enjoy this feeling for a moment before moving on. Now you will tighten your glute muscles on your back side. These take much abuse from sitting for long periods. Take in a deep breath and clench these muscles tightly. You should feel your body rise a little. Keep that tension for as long as you are comfortable, then release it as you exhale away your stress and worry. So we can think about reactance as pushback against attempts to restrict our freedom to have, do, or think what we want. The amount of pushback depends on how important that freedom is to us as well as how forceful the threat is. If going to your current college or university was particularly important to you, but your parents wanted you to go to another school, there is a good chance that you may have experienced strong feelings of reactance if your parents actively tried to direct your decision. However, if where you went to school was not a particularly important freedom for you, then you would not have experienced much reactance if your parents tried to restrict that freedom. Looking at reactance from the cultural perspective, we find that culture plays a big role in determining the importance people place on freedom, whose freedoms are most important, and thus how strong their reactance is. In our discussion of cultural variation in article 2, we saw that individual agency and a sense of personal freedom are more important to people in Western, individualistic cultures. A sense of group harmony is more important to those from collectivistic cultures, and as a result, reactance might play out differently for people from such cultures. Indeed, European American students (who tend to value individualism) tend to show more reactance when their personal freedoms are threatened, whereas Asian and Latin Americans (who tend to value collectivism) tend to show more reactance when the freedoms of their fellow students are threatened (Jonas et al. APPLICATION Reactance in Jury Decision Making The research on reactance can be applied to a fairly common occurrence in jury trials. No doubt people were talking about it long before written languages even existed. The priestess-poet Enheduanna wrote about hope 4,300 years ago.