The Impact of Behavioral Topic on Psychological Reactance: Arousal and Freedom Restoration

Psychological reactance theory (PRT) proposes that the importance of freedom, along with threat to freedom and receiver personality trait, impacts the arousal of psychological reactance and the subsequent freedom restoration. This paper presents a 2 (threat: low vs. high) × 3 (source: the CDC, victim of the health issue vs. AI) × 2 (health topic: college drinking vs. STD) between-subjects experiment (N = 765) to test the potential effects of topic and source legitimacy on reactance. Results showed that behavioral topic influenced the magnitude of psychological reactance and forms of freedom restoration simultaneously. Theoretical contributions, implications, and limitations are discussed.