ABSTRACT
Psychological reactance refers to the motivational state that people experience when their freedoms have been threatened. Jack Brehm identified the construct in the 1960s in response to particular counterintuitive reactions observed after individuals received a persuasive message. Historically, psychological reactance has, in principal, been examined from the individual, micro, perspective. This is largely because the phenomenon operates chiefly at the level of the individual. As such, its relationship with social change has largely been ignored in the literature. However, recent conceptual models have been developed to more directly address how psychological reactance can be operationalised. This has led to a new way of conceptualising how reactance may operate in wider social arenas. This article is dedicated to framing the relationship between psychological reactance and social change based on this new conceptual model. By doing so, the authors make a case for this perspective using various macro-level contextual examples drawn from modern society.
