The Role of Reactance in Responses to One-Sided Advertisements: How Health-Related Appeals Backfire among Restrained Eaters

In this research we explore consumer attitudes toward one-sided appeals that present only the negative aspects of consuming indulgent food and determine how these attitudes influence subsequent food preferences. Public service announcements (PSAs) often use one-sided messages (e.g., “All dessert is bad”) to encourage healthy behaviors and to discourage unhealthy behaviors, such as overeating indulgent food. These kinds of messages can backfire, however, because consumers perceive them to be biased since they only mention the negative aspects of dessert and disregard anything positive. Since the intended purpose of the message is to convince consumers that they should eat fewer desserts, consumers may rightly feel that such one-sided messages are trying to limit and constrain their choices. Reactance theory (Brehm 1966, 1989) suggests that when individuals feel that someone else is constraining their freedom to choose or act, they will initiate a motivational state of reactance to regain that freedom. We propose that under certain conditions, one-sided messages will cause reactance, leading consumers to pursue goals that run opposite to those intended by the message, such as increasing consumption of indulgent food.