Inoculating Against Reactance to Persuasive Health Messages

Abstract

This investigation examined the possibility of decreasing psychological reactance to health campaigns through the use of inoculation messages. It was hypothesized that an inoculation message, which forewarned of the potential of subsequent reactance, would decrease participants' likelihood of reacting negatively to a freedom-threatening message aimed to reduce excessive alcohol consumption. Participants (N = 275) who were inoculated against potential reactance felt less threatened and experienced less reactance compared to those who did not read an inoculation message. Structural equation modeling showed that inoculation indirectly predicted lower intention to drink alcohol via the theorized mediated reactance process. This research suggests that it is possible to inoculate against self-generated cognitions that might otherwise lead toward negative health behaviors.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 139 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.