Author Information
Andy H. Ng, York University, CanadaMohammad S. Kermani, York University, Canada
Richard N. Lalonde, York University, Canada
Abstract
People believe that they are free to engage in reasonable behaviors. When this freedom to act is taken away from an individual, s/he would experience psychological reactance, a “motivational state directed toward the re-establishment of the free behaviors which have been eliminated or threatened with elimination” (Brehm, 1966). Censorship can be considered as a form of restriction of freedom to fully access information and hence should result in psychological reactance (Worchel & Arnold, 1973). In the present research, we examined cultural differences in psychological reactance in response to a threat of social media censorship among Iranian-Canadians (n = 75), European-Canadians (n = 132), and East-Asian-Canadians (n = 87). Participants read a passage on promoting social media censorship, purportedly written by a first-year university student (low threat condition) or the Canadian Government (high threat condition), randomly assigned. Participants then completed a measure of psychological reactance (e.g., “I think people should have the right to information”), the Self-Construal Scale (Singelis, 1994), and answered some questions about their censorship experience. Results revealed an interaction between Culture and Threat on psychological reactance, p = .01. In the high threat condition only, Iranian-Canadians (vs. European-Canadians and East-Asian-Canadians) exhibited more psychological reactance, p = .01, and this cultural difference was mediated by experience with censorship, p < .05. Results are consistent with the notion that Iranians have more experience with restriction of information access and repression of freedom, and thus have a heightened sensitivity to freedom threat when it came from a powerful source.
Paper Information
Conference: ACP2015Stream: Qualitative/Quantitative Research in any other area of Psychology
This paper is part of the ACP2015 Conference Proceedings (View)
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