Relationships
Surprise! Nagging Your Spouse to Lose Weight Backfires
What happens when you try to help your spouse lose weight?
Posted May 22, 2017
Ever wonder why your partner eats too much, even when you warn him or her not to? It could be precisely because your admonitions put your partner into a state of reactance, causing them to go against your advice just to prove their independence.
Reactance is a state of mind that arises when people feel that their freedom is being restricted. It can be triggered by random events — when a food is not in stock at a grocery store, some people will be upset that they’ve lost the ability to purchase that food, even if they didn’t care that much about the item previously. Public service announcements, or PSAs, can trigger reactance, too. Lecturing people on what they should or shouldn’t do can create backlash, when people do the bad thing just to prove they can’t be controlled.
When I first learned about psychology reactance, I thought about my older brother. It was a cold Minnesota day (sorry for the redundancy), and my then 9-year-old brother was staring longingly at a ribbon of ice that had wrapped itself around a metal railing. My parents, reading his mind, warned him not to lick it. He promptly took a lick, and his tongue stuck to the frozen metal like it planned to remain there until April. My parents rescued him by pouring lukewarm water over the railing.
The lesson? Sometimes the worst way to keep people from engaging in harmful behaviors is to tell them to avoid those behaviors.
Consider a clever study by Nguyen Pham and colleagues at Arizona State University. They told people that they were participating in a research study exploring the relationship between handwriting and personality, and that they needed to write out a sentence chosen randomly by a computer. The whole handwriting/random sentence thing was baloney, of course: The researchers were getting people to write these sentences down in order to see how those sentences influenced their subsequent behavior. Some wrote down the sentence “all dessert is bad,” others “all dessert is good,” and yet others “all dessert is food.” The researchers then assessed people’s attitudes towards healthy and unhealthy foods. They discovered that among people who were on diets, the “all dessert is bad” sentence increased the number of positive thoughts they had about unhealthy food:
In another study, Pham found that negative messages about sugary snacks increased how many cookies dieters ate:
In both studies, only self-professed dieters demonstrated the backlash effect — the very people we would most want to help by encouraging them to avoid unhealthy food are the ones most likely to respond to our reminders by consuming more such food.
The lesson is clear: When you tell people who are trying to diet that they shouldn’t eat dessert, or that sugary snacks are unhealthy, you have just increased the chance that they will eat those unhealthy foods.
Here’s a win-win for your relationships: Stop nagging your loved ones about how much food they eat. It could be a recipe for unhealthy behavior and an unhealthy relationship. In fact, you’re probably better off licking a frozen railing than telling your partner not to have a piece of cake.
