No, this reactance is not an electric quantity. It’s a psychological theory. Are you in a reactance state?
Reactivity is, in electrical engineering, the measure of how much opposition an electrical system makes to changes in current and voltage. Therefore, in an analogous way, we can say that reactance measures the opposition to something in general. But what will be the psychological equivalent of electric reactance?
Psychological Reactance
No, this reactance is not an electric quantity. It’s a psychological theory. Are you in a reactance state?
Reactance is, in electrical engineering, the measure of how much opposition an electrical system makes to changes in current and voltage. Therefore, in an analogous way, we can say that reactance measures the opposition to something in general. But what will be the psychological equivalent of electric reactance?
Psychological Reactance
Reactance is a state that comes up when an some individual freedom is threatened or eliminated. In a reactance state, if a major personal freedom is constrained and given that this person is responsible and able to control the results of his/her actions, this person will adopt a behavior trying to reestablish the lost freedom.
Psychological reactance is a theory with broad scope and can explain various behaviors of disobedience, or, in the correct term, delinquent behaviors:
- Patients who refuse any limiting treatment
- Children who during bad behavior episodes
- The reason why “do not step over the grass” always create paths that cuts through the grass
- Scratched walls and monuments
- …
And, mainly for this article:
- Behaviors in the work environment
In summary, the psychological reactance explains why the prohibited options tend to be always more interesting or because the unattainable pasture is always greener.
Reactivity in Product Development
At R&D environments, reactance manifests itself in those who…
- Refuse to follow coding style manuals;
- Hate working on others’ code;
- Who love to be “the opposite”;
- Who refuse to accept a new technology.
- (I think people from other markets can make a similar lists).
An important point about the Reactance Theory is that it is born of the individual’s need for self-affirmation and is directly related to his or her self-esteem. If we evaluate this in a development environment, in evaluating all the examples cited, we conclude that this need for affirmation translates into a sense of usefulness: the individual wants to show his value; and in self-esteem, which is to prove that he/she knows or that he/she knows best.
Usually being helpful and having knowledge, in a company, is to key to keep the job.
But to what extent does this necessity of affirmation, of demonstration of one’s own knowledge, translate positively into the professional? To nothing when it means intransigence.
Reactivity and Disobedience
I have a story.
An employee once refused to use prefixes / suffixes on variable names. He deliberately opted to contradict the company’s coding style manual. Some time later, he got into a project and complained about the very poor quality of the work, and that he, himself, had done something similar a long time ago, but much better.
To his bad luck, the logs showed that the code was his own …
What’s in this story? We note a very large need for self assertion. Whenever the professional is forced to follow the trail of another professional adopts, without any restraint, the posture of criticism and defensive. This time it was not favorable to him…
How often doesn’t a development practitioner take a similar stance, just to be disobedient, uncompromising, or different? Forstanding out, for being different, the developer behaves with non constructive attitudes; just the very opposite of the sense of usefulness. He/she becomes disobedient.
Reactance and Career
A career will encounter several situations of divergence. Different people believe in different things. So disagreement will be commonplace in any truly pluralistic environment of ideas. However, it is important for a developer to always keep his or her mind open to the ideas of others and avoid entering into a reactance state when a path has already been determined.
It is important to accept the ideas of others. It is important to follow rules and worry about what matters. It is important, above all, to avoid the state of refusal by simple refusal.
The reactance also explains, to a certain extent, the Achilles Effect. But much more than that: reactance theory explains why what is prohibited is tastier …
