How To Apply Reverse Psychology?

You must have used reverse psychology at another point in your life at some point in your life, even though you may not have been aware, at that time or still today, of the power that lurks within it. In practice, it means that you take one position in a dispute, with the other party settling on the opposite side.

Teenagers in particular are masters at adopting the opposite view. When a person growing up is just forming his or her own personality and identity, it is precisely conditioning or an adult who consults instructions that are things that get their surface tense. So to avoid that feeling, they often try to do the exact opposite of what is expected of them in that situation, even if their hearts really say that the proposed option is actually the best option. 

However, this is certainly not just a phenomenon for teenagers. Even if it occurs less strongly and less frequently, it is common for people to strive to adhere to a different, mainstream non-mainstream mindset throughout adult life.

Take, for example, a 5-year-old boy who refuses to eat vegetables from his plate. You demand that he finish eating everything that has been put on the plate, but it seems to resonate with deaf ears: he refuses to eat his carrots or pieces of zucchini at all. If you keep sweating and nag him to eat everything, the situation will end badly. You will give up and he will end up running joyfully and contentedly with his games.

The thing is not so simple that a child could just be forbidden to eat them. He would walk out of the situation and we would have to eat the leftovers from the table in our own showers. So it’s a good idea to prepare for the situation in advance and make the vegetables look more appealing:  shape them so that they look completely flat and dull as opposed to: make them funny mouthfuls that make dining an entertaining experience. 

In this way, we apply the principles of reverse psychology by changing the appearance of food to make it look more appealing. All of us have at some point in our lives been in a situation where curiosity arises precisely because we know something is forbidden.  This happens equally among adults as well as children, as parents tend to forbid their children from doing things they themselves used to find tremendously fun.

Another reason to become a kind of confrontation may arise from the self-confidence that a person feels in a given situation. If you feel insecure and someone encourages you to take a risk, you will most likely act in a more conventional or less out-of-mainstream way. 

Similarly, the other way around, when we feel confident, we tend to consider a higher-risk option much more likely, precisely when someone is trying to get us to choose a safer path.

Thus, settling on the opposite side in these cases does not usually determine which side a person will eventually settle on, but it has been proven to have a big impact on which side a person leans strongly in making a decision.

Perhaps the example given earlier of a child refusing to eat the vegetables on his plate is very simple. However, it should be noted that  reverse psychology is very often used in business, among other things.

Let’s take another example: a company offers voluntary courses to its employees. However, as the courses will only be held after their work has been completed, no one will register for them. Therefore, the company manager informs the employees that starting next month, the number of courses will be cut in half and that the resources to provide them will run out.

With this strategic move, the company is not really going to remove courses from its offering, but to make employees realize that they have valuable resources at their disposal  and that if no one uses them, they will be removed from the range altogether. After all, no one wants to lose anything of value, even though it may be that man had not understood the true dignity and benefit of the matter at the time it was bestowed upon him.

The three stages of applying reverse psychology

It’s not, of course, about “denying things” all the time in life to get other people to do what we want. There are certain “conditions” that prevent manipulation from becoming a nasty habit:

1 – To whom do you apply it and why?

Answer this question before you try the reverse psychology technique. If your goal is to get your child to dress quickly before leaving school, or get him or her to stop tapping the TV, then give back, but if your  goal is to convince your customer to buy a new product on sale, you may want to think again. 

2 – What effects can it have?

If you release your child from housework, but he ends up doing them anyway, it goes well. But sometimes, however, your plan doesn’t end up working as expected,  with your child responding with a grateful and cheerful voice: “great thing, now I can start playing video games again.”

3 – How free does that person want to feel?

The greater his need for self-determination  (the need to feel that the decisions he makes are based on his own states of will), the more likely he is to follow a different path than the one we suggested to him. An example is  a person who is reluctant to take orders from other people. It is very unlikely that the application of reverse psychology to such a person would do great.