Section 14

In Robert Cialdini’s book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion there’s an interesting discussion of people’s reactions to censorship.

The chapter on scarcity talks about how a perception of scarcity makes something more desirable. It covers how “compliance professionals” (i.e. salespeople, advertisers, con-artists, etc.) use scarcity to push people into making buying decisions and how being told that we can’t have something makes us want it more (”psychological reactance”).

In the case of censorship, being told that we’re not allowed to read or view something makes us all the more eager to do so. Moreover,

The intriguing thing about the effects of censoring information is not that audience members want to have the information more than they did before; that seems natural. Rather, it is that they come to believe in the information more, even though they haven’t received it. For example, when University of North Carolina students learned that a speech opposing coed dorms on campus would be banned, they became more opposed to the idea of coed dorms. Thus, without ever hearing the speech, they became more sympathetic to its argument.

This raises the worrisome possibility that especially clever individuals holding a weak or unpopular position can get us to agree with that position by arranging to have their message restricted. The irony is that for such people - members of fringe political groups, for example - the most effective strategy may not be to publicize their unpopular views, but to get those views officially censored and then to publicize the censorship.

Perhaps the authors of [the United States’] Constitution were acting as much as sophisticated social psychologists as staunch civil libertarians when they wrote the remarkably permissive free-speech provision of the First Amendment. By refusing to restrain free speech, they may have been attempting to minimize the chance that new political notions would win support via the irrational cause of psychological reactance.

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