Psychological reactivity: what is it?

Why do we change our behavior depending on whether we are being watched or not? Science explains it.

Human beings are fundamentally social animals, and this means that they adapt their behavior depending on the social context in which they find themselves. But the social character of our species is very different from that of other forms of life..

Just as social insects such as ants can live in large colonies, they are not aware of it: they lack the ability to imagine the concept of "other" and "self". We, on the other hand, are social not only because we live collectively, but also because we think about the mental states of others. This, however, has a side effect called psychological reactivity..

What is psychological reactivity?

In psychology, reactivity is a concept that serves to designate the tendency of individuals to modify their behavior when they feel that someone is observing them.. The presence or absence of psychological reactivity causes us to behave in one way or another, whether we are alone or in company. In fact, reactivity may not exist in contexts where we are surrounded by many people, precisely because the fact of being in a crowded place may make us think that no one is going to notice us. What matters is the fact that we are aware that someone is watching us, not so much our physical proximity to other people who might see us.

Thus, it is possible that psychological reactivity it is possible that psychological reactivity may appear at times when we are alone, if we come to believe that entities are watching us.If we come to believe that there are disembodied entities watching us, which is typical of magical thinking. But it is not necessary for this belief to be very firm; the simple fact of evoking a person to whom we want to make a good impression can make us, without realizing it, behave in a way that is somewhat more similar to how we would behave if that person were really observing us.

It is this phenomenon that makes, for example, Social Psychology not only study the influence that others have on the person, but also the influence that imaginary entities that are perceived as real or partially real in the here and now have on the person.

That is why psychological reactivity is a complex phenomenonIt depends both on how we perceive our environment and on cognitive elements and our imagination. Therefore, it is difficult to control and to study, since imagination plays a role in it, and it cannot be modified in a predictable way from outside the individual.

Moreover, reactivity always contains a scale of intensity: changing our behavior by remembering a teacher to whom we owe a lot is not the same as doing so when we learn that thousands of people are watching us through a television camera. In the second case, the influence of others will be much more noticeable, and will have an impact on practically all our gestures.

Psychological reactivity in research

But if the concept of psychological reactivity is useful for anything, it is for to take it into account in research based on the observation of individuals.. 

One of the principles of science is the goal of studying natural processes without intervening in them, but psychological reactivity is a strong interference where behavioral researchers are trying to learn about the behavior of humans or other animals with developed nervous systems: its very presence causes individuals to behave differently than they would if they were not the subjects of scientific study, and thus the results obtained are contaminated. the results obtained are contaminated. 

In psychology, as in any science, it is essential to know how to delimit well the type of phenomena being studied, that is, to isolate the variables in order to focus on what we want to investigate, and psychological reactivity can produce results that are not representative of those mental or social processes that we are trying to know better.

This means that the presence of psychological reactivity in scientific research poses a threat to its internal validity, i.e., to its ability to find findings related to the object of study it was intended to investigate, and not to something else.that is, in terms of its ability to find findings related to the object of study that was to be investigated, and not to something else. For example, if a research project aims to analyze the behavioral patterns of a particular ethnic group when making purchasing decisions, the results obtained could actually reflect the way in which the members of this group want to be seen by Westerners, without the researchers realizing it.

The Hawthorne effect

The Hawthorne effect is a type of psychological reactivity that occurs when subjects participating in research know they are being observed.

It is the type of psychological reactivity typical of behavioral research.It presents different variants, such as the John Henry effect, which occurs when a group of subjects modify their behavior when they imagine that they are part of the control group of an experiment, or the Pygmalion effect, in which the volunteers in a research study adapt their behavior voluntarily or involuntarily so that the main hypothesis defended by the experimenters is confirmed. This phenomenon is often preceded by the experimenter effect, which occurs when the researchers themselves give clues as to what their intentions are and what result they expect to obtain.

How to avoid psychological reactivity in research?

Psychological reactivity is usually controlled by making the people who participate in a study know the minimum about it. In social psychology, for example, it is customary to conceal almost all information about the objective of the studies, and sometimes lies are made, as long as this does not go against the integrity and dignity of the persons, and it is made clear what the experiment is about after the observations have been made.

Double-blind studies are among those that are best designed to prevent the occurrence of psychological reactivity, since in them neither the subjects nor the subjects themselves are involved in the study.In double-blind studies, neither the subjects being studied nor those collecting the "raw" data about them know what the objective of the research is, thus avoiding the Pygmalion and experimenter effects.