Comparison of psychological reactance to determining the price of renting a house in the Corona period in Lindsay and Dillard & Shen

Psychological reactance theory assumes that individuals, when receiving a message that threatens their freedom; react by resisting that message. Landlords tend to set their rental price themselves. At the time of the corona, when the government set a lower rate to increase annual rents; there was a good opportunity to test this assumption. There are two patterns of psychological reactance, one involving the threat to freedom (Dillard and Shen, 2005) and the other without it (Lindsay, 20005), that the present study aims to compare them.

The research sample consisted of 395 landlords from Isfahan, Baharestan and Sepahan Shahr who were selected by convenience sampling method and responded to research tools including scales of attitude (Morgan and Miller, 2002), Behavioral Intention (Morgan, 2008), Freedom Threat (Dillard & Shen (2005); Lindsay (2005)), Psychological Reactance (Dillard & Shen, 2005), Reactance Restoration Scale (RRS) (Quick and Stephenson,2008), Source Appraisal (Miller et al., 2007), Anger (Dillard & Shen, 2005), and Negative Cognition (Dillard & Shen, 2005). Structural equation models (SEM) and item-response theory models (IRM) have been used to analyze the data.

The results showed that Dillard and Shen's (2005) model had good fitness and had better fitness than Lindsey (2005) model. Psychological reactance, in addition to affecting other variables (motivation, attitude, and source of evaluation); It reproduces anger and negative cognition, and considering these two emotional and cognitive components improves the structural features of the model. If a psychological reactance is considered without these components; the structural model has a low fit.

Messengers are advised to formulate and present the message in a way that provokes less psychological reactance to achieve less anger and negative cognition.