Reactance and future narratives

The louder someone insists a particular future is inevitable, the more people push back. Not because the future described is necessarily wrong, but because the way it’s communicated threatens their sense of agency. This pattern has a name in psychology: reactance.

The mechanism

Jack Brehm described psychological reactance in 1966 as the motivational counter-drive that kicks in when people perceive a threat to their freedom of action.¹ The trigger isn’t the content of a message. It’s the perceived elimination of choice. Tell someone they must do something, and they’ll want to do the opposite. It’s an adaptive defense of autonomy.

This maps directly onto how futures are communicated. When a future narrative is framed as deterministic (“AI will replace most jobs, adapt or fall behind”), it strips the audience of perceived agency. The narrative becomes a mandate, not an invitation. And mandates trigger reactance.

Why future narratives are particularly reactive

Three things make futures communication especially prone to triggering reactance:

Deterministic framing. L.M. Sacasas calls this the “Borg Complex”: the rhetorical move of declaring resistance futile, dismissing legitimate concerns as nostalgia, and equating skepticism with backwardness.² Laura Forlano’s concept of “technovisions” describes the cultural infrastructure behind this: mythologies that present technological progress as both inevitable and unquestionable.³ Both describe the surface rhetoric of what Mar Hicks identifies as a power move: saying a technology is inevitable puts enormous power in the hands of the people who make the technology.

Anticipatory reactance. A 2025 study found that reactance to anticipated future restrictions is significantly stronger than reactance to restrictions already in place.⁴ For futures communication, this matters: a scenario describing future freedom losses generates resistance now, even though nothing has happened yet. The not-yet-real quality of futures amplifies the threat.

Avoidance framing. “We must prevent catastrophe” triggers more reactance than “imagine what we could build.” Catastrophe-preventing narratives produce more anger, more counter-arguing, and more negative perception of the communicator than possibility-exploring ones.⁵ Feinberg and Willer demonstrated this empirically: apocalyptic climate scenarios actually reduced climate change belief among people with strong just-world convictions.⁶

The limit of the reactance frame: congealed futures

Here’s the important counterargument. Reactance requires that people perceive an external threat to their freedom. But the most powerful future imaginaries don’t feel like external threats at all. They’ve become background knowledge: “congealed discourses” so deeply naturalized that imagining alternatives requires conscious effort.⁷

AI as of early 2026 is a useful case study because the same narrative (“AI will fundamentally transform everything”) produces radically different responses across the population, simultaneously:

There are people in full reactance mode, and the movement is gaining visibility. Communities fighting data center construction, widespread disgust at AI-generated slop, artists and writers pushing back against copyright erosion, a broader counter-movement that rejects not just specific applications but the entire inevitability framing. For these people, the meta-narrative is not settled at all. It’s an active threat to their autonomy, and they’re fighting it.

Then there are the enthusiastic adopters. People who genuinely embrace the narrative: early users who feel empowered by the tools, professionals chasing competitive advantage. Whole communities building around AI capabilities. For them, the same narrative that triggers reactance in others affirms their sense of agency. They’re actively choosing this future, which is the opposite of a congealed discourse.

And then there’s the growing middle: people who have accepted the meta-narrative as background reality without much enthusiasm or resistance. For them, the debate has shifted from whether AI will reshape things to how. This group is closest to the congealed-futures dynamic described above.

What makes this theoretically interesting: reactance theory predicts exactly this divergence. The same message produces different responses depending on how much autonomy someone perceives. The narrative “AI will change everything” is a freedom threat if you feel it’s being imposed on you, an opportunity if you feel you’re choosing it, and invisible if it’s become part of your background assumptions about reality. Same narrative, three responses, depending on where you stand.

This is where concepts like Condensation of Future Imaginaries and Present futures add depth: they describe the slow, cultural process that moves narratives from contested to assumed. But the AI case shows that this process doesn’t happen uniformly. Narratives can be congealed for one segment of the population while still actively contested by another.

So reactance and resignation sit on a spectrum. Light, specific autonomy threats produce active resistance. Massive, naturalized ones collapse into apathy. The key moderator: perceived self-efficacy. Florence Gaub puts it well: fear subsides when people feel they have the capability to meet the future.⁸

Stages of narrative absorption

The reactance-resignation spectrum isn’t static. It’s a process. As a future narrative matures from fresh provocation to settled background knowledge, the psychological response shifts. Different groups move through these stages at different speeds, and a single narrative can sit at multiple stages simultaneously. But the dominant public discourse tends to follow a trajectory:

Reactance. The narrative is new and feels like an external imposition. Active pushback: “This won’t happen,” “We don’t want this.” The freedom threat is sharp and identifiable. This is where most counter-movements start.

Selective resistance. The meta-narrative gains ground, but resistance migrates to concrete manifestations. The fundamental premise is partially accepted; the fight shifts to specific implementations. AI in early 2026 sits squarely here.

Negotiation. The meta-narrative is accepted. Debate is about terms, not direction. How will AI reshape work, not whether. At this stage, reactance only fires on specifics, never on the frame itself.

Naturalization. The narrative becomes invisible as narrative. It’s just how things are. This is Condensation of Future Imaginaries as endpoint: the future imaginary has fully congealed. Reactance is structurally impossible because there’s no perceived external force to resist.

The analogy to grief stages isn’t accidental. At its core, this process involves loss: the loss of perceived alternatives. But unlike grief, where the lost thing was real, future narratives construct the loss. You’re mourning options that someone else declared impossible. Which means the process is potentially reversible. When abstract narratives translate into concrete personal consequences, what felt like settled reality can become contestable again. My hunch is that we’ll see this with AI over the coming years.

The participatory bypass

If reactance fires because people receive futures as mandates, the structural fix is to make them co-authors. Participatory futures methods structurally bypass the autonomy-threat mechanism. Japan’s Future Design Movement has people role-play as residents of 2060: you’re not being persuaded, you’re imagining yourself.⁹ The Anti-Dystopia framework works similarly: it neither prescribes utopias nor paralyzes with dystopias, but opens space for imperfect, contested, actively shaped futures.

Change management research corroborates this at a more proximate scale. Coch and French’s 1948 field experiment found that workers who participated in planning organizational changes showed far less resistance than those who received identical changes as mandates.¹⁰ If participation reduces reactance for concrete, near-term changes within a single organization, the mechanism should hold at least as strongly for abstract futures where the autonomy threat is harder to counter with evidence.

This connects to what Critical Futures Studies has argued for decades: No future is neutral, and the way we communicate futures is itself a political act. The reactance lens adds a psychological mechanism to that claim. It explains why deterministic futures fail as communication, beyond the intellectual critique.

Open questions

• What determines whether a future narrative produces reactance (active resistance) or resignation (apathy)? And can communicators influence that threshold?
• Does “this future will come” empirically produce more reactance than “this future could come”? This has never been directly tested in a futures context.
• How do you make congealed futures visible as contestable narratives again, especially for non-academic audiences?

As of early 2026, no academic publication directly applies reactance theory to futures communication. The connection is an emerging synthesis, supported by adjacent empirical work from climate communication, health communication, and change management. It seems like a gap worth filling.