A recent study published in The Journal of Social Psychology suggests that presenting people with exaggerated arguments in favor of a controversial topic might actually make them oppose it more strongly. By testing this persuasion technique on attitudes toward prostitution, researchers found that exposure to absurdly supportive messages tends to reduce favorable views on the issue and indirectly increases support for restrictive policies. These findings provide evidence that unconventional communication strategies can shift opinions on morally charged social issues.
Changing strongly held social beliefs remains a major challenge in psychology. People naturally process information defensively. When they encounter facts that contradict their existing views, they tend to evaluate that evidence in a way that protects their current opinions. Because of this defensive reaction, direct persuasion attempts using counter-arguments often fail to change minds.
In response, psychologists developed a technique called paradoxical thinking. This method involves presenting messages that agree with a person’s general stance but are exaggerated to an extreme or absurd degree. The goal is to prompt the listener to reject the extreme conclusion. By distancing themselves from the absurd argument, individuals might soften their original stance.
Psychologists sometimes call this process cognitive unfreezing, which refers to a temporary mental openness that allows people to reconsider their prior beliefs without feeling directly attacked. Most past experiments on paradoxical thinking have focused on political disagreements and intergroup conflicts. The authors of the new study wanted to test if this technique could influence views on a highly polarizing and morally loaded topic.
Uri Lifshin, a senior researcher at the Israel Center on Addiction and Mental Health and the psychology department at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, explained the study’s origins. “Daniella and Omer came up with the idea during the course ‘Psychology and Social Change’, in which students tried to apply various social psychological theories to promote social change,” Lifshin said, referring to co-authors Daniella Yaffe and Omer Kochav. “We were exploring the idea of using paradoxical thinking as an intervention in different social domains.”
Attitudes toward prostitution are widely varied and deeply tied to personal morals. Some people view prostitution as a consensual economic activity, while others see it as inherently harmful and exploitative. Because arguments against prostitution can sometimes feel like threats to individual freedom, people might resist standard negative messaging. To explore this dynamic, the scientists designed three experiments to see how readers would react to absurdly pro-prostitution messages.
In the first experiment, the researchers recruited an international sample of 231 adults through the social media platform Reddit. The group consisted of 114 men, 105 women, and 12 individuals who reported a different gender, with ages ranging from 18 to 66. Participants were randomly assigned to read one of four short articles about prostitution.
All the articles contained identical factual information about global prevalence, gender distribution, and reported psychological harms. The texts only differed in their concluding arguments. The moderate paradoxical article argued that prostitution should be allowed simply because it gives women a way to make easy money.
The extreme paradoxical article took a more drastic stance, arguing that prostitution should continue because men enjoy it and benefit from it psychologically. A negative message article concluded that prostitution must be stopped due to the severe harm it causes. Finally, a neutral article presented only the basic facts without any prescriptive conclusion.
After reading the assigned text, participants completed a survey measuring their attitudes toward prostitution, including their beliefs about the legality of the practice. They were also asked if they would be willing to sign a petition to make prostitution illegal, though the petition was fictitious. The results indicated that the moderate paradoxical message successfully reduced positive views on prostitution.
Participants who read the moderate pro-prostitution article reported less favorable attitudes toward the practice compared to those who read the neutral or negative articles. The extreme paradoxical text did not reliably differ from the comparison conditions in this first sample. While the messages did not directly cause massive shifts in petition signing, the researchers found an indirect effect.
The moderate paradoxical text shifted underlying attitudes. These adjusted viewpoints then predicted a higher willingness to sign the petition to ban prostitution. This suggests that the technique primarily operates by changing internal opinions before influencing outward behavior.
The scientists then conducted a second experiment to see if they could replicate these patterns in a different cultural setting. They recruited 103 Hebrew-speaking Israelis from Reddit, consisting of 88 men, 14 women, and one person of another gender, aged 18 to 47. This time, the researchers simplified the setup by removing the neutral article condition.
Participants were randomly assigned to read either the moderate paradoxical message, the extreme paradoxical message, or the standard negative message, all translated into Hebrew. Following the reading assignment, the sample answered the same questions regarding their views on prostitution and their willingness to sign the petition. In this Israeli sample, the extreme paradoxical condition proved to be the most effective.
Participants exposed to the extremely exaggerated message reported significantly less favorable attitudes toward prostitution than those in the moderate or negative groups. The success of the extreme message in this context caught the researchers off guard.
“We did not initially expect that the more extreme version of the absurd paradoxical statement about prostitution (that despite all the harm it can do, prostitution should be legal because men enjoy it) would be more effective than the moderate paradoxical message (that despite all the harm it can do, prostitution should be legal because it provides women with the opportunity to get relatively easy money),” Lifshin told PsyPost. “It was surprising to see that many people accepted the latter statement.”
Just as in the first experiment, the extreme paradoxical text did not directly alter petition signing. Instead, it indirectly increased willingness to sign by first shifting the participants’ attitudes.
For the third experiment, the researchers wanted to test the underlying psychological mechanism of paradoxical thinking. They hypothesized that the technique works precisely because people actively disagree with the absurd message. They recruited another group of Reddit users, resulting in a final sample of 97 adults aged 18 to 58. This group included 72 men, 23 women, and two non-binary individuals.
Participants were randomly divided into just two groups to read either the extreme paradoxical message or the standard negative message. Afterward, they rated how much they agreed or disagreed with the article they had just read, completed the attitude survey, and answered the petition question. The researchers found that participants agreed significantly less with the paradoxical message than with the negative message.
When analyzing the psychological pathways, the scientists noticed a distinct pattern in the paradoxical group. Strong disagreement with the absurd pro-prostitution article predicted less favorable attitudes toward the practice. These reduced favorable attitudes then predicted a higher likelihood of supporting restrictive policy actions.
In the negative message group, agreement operated in a standard persuasive manner, where agreeing with the text led to less favorable views on prostitution. This difference in pathways provides evidence that paradoxical thinking works specifically by triggering rejection of an exaggerated idea. When combining the data from all three experiments, representing 431 total participants, the overall trends became more pronounced. The combined analysis showed that the extreme paradoxical manipulation had a robust indirect effect on the behavioral intention to sign the petition to ban prostitution.
“The findings demonstrate that sometimes paradoxical thinking maneuvers can be more effective in affecting attitudes and behaviors than ordinary direct persuasion,” Lifshin said. “This highlights the potential use of the theory in different domains.”
However, the strategy is not without drawbacks. “There is both potential and risk in applying paradoxical thinking interventions as a persuasion technique,” Lifshin added. “The key is to consider the sensibility and variability within each context.”
The study has some limitations, including modest sample sizes and a high number of participants who had to be excluded because they failed attention checks. Additionally, the gender distribution in the second and third experiments was heavily skewed toward men. This imbalance makes it difficult to know how women might respond to similar messaging.
Lifshin pointed out that the findings require context. “First, that the effects of paradoxical interventions might be risky, as their effects may vary depending on factors like content and extremity,” he noted. “When poorly calibrated or delivered to the wrong audience, messages that are too moderate (or too exaggerated as found in previous studies) may reinforce rather than undermine the target attitude.”
“Accordingly, paradoxical thinking should be treated as a theoretically grounded approach that requires careful theoretical tailoring, ethical consideration, and testing before any practical application,” Lifshin said.
The authors also clarified their own stance on the study’s subject matter. “Second, the topic of legalization of prostitution itself is very sensitive and complex,” Lifshin added. “While there are many negative aspects of prostitution, we do not necessarily view it as entirely negative, nor do we believe that criminalizing sex work is the solution.”
Looking ahead, the researchers hope to test this technique in other areas. “We hope to be able to apply paradoxical thinking interventions to different domains,” Lifshin said. “It could for example be tested as a way to reduce prejudice, or to promote pro-environmental behaviors.”
“Currently we are thinking about testing paradoxical thinking interventions in the context of addictions (i.e., to reduce motivation for using substances or other addictive behaviors),” he noted.
“We hope that this work may inspire more work on applications of paradoxical thinking in important domains and highlight the need for theoretically grounded interventions for attitude change, what Tim Wilson and Greg Walton call ‘wise interventions’,” Lifshin said.
The study, “Paradoxical thinking and attitudes toward prostitution: preliminary experimental findings,” was authored by Daniella Yaffe, Omer Kochav, and Uri Lifshin.
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