Adopting the outward opposite of an impulse one cannot acknowledge, often with conspicuous intensity.
Freud's 1905 mechanism. It shares the evidential caveat of other psychoanalytic mechanisms: culturally pervasive, clinically influential, and without the experimental support the biases in this ledger have.
In practice
- A newcomer anxious about fitting in becomes the loudest defender of the team's customs, and means it.
- The observable pattern that survives is narrower: conspicuous intensity about a rule is weak evidence about the person's own conduct, and treating it as strong evidence is where the concept is misused.
- Standing
- Same evidential caveat as other psychoanalytic mechanisms.
- Further reading
- Wikipedia
- Subject
- Psychology & Behavior
- Essay
- Theories of the mind, from the lab to the bookshop