Live free and die: Expanding the terror management health model for pandemics to account for psychological reactance

According to the terror management health model (TMHM), life‐threatening health conditions have the potential to make people think about death, which triggers anxiety and motivates people to engage in defensive behaviors that may or may not facilitate health. This model has been used to explain health‐defeating reactions to the COVID‐19 pandemic (e.g., intentional nonadherence to mitigation guidelines) and to inform recommendations for current and future public health campaigns. Unfortunately, these recommendations do not account for psychological reactance, an aversive motivational state known to undermine persuasive messages. For this reason, we argue that the TMHM for pandemics is incomplete in its current form and should be expanded to account for reactance processes. We also highlight two reactance‐reducing strategies (inoculation messages and restoration postscripts) that could potentially increase the efficacy of the public health messages proposed by the TMHM for pandemics. We conclude with a discussion of how psychological reactance theory can augment the TMHM more broadly. Overall, we hope to illustrate both the utility and feasibility of considering more than one theoretical approach when designing empirically supported public health messages.