Countercontrol is an option for anyone who is controlled by others.

A controller sets the scene for countercontrol with the goals they pursue.

A countercontroller turns the tables on their controller.

However, countercontrol can be thwarted by changing goals.

In 1953, the great behaviorist B. F. Skinner said that being controlled was not nice. Because of this, Skinner warned that “the individual who undertakes to control other people is likely to be countercontrolled by all of them” (1953, p. 321). According to Skinner (1953), a person who countercontrols, “may show an emotional reaction of anger or frustration... which injures or is otherwise aversive to the controller” (p. 321).

Have you ever felt like someone is winding you up? Maybe they’re pushing your buttons or yanking your chain. Do you sometimes think that a comment was made to get a rise out of you? As a schoolteacher, I often heard these things discussed. When I discovered countercontrol, I thought it could explain what was going on, so I did a Ph.D. to study it (Carey & Bourbon, 2005).

As far as I know, my work was the first time young people had been asked about countercontrol. I gave questionnaires to hundreds of students. About 10 percent of them said they countercontrolled their teacher frequently (Carey & Bourbon, 2005). The students told me they could do things like make their teacher cry, yell, or run out of the room. In a class of 30 students, having three of them countercontrolling could really ruin your day.

Since countercontrol can be bad, knowing how it happens might be helpful. And no surprise, control is key.

Control is making things be the way we want (Powers, 1998). And we’re really good at it. Setting the table for dinner is control. The table is not set. It’s nearly dinnertime. So we do what we need to do to make the table “just right.”

What’s just right comes from goals. If the goal is to serve a three-course meal, then there will be a certain just-right state for the table. But if the goal is to play Warhammer, a different “just-right” state will be needed.

Control is all about goals and what we do to bring them about. Chasing goals gets interesting when different people use the same environment. Sometimes our goals can even be about those other people. Rick Marken and I talk about these social affairs in our book Controlling People (2016). Countercontrol adds another piece to the getting-along-in-a-social-group puzzle.

Countercontrol is only possible when one person tries to control another’s actions. If I have a goal of seeing you act a certain way, then achieving it is up to you. And you can use this situation to prevent me from achieving my goal.

Suppose your boss likes you to maintain eye contact when they are speaking to you. So the boss has a goal about where your eyes are looking. But your boss can’t directly affect the position of your eyes. They rely on you to achieve their goal.

If you’re not particularly happy with your boss, helping them achieve their goal might not be a high priority. Perhaps irritating your boss is what you have in mind. All you have to do is look a little bit away from your boss’s eyeballs, and they won’t get what they want. You might even notice them moving their head around to get into your line of sight.

On the other hand, if your boss didn’t care where you looked while they were talking to you, you wouldn’t be able to use your eye movements to push their buttons.

Whenever you’re being wound up by others, have you ever noticed what your goals are at that time? If you want your students to sit with straight backs and feet flat on the floor, for example, it will be easy for them to mess with your goal. But countercontrol will be much harder if your goal is to check in with the students on their progress and any help they need.

I don’t know about you, but I find it liberating to think that I can influence whether someone yanks my chain. They can only do the yanking if I’ve handed them the chain in the first place. By understanding control, countercontrol, and how goals work, we can all get more of what we want more of the time.

Whenever we have goals about how someone else acts, countercontrol is possible. Directing the actions of another person will interfere with things that they want. Setting goals about what we, rather than others, will do and how we will be in any situation makes countercontrol much less likely.

We have the best chance of nailing our own goals when we help others get theirs. Maybe it’s one of nature’s little safeguards that stopping others from getting their goals ultimately prevents us from being all that we can be. Life is best when we help, rather than hinder, the control of others.

Carey, T. A., & Bourbon, W. T. (2005). Countercontrol: What do the children say? School Psychology International, 26(5), 595-615.

Marken, R. S., & Carey, T. A. (2016). Controlling People: The paradoxical nature of being human. Brisbane: Australian Academic Press.

Powers, W. T. (1998). Making Sense of Behavior: The meaning of control. New Caanan, CT: Benchmark.

Skinner, B. F. (1953). Science and Human Behavior. New York: Free Press.

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