I never heard of “reverse psychology” in 4 years of undergrad and six years of grad school. When looking it up online I found numerous sources they all admit two things. One it’s hard to define and has multiple definitions. Two and related to point one, it is hard to recognize since in psychology we don’t have it officially defined. When you don’t have something well defined it allows people to “shift the goal posts” in using the term. This is when you change the definition to fit your agenda in a given situation. A related example is alcoholism or alcoholic. This term has a poor definition at best. We all have a general idea that the person has trouble with drinking too much. Yet we have an official diagnosis… “Alcohol use Disorder” with specifiers of, Mild, Moderate and Severe. These specifiers are defined by the number of symptoms present.

Reverse psychology as a term is just like alcoholism/alcoholic. You get to change the definition to achieve your agenda. This is outright manipulation on the part of the person using these terms and others. As I wrote about “daddy issues” people shift the definition to achieve their biased agenda. Look up “daddy issues” in google and you will find absolutely contradictory and diametrically opposed usages of the term rendering it useless. In actual communication with people they may define “daddy issues” differently and in different situations.

In psychology and other scientifically studied fields you need a commonly agreed upon definition. This is referred to as reliability. If you don’t have a reliably agreed upon common definition you automatically do not have validity. Which in common speech means we don’t know what is right. If you define a concept in a way that automatically is different than me and we don’t agree which concept/definition is right.

When teaching students, the importance of a definition and or agreement of a concept I would give this following example. I divided the class in half. I said suppose each side of the room has equal weight of what type of fruit I will show in the picture next. I would then show a picture of an apple to one half of the room. Then the other half a picture of an orange. When both sides were able to see it I then had the students vote on which type of fruit was present in the picture on the next of my power point. It was a very fuzzy picture that was very ambiguous.  Easy to understand each side voted on what they saw initially, a cognitive prompt. I pointed out, well now we are at a standstill. What do we report to the rest of the university?

This illustrates the problem with a lack of common definition of a given concept. Which is correct, right, or “true.”

Now keep in mind this happens in all sciences. We need the concept or idea or physical thing to have an agreed upon definition.

In conclusion, what do we do about the above main concept of reverse psychology? Then this is obviously extended to alcoholism, and daddy issues and many other concepts in psychology and the other sciences. We cannot use our language in scientific fields idiosyncratically.