Why Can the Same Proposal Seem Worse When It Comes from an Opponent?

Two departments are negotiating a hybrid-work arrangement. If a proposal is anonymous, people may compare its office-day and meeting rules carefully. Once they learn that it came from a long-standing rival department, the very same terms can look self-serving. This tendency to reduce a proposal’s appeal because it comes from an opponent is often called reactive devaluation.

In related studies, participants evaluated identical peace proposals attributed to different sides; the source label changed some evaluations. That does not mean people are always irrational. An opponent’s identity can provide genuine information about motives, credibility and the likelihood of implementation. The problem arises when “who said it” becomes “the content must be bad”, so the actual terms are no longer examined.

Reactive devaluation overlaps with ordinary distrust, but its focus is narrower: the opponent source changes the proposal’s perceived value. It should not be treated as a fixed explanation for every disagreement either; the effect varies with conflict intensity, group identity and context. A sounder response is to separate the proposal’s text, its source and one’s inferences about motives, then assess the terms one by one. Source can be evidence, but it should not replace judgement.

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https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0022002702046004003