NEW YORK — When a man fails to help out around the house, his poor performance might be related to a subconscious tendency to resist doing anything his wife wants, a new study suggests. Men and women are sure to argue about this one. In fact, the man and woman who led the study disagree on the meaning of the results. Psychologists have long known about ‘reactance,’ the tendency to do the exact opposite of what’s requested by a loved one or boss. The new study aimed to find out whether the phenomenon might occur at a subconscious level. Participants were asked to name a significant person they perceived as controlling their lives, and another who just wanted them to have fun. Then they were asked to discern words from jumbled letters on a computer screen while the names of the people they had mentioned were flashed subliminally. The names were flashed too quickly to be registered consciously. Subjects performed better when exposed to the name of the person who wanted them to have fun than when exposed to the controlling individual’s name. ‘Our participants were not even aware that they had been exposed to […]