There’s this thing called “reverse psychology.” It’s a verbaltechnique that gets someone to do the opposite of what you tellthem. It’s an extremely successful strategy when dealing withrebellious people and adolescents (or am I being redundant?).

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I used it a lot as a kid when dealing with my peers. It worked,too. At least until I told them the secret behind my persuasivesuccess.

Once they realized what I was doing, it became whollyineffective. (That’s when, I can reveal all these decades later, Isuccessfully employed what I called “reverse” reversepsychology.)

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While reverse psychology is generally aimed at a specifictarget, it can often ricochet and come back to hit the sender.Robert Cialdini discovered this long ago when the National ForestService inadvertently told people it was OK to steal petrified wood– the exact opposite of the Service’s intention.

More recently, behavioral finance researchers discovered thesame phenomenon takes place within the retirement savings environment (see,“A 401k Fiduciary Must Know Where Gamification Failsin Encouraging Retirement Savings,” FiduciaryNews.com,August 9, 2016).

If you’ve ever played a video game (or are an avid golf fan),you know what a leaderboard is. For those not familiar with thepurpose of a leaderboard, it is to motivate players to move up inrank. For golfers, it means playing better at the next hole. Forgamers, it means throwing another quarter in the slot and trying toget to the number one slot.

Leaderboards have been pretty good at influencing the behaviorof their targets. It’s not reverse psychology. It’s more like asubliminal “play me” – a kind of peer pressure that keeps gnawingat you until you’re either in the number one position or fresh outof quarters.

It’s enough to drive you berserk. And I ought to know. TheLorelei of the leaderboard captured me in the early 1980s on avideo game called “Berserk” (if that just spontaneously summonedthe robotic voice within to repeat “Intruder Alert! IntruderAlert!” we are fellow travelers of the joystick kind).

Here’s the odd thing. While leaderboards have a proven successrecord when it commons to persuasion in most fields, they are acomplete failure in the realm of retirement saving.

In fact, their effect not only fails to persuade people to save,it actually works as a deterrent when it comes to retirementsaving. Research shows disclosing leaderboard-like information, infact, dissuades people from saving more.

Why is this so?

In an example of inadvertent reverse psychology, showing peopletheir place in the game of economic prowess turns out to be verydepressing when your economic prowess doesn’t amount to much.Rather than play the game, these folks just pack up and go home –quite possibly to lose themselves playing endless hours of GrandTheft Auto.

I’ve often wondered if we could inspire greater savings rates bygamifying the 401k education system. I’ve even gone so far asworking out game-like designs in my head.

Short of advocating some of the behavioral techniques empiricalevidence has shown really do work, most of my thoughts along theselines have stayed within my cranial cavity.

Thank goodness.

Which gets us to those dire headlines.

Have you ever heard the expression “scared straight”? It’s whenyou try to scare someone into doing the right thing. I’m sureeditors around the media world feel they’re employing this tacticwhenever they come up with headlines like “Almost Half ofMillennial Women Aren’t Saving for Retirement,” (MONEY, August 4,2016) or “What Nest Egg? Two-Thirds of Americans Can’t Cover $1,000Emergency,” (Fox Business, August 4, 2016).

Those headlines may scare the reader, but if you look closely atthem, they also do something else. They’re telling the reader it’sOK to not save.

After all, half of millennial women and two-thirds of Americanscan’t be wrong, can they? If they’re not saving – and presumablythey’re living life exactly as they want to – what compellingreason is there for other people to change their lifestyle tosave?

Reverse psychology. It pops up in the craziest ofplaces.