Some reforms, such as the passing of a prohibitive law or a binding agreement to solve a social dilemma, involve coercion. In hypothetical cases, participants sometimes said they would not support coerced reforms even though they acknowledged that the reforms would improve matters. Participants justified such resistance by noting that the reform would harm some group (despite helping many others), that a choice would be taken away that people ought to be able to make (i.e., that a right would be violated), or that the reform would produce an unfair distribution of costs or benefits. These results were found when participants indicated whether each justification was true or false (and their responses were correlated with their voting), when they chose justifications from a list, or when they provided open-ended responses. Participants also exhibited a status quo effect: They were more likely to vote against a reform than to vote to repeal the same reform once it was passed.
