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Are Depressed People More or Less Susceptible to Informational Social Influence?

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Abstract

When making judgments and decisions, people suffering from depression are often faced with opinions and advice from others (e.g., from their therapists) but it is unclear how their psychopathology alters the utilization of such information. This study is the first to examine whether depressed people are more or less susceptible to informational social influence. To this end, we employed the Judge–Advisor-System, which allows for a pure test of how people utilize information from others. We found that depressed participants had significantly higher advice taking values than non-depressed participants, which was mediated by self-esteem. A fine-grained analysis of these group differences revealed that depressed participants were more likely to revise their initial estimates after receiving advice than non-depressed people. Yet, once having decided to revise their estimates, depressed people did not weight advice more heavily. Theoretical implications concerning two qualitatively independent effects of depression on advice taking are discussed.

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Notes

  1. Admittedly, our sample size was rather small due to a limited number of eligible patients. We will further discuss this in the “Limitations” section.

  2. Other disorders like an anxiety disorder were permitted in the control group. Actually, just one participant in this group fulfilled the criteria for a lifetime diagnosis (panic disorder) but was remitted during study participation.

  3. We did not compensate the inpatient group with financial incentives because they were tested in the local hospital where a number of other studies were conducted. Since it is not common to compensate participants in this institution, we did not want to make any exceptions to this rule. Previous studies found that financial incentives reduce advice discounting (Bonaccio and Dalal 2006), so this inequality in payment could lead to a higher advice utilization in the control group. Therefore, the possible confound produces an effect in the opposite direction of the one postulated in our hypothesis.

  4. A Levene’s test revealed that the variance of both groups was not equal. Therefore, we report the results with corrected degrees of freedom.

  5. Another possibility to deal with such AT values is to change negative values to 0 and values above 1 to 1 (e.g., Gino 2008; Gino et al. 2009; Schultze et al. 2015). Hence, we re-ran the analyses, truncating the AT scores at 0 and 1 instead of excluding extreme values. These analyses yielded the same pattern of results.

  6. Self-esteem values were missing for five participants. Therefore, we removed these participants from model 2 in order to allow comparison of this model with models 3 and 4. Removing these participants did not change the pattern of results reported for models 1 and 2 in Table 2.

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Funding

The research reported in this article was supported by a grant from the Volkswagen Foundation for the project “Social conformity: Why do humans and monkeys make weak decisions under social influence?” (Az. 85 148) within the European Platform for Life Sciences, Mind Sciences, and the Humanities.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Psychology, University of Hildesheim, Universitätsplatz 1, 31141, Hildesheim, Germany

    Christine Hofheinz, Markus Germar & Andreas Mojzisch

  2. Institute of Psychology, Georg-August-University Göttingen, Göttingen, Germany

    Thomas Schultze

  3. Department of Psychology and Psychotherapy, Witten/Herdecke University, Witten, Germany

    Johannes Michalak

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  1. Christine Hofheinz
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  3. Thomas Schultze
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Correspondence to Christine Hofheinz.

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Conflict of Interest

Christine Hofheinz, Markus Germar, Thomas Schultze, Johannes Michalak and Andreas Mojzisch declare that they have no conflicts of interest.

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All procedures performed in the study involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards. The study was approved by the local ethics committee.

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All procedures followed were in accordance with the ethical standards of the responsible committee on human experimentation (national and institutional). Informed consent was obtained from all individual subjects participating in the study.

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Hofheinz, C., Germar, M., Schultze, T. et al. Are Depressed People More or Less Susceptible to Informational Social Influence?. Cogn Ther Res 41, 699–711 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10608-017-9848-7

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