Are depressed people simply more realistic in judging how much they are in control of their lives, while others view the world in a rosy light by living under the illusion that they are more in control than they are? That is the idea of ‘depressive realism’, a theory that has prevailed in science and popular culture for more than four decades. The problem is that it is not true, according to research from the Haas School of Business at the University of Berkeley (United States).
depression and control
“It’s an idea that has enough appeal that many people seem to believe it, but the evidence isn’t there to support it. The good news is that you don’t have to be depressed to understand the degree of control you have,” said Professor Don Moore, co-author of the study, which was published in the scientific journal Collabra: Psychology.
The concept of ‘depressive realism’ comes from a 1979 study of college students that examined whether they could predict the degree of control they had on whether a traffic light turned green when a button was pressed.
The original research concluded that depressed students were better at identifying when they had no control over the traffic lightswhile those who were not depressed tended to overestimate their level of control.
Moore and his colleagues set out replicate those results. The authors studied two groups of participants, who were examined for depression using a questionnaire. The first group, of 248 participants, came from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, an online service that provides paid pollsters and study participants from a variety of backgrounds, in this case all over the age of 18. The second group consisted of 134 college students who participated in exchange for college credit.
The researchers added or used more modern and robust measures for the study. For example, they added a mechanism to measure bias and experimentally varied the amount of control that the participants had.
Methodology
The participants performed a task similar to the one in the 1979 study. In 40 rounds, they each chose whether to press a button, after which a light bulb or a black box would appear. Each one had to find out if pressing (or not) the button influenced the light to come on. After the rounds, each reported the degree of control he had over light.
Both the online groups and the university student groups were divided into three experimental conditions. Each condition experienced different button-to-light relationships over the 40 rounds.
Participants in the first two conditions had no real control over the appearance of the light, but they did see it light up once. quarter or three quarters of the time, respectively. Participants in the third condition had some control, seeing the light three quarters of the time after pressing the button.
Conflicting results
The researchers were unable to replicate the results of the original study. In fact, the people in the online group with the highest level of depression they overestimated their control, which directly contradicts the original study. The researchers note that this finding may be due to anxiety rather than depression, an observation that Moore says warrants further study. In the college student group, depression levels had little impact on their view of control, according to the authors.
The researchers also checked the Overconfidence. Study participants were asked to estimate their score on an intelligence test. Depression also had no impact in this case.
The results undermined his belief in the ‘depressive realism’. “The study does not suggest that there are benefits to being depressed, so no one should be looking to depression as a cure for their cognitive biases,” Moore says.
Although depression does not improve judgment, the question of how to accurately measure our level of control in various situations has broader implications throughout life.
“We live with great uncertainty about the degree of control we have: over our careers, our health, our body weight, our friendships or our happiness. What actions can we take that really matter? If we want to make good decisions in life, it is very useful to know what we control and what not”, remacha Moore.