1. Are Depressed People More or Less Susceptible to Informational Social Influence?
- Author
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Markus Germar, Thomas Schultze, Christine Hofheinz, Johannes Michalak, and Andreas Mojzisch
- Subjects
media_common.quotation_subject ,05 social sciences ,Self-esteem ,050109 social psychology ,Experimental and Cognitive Psychology ,050105 experimental psychology ,Test (assessment) ,Clinical Psychology ,Group differences ,0501 psychology and cognitive sciences ,Psychology ,Depression (differential diagnoses) ,media_common ,Psychopathology ,Clinical psychology ,Quality of Life Research ,Social influence - 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.
- Published
- 2017
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