Forty-three years ago, two young
psychologists, Lauren B. Alloy and Lyn Y. Abramson, reported the results of a
simple experiment that led to a seminal idea in psychology.
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Their aim was to test the “helplessness theory”,
that depressed people tend to underestimate their ability to influence the
world around them.
Alloy and Abramson categorized college student
volunteers as depressed and non-depressed based on self-reported symptoms, and
provided each person with a button and a light that flashed occasionally. They
then asked the volunteers to assess how much control they had over the light
when they pressed the button.
What they discovered was surprising. The depressed people,
it turned out, had a more accurate reading of their ability to affect outcomes.
Thus was born the hypothesis of “depressive realism” — the idea that, at times,
depressed people have a more realistic view of their conditions because they
are free of the optimistic bias of their cheerful peers.
This idea, summarized in the original paper as
“sadder but wiser”, has been taught to decades of Intro Psych students and
cited more than 2,000 times by other scholars. It also percolated through
American culture, introducing the idea that depression, for all its pain, may
also provide its sufferers with some gifts.
A study published this month in the journal
Collabra: Psychology by Amelia S. Dev and others calls that conclusion into
question.
Recreating the original
experiment, in which subjects must assess whether their button-pushing affected
the light, the new research team found no association between depressive
symptoms and outcome bias. In one sample, the patients with more depressive
symptoms overestimated their control; in the second, depressive symptoms did
not predict any particular bias.
“Across two samples, we find no evidence that
depressive symptoms is tied to greater realism,” the study said.
Don A. Moore, one of the authors of the new study,
said that the team had coalesced around the question of whether “positive
illusions” can enhance performance, and that this had led them back to the 1979
study.
“Its impact has been huge, and it’s been pervasive
in so many aspects of research and pop culture that it can be hard to wind it
back up,” Moore, a psychological researcher and a professor at the University
of California, Berkeley, Haas School of Business, said of the original study.
Under the influence of this theory, many
psychologists taught that “a little bit of self-delusion is helpful for getting
through life”, he said. “You have to believe in yourself a little more than
reality warrants.”
“What we knew,” he said, “made us wonder whether
that effect would hold up.”
Already, a 2012 meta-analysis of 75 studies on
depressive realism had found that the overall effect of depressive realism was
small, and that results were influenced by the study’s methodology. But it
remained such a well-established notion that “we faced skeptical reviewers
along the way”, Moore said.
“If you’re trying to disprove a false positive that
has made its way into the literature, that is an uphill climb,” he said.
Alloy, one of the two psychologists who designed the
original experiment, said in an interview that she did not believe the new work
constituted a major challenge to depressive realism, because the research team
failed to directly replicate the original 1979 experiment.
“When they say they did a direct replication of our
study, they did not,” Alloy, a professor of psychology at Temple University,
said. “It’s not a major challenge. The original findings still hold.”
She said differences in the design of the two
experiments may account for the variance in results. The new team did not find
an “illusion of control” among the non-depressed subjects, as the 1979 team
did, which she said was unusual and made it difficult to interpret any results.
The new team repeatedly asked subjects to assess the
probability of the bulb lighting if they pushed the button throughout the
experiment, rather than waiting until the end, as the original researchers did.
Also, she said, the new researchers prescreened subjects for symptoms of
depression, rather than screening them on the day of the experiment, so their
mood may have shifted in that time.
She also said the research team recreated only the
second of the four experiments in the 1979 paper, which had the least robust
findings.
Finally, she took issue with the researchers’
characterization of depressive realism, which she said occurred only under
certain conditions.
“It simply isn’t true that depressed people are more
accurate in their perception of the world,” she said. “That is too broad and
general a statement.” Subsequent studies identified conditions under which
depressive realism was present, which led to “more nuanced, sophisticated
conclusions”, she said. “What’s out there in the public might not have kept up
with that.”
Over the four decades since Alloy and Abramson
published their paper, the “sadder but wiser” idea has not guided emerging
treatments. Clinicians have gravitated to cognitive behavioral therapy, which
helps depressed patients identify distortions in their thoughts.
“We would do a disservice to the client by accepting
that what they say is a reality, rather than through a gentle Socratic process,
to ask them to explore and examine their pattern of thinking,” said Allen
Miller, a clinical psychologist at the Beck Institute, who was not involved in
the study.
Miller described the new paper as “a reasonable
attempt to replicate it, which of course they were not able to do”.
Brian A. Nosek, a psychology professor at the
University of Virginia who coordinated the 2015 Reproducibility Project,
described the Dev study as “a solid piece of work, well designed and well
reported”.
“Inevitably, it does confront us to revise our
confidence in prior findings,” he said. “But no replication is definitive.”
A decade ago, when young scientists began efforts to
replicate published findings, they were often “seen as an attack” on
established researchers, Nosek said. Since then, though, they have “become much
more normalized” as part of an ongoing scientific dialogue. Still, he said, “we
all have our egos, and our findings are like possessions.”
And challenging blockbuster work like the 1979 study,
which “provoke such engagement with the mysteries of human behavior and the
mind”, has a ripple effect, he added.
“This is a classic finding that I really want to be
true, and many people do — it gives the Eeyores in all of us a little hope,” he
said. “That obviously has implications. Are we pulling down the icons of the
field? What is left when we pull those down?”
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