“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,” Dr. Moore, a psychological researcher and a professor at the University of California, Berkeley’s 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,” Dr. 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.
Dr. 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,” Dr. 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 nondepressed subjects, as the 1979 team did, which she said was unusual and made it difficult to interpret any results.
