NCT03899168

Confirmation Bias Towards Treatments of Depressive Disorders in Social Tagging

How Confidence in Prior Attitudes, Social Tag Popularity, and Source Credibility Shape Confirmation Bias Toward Antidepressants and Psychotherapy in a Representative German Sample: Randomized Controlled Web-Based Study

• Status: Completed
• Phase: N/A
• Study type: Interventional
• Enrollment: 520 (actual)
• Sponsor: Leibniz-Institut für Wissensmedien · Academic / Other
• Sex: All
• Age: 18 Years – 60 Years
• Healthy volunteers: Accepted

Summary

The study examines whether people primarily want to confirm their prior attitudes in health-related information search, in an online environment using social tags for navigation. Participants were looking for information on the treatment of depression with antidepressants and psychotherapy. They were randomly assigned to two groups with either high or low credibility of the community who provides social tags, and two groups where participants' confidence in prior attitudes was heightened or lowered, and to two groups where either antidepressant tags were more popular or psychotherapy was more popular. The investigators measured attitude change toward the treatments and also navigation behavior.

Detailed description

In health-related, Web-based information searches, people should select information in line with expert (vs nonexpert) information, independent of their prior attitudes and consequent confirmation bias. This study aimed to investigate confirmation bias in mental health-related information searches, particularly (1) if high confidence worsens confirmation bias, (2) if social tags eliminate the influence of prior attitudes, and (3) if people successfully distinguish high and low source credibility. In total, 520 participants of a representative sample of the German Web-based population were recruited via a panel company. Among them, 48.1% (250/520) participants completed the fully automated study. Participants provided prior attitudes about antidepressants and psychotherapy. The investigators manipulated (1) confidence in prior attitudes when participants searched for blog posts about the treatment of depression, (2) tag popularity -either psychotherapy or antidepressant tags were more popular, and (3) source credibility with banners indicating high or low expertise of the tagging community. The investigators measured tag and blog post selection, and treatment efficacy ratings after navigation.

Conditions

• Major Depressive Disorder, Recurrent
• Depressive Episode
• Depressive Disorder, Major
• Depression

Interventions

Type	Name	Description
OTHER	Social Tag Popularity	The relative size of treatment tags in a tag cloud was either larger for antidepressant treatments or psychotherapy treatments.
OTHER	Confidence in Prior Attitudes	Participants thought back of situations in which they were either confident or doubtful about their own knowledge. This should elicit a mindset where participants are more or less confident about their own prior attitudes.
OTHER	Source Credibility	The source credibility of the community that allegedly collected and labelled the blog posts was either high or low in terms of expertise. Either experts (high credibility) or first semester students (low credibility) did allegedly collect blog posts. This was indicated by banners on top of the navigation platform in the internet browser.

Timeline

• Start date: 2014-11-14
• Primary completion: 2014-11-14
• Completion: 2014-11-14
• First posted: 2019-04-02
• Last updated: 2019-04-02