Damage Trust but Increase Cooperation? Putting Depression in Trust Game Lens

摘要: Depression is theoretically associated with poor social functioning and social impairments, but empirical evidence for poor trust or cooperative behavior among depressed patients is scarce and severely under-researched. Based on a revised version of Trust Game, the present study aimed to clarify the equivocal relationships between depression, trust and altruistic cooperative behaviors, whilst taking into consideration of the potentially confounding effects of trait propensity to trust and locus of control. In the new version of Trust Game, each pairs of participant played the role of an investor and a trustee respectively. The investor player first receives an endowment of a given amount of money and decides how much he/she would like to invest. The invested endowment is then tripled and given to the trustee, played by the other participant who decides how much repayment he would like to return. This procedure is repeated for 10 rounds, trust behavior and altruistic cooperative behavior are then quantified as the averaged invested endowments and repayments, respectively. Results revealed that depressive symptoms negatively predicted invested endowments (i.e., the trust behavior) after the trait propensity to trust was controlled for, but a positive relationship between depressive symptoms and repayments (i.e., the altruistic cooperative behavior) was found, which was significantly moderated by the external locus of control. Specifically, in those with higher scores in externality, depressive symptoms actually resulted in a decrease (rather than an increase) in altruistic cooperation. This work, for the first time, clarified the relationships between depression and trust and altruistic cooperation by introducing trait factors such as propensity to trust and locus of controls, providing a new sight of exploring the effects of depressive symptoms on social functions.