The IOED in Mental Disorders Stigma

Abstract

Mental health conditions are a growing phenomenon in people’s daily life as people receive more pressure from the environment. It is worth noting that even though there is such an amount of mental patients, people still show deep-rooted stigma toward those with mental disorders. To find out the specific causes of discrimination, an unexplored factor - the illusion of explanatory depth (IEOD) - is one possible factors. IOED reflects a mismatch between understanding and belief. People perceive their understanding to be greater than it is. In this paper, we examined whether IOED is one of the causes of stigma toward people with depression and whether exposing IOED is a way to moderate the discrimination. An online survey with different tasks (explaining the symptoms and causes of depression VS. reading a paragraph describing symptoms and causes of the depression) were conducted on two groups of participants to measure the changes in their understanding and discrimination level both before and after exposing the IOED. The result was assessed using a two-way mixed ANOVA test and it demonstrates that IOED is present in people’s understanding of depression but not discrimination toward the illness.