Depression, Perceived Inferiority, and Interpersonal Behavior: Evidence for the Involuntary Defeat Strategy

Abstract

The social competition theory (Gilbert, 2000; Sloman, 2000) attributes depression to activation of the Involuntary Defeat Strategy (IDS), which is postulated to have evolved to forestall defeated individuals from engaging in potentially dangerous contests with superior rivals. We sought to test this theory using an event–contingent recording method. One hundred and thirteen employed adults completed records describing their social interactions over 20 days; the records assessed perceived inferiority to the other, perceived partner dominance, perceived partner warmth, and the participant's level of dominant, submissive, quarrelsome, and agreeable behavior. Multilevel modeling was used to examine how depression moderated relations between perceived inferiority, partner behavior, and the participant's behavior. Among more depressed participants, partner dominance was strongly related to perceived inferiority, and both perceived inferiority and partner dominance predicted more submissive behavior. The results were generally consistent with the hypothesis that the IDS is highly activated in depressed people.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 52 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.