People believe that treatments for illnesses are effective when they target the cause of the illness. Prior work suggests that biological essentialist explanations of mental illness lead people to prefer medications or other pharmacological treatments. However, prior work has not distinguished between biological and essentialist explanations. In…

Understanding how mental health treatments benefit those who receive treatment comes with a challenge: Often different people involved in treatment have different impressions of the treatment's ultimate effects. How do people reconcile these different reports to understand the true benefit of treatment? In a series of 4 experiments, we tested…