H Mercier
email: hugo.mercier@gmail.com

H Miton

UTILIZING SIMPLE CUES TO INFORMATIONAL DEPENDENCY

Keywords: Majority rule, Informational conformity, Informational dependency, Trustworthiness

Studies have shown that participants can adequately take into account several cues regarding the weight they should grant majority opinions, such as the absolute and relative size of the majority. However, participants do not seem to consistently take into account cues about whether the members of the majority have formed their opinions independently of each other. Using an evolutionary framework, we suggest that these conflicting results can be explained by distinguishing evolutionarily valid cues (i.e. they were present and reliable during human evolution) from other cues.

We use this framework to derive and test five hypotheses (H1 to H5). Our first three experiments reveal that participants discount majority opinion when the members of the majority owe their opinions to the same hearsay (H1), owe their opinions to having perceived the same event (H2), or owe their opinions to a common motivation (H3). Experiment 4 suggests that, by contrast, participants do not discount majority opinion when the members of the majority owe their opinions to sharing similar cognitive traits (H4). Finally, Experiment 5 suggests that participants adequately discount majority opinion when one of the members of the majority is untrustworthy (H5). This set of experiments shows that participants can be quite skilled at dealing with informational dependency, and that an evolutionary framework helps make sense of their strengths and weaknesses in this domain.

Utilizing simple cues to informational dependency How many people hold an opinion, or engage in a given behavior, can be a very good cue regarding the validity of the opinion, or the efficiency of the behavior.

Condorcet offered the first mathematical demonstration of the power of majority rules in the late eighteenth century [START_REF] Condorcet | Essai sur l'application de l'analyse à la probabilité des décisions rendues à la pluralité des voix[END_REF]. Since then, further mathematical proofs [START_REF] Ladha | The Condorcet jury theorem, free speech, and correlated votes[END_REF], simulations [START_REF] Hastie | The robust beauty of majority rules in group decisions[END_REF], and experiments [START_REF] Hastie | The robust beauty of majority rules in group decisions[END_REF] have comforted the conclusion that following the majority is often a sound heuristic (as is following the plurality when there are more than two options, see [START_REF] Hastie | The robust beauty of majority rules in group decisions[END_REF].

The present article explores how well humans take into consideration one crucial parameter when deciding how much to follow majority opinions: whether the members of the majority have reached their opinions independently of each other.

We start by briefly reviewing the literature on whether people follow majority rules adequately, suggesting that an evolutionary framework can account for apparently discordant results. We then look in more detail at one crucial parameter regarding the validity of majority rules: whether the members of the majority formed their opinions independently of each other-i.e. whether the majority suffers from informational dependencies. Based on the same evolutionary framework, we draw a series of hypotheses regarding which cues to informational dependencies people should be better able to take into account. Finally, we test these hypotheses in a series of experiments.

Majority rules and informational conformity

Given their usefulness, it is unsurprising that majority rules can be found throughout the animal kingdom (e.g. [START_REF] Conradt | Group decisions in humans and animals: a survey[END_REF][START_REF] Conradt | Group decision-making in animals[END_REF].

One of the best examples was provided by a study of baboons [START_REF] Strandburg-Peshkin | Shared decision-making drives collective movement in wild baboons[END_REF]. GPS tracking enabled the researchers to look at the decisions made by each baboon when the troop was starting to split into two subgroups. The baboons were more likely to follow the largest of the two subgroups, and this tendency grew stronger with the difference in size between the two subgroups.

Humans, compared to other primates, live in larger groups, and rely more on cooperation [START_REF] Sterelny | Thought in an Hostile World[END_REF][START_REF] Tomasello | Origins of human communication[END_REF]. Moreover, humans rely vastly more on communication than any other primate species. As a result, we should expect humans to be able to take majority rules into account not only in weighing what other people do (e.g. [START_REF] Henrich | The evolution of conformist transmission and the emergence of between-group differences[END_REF][START_REF] Richerson | Not by genes alone[END_REF], but also when weighing what they say.

Studies of majority rule in humans, however, have yielded conflicting results. Some experiments suggest that people have no understanding of the benefits of majority rules. When presented with the majority opinion on policy issues, people are as likely to move their opinions towards the majority opinion as away from it (for review, see [START_REF] Mutz | Impersonal influence: How perceptions of mass collectives affect political attitudes[END_REF]. When asked to imagine whether an assembly voting with a majority rule would be more likely to select the correct option than any of its individual members, people have no intuition that the former is more likely to be right than the latter, even when mathematics dictates that this should be the case (Mercier, Dockendorff, & Schwartzberg, submitted).

By contrast, other experiments find that people not only follow majority rules, but do so broadly rationally. For example, Morgan and his colleagues (2012) gave participants a series of tasks (such as mental rotations), providing the participants with what they thought to be the individual answers of other participants. Participants were more likely to follow the majority when it was larger in absolute terms, larger in relative terms (i.e. closer to a consensus), and when they were less sure of themselves. These findings are in line with a long tradition of conformity studies in social psychology (for reviews, see [START_REF] Bond | Group size and conformity[END_REF]Mercier & Morin, submitted). When concerns about normative conformity are removed, participants follow majority rules in a broadly rational fashion (i.e. in a way that optimizes information gains).

It has been suggested that an evolutionary framework can help understand why people ignore majority rules altogether in some cases, and follow them well in others (Mercier & Morin, submitted). Just as the human reliance on cooperation made of dealing with cheaters a significant evolutionary problem [START_REF] Cosmides | The logic of social exchange: Has natural selection shaped how humans reason? Studies with the Wason selection task[END_REF], the human reliance on communication made of dealing with unreliable senders and messages a significant evolutionary problem (on the evolution of communication more generally, see [START_REF] Smith | Animal signals[END_REF]. Had people been unable to properly evaluate what they were told-accepting most reliable messages, rejecting most unreliable ones-communication could not have remained evolutionarily stable.

Accordingly, humans should have been endowed with mechanisms whose function is to evaluate communicated information, which have been dubbed mechanisms of epistemic vigilance [START_REF] Sperber | Epistemic vigilance[END_REF].

A wealth of experiments shows that humans are able to take a wide variety of cues into account in order to evaluate communicated information, from how well messages fit with their prior beliefs, to how competent and honest the source is deemed to be [START_REF] Bonaccio | Advice taking and decision-making: An integrative literature review, and implications for the organizational sciences[END_REF][START_REF] Harris | Trusting what you're told: How children learn from others[END_REF]Mercier, submitted, 2017).

Moreover, many of these skills are very early developing, some being present at 2 years of age [START_REF] Castelain | Evidence that Two-Year-Old Children are Sensitive to Information Presented in Arguments[END_REF][START_REF] Harris | Infants understand how testimony works[END_REF], many others developing through the preschool years (for review, see [START_REF] Harris | Trusting what you're told: How children learn from others[END_REF].

The importance of communication and of majority rules suggests that some mechanisms of epistemic vigilance should be dedicated to the use of majority rules in the case of communicated information. These mechanisms should make us more likely to accept an opinion when we see that many people, who we deem competent and honest, all hold this opinion. As mentioned above, this is what experiments on conformity reveal. However, these mechanisms should not give us access to an abstract understanding of the power of majority rules-in the same way that naïve physics does not help us understand theoretical physics. This is why people do not take majority rules into account when the information is presented in an explicit, abstract manner.

We can thus distinguish between evolutionarily valid cues-cues that were present and reliable in the EEA-and non-evolutionarily valid cues-such as cues that are recent cultural innovations (Mercier & Morin, submitted). Being told by many individuals that they hold the same opinion is an evolutionarily valid cue, while a percentage representing the same distribution of opinions is a non-evolutionarily valid cue (for a direct comparison, see Mercier, Majima, Claidière, & Léone, submitted).

The distinction between evolutionarily valid cues and non-evolutionarily valid cues helps make sense of the apparently contradictory results regarding how people deal with majority rules. On the whole, it seems that participants react broadly appropriately when the cues are evolutionarily valid-e.g. seeing the individual answers of a number of participants-and fail to do so when the cues are notevolutionarily valid-e.g. being provided with a numerical description of a voting scenario.

In some ways, the difference between evolutionarily valid and nonevolutionarily valid cues is similar to the difference between decisions from experience and decisions from descriptions. Experiments on risky choice have manipulated whether participants are exposed to descriptions-for example, explicitly providing the probabilities of the different outcomes of a gamble-or to experiencesfor instance, providing participants with a series of gambles in which they slowly learn the probability of each outcome (for review, see [START_REF] Hertwig | The description-experience gap in risky choice[END_REF]. Participants react very differently to these two situations. Arguably, this is because one cue-the repeated series of gambles-is more evolutionarily valid than the other-the explicit description of probabilities.

Informational dependencies

A crucial component of majority rules that we have not mentioned so far is independence. For the majority opinion to be reliable, members of the majority must have acquired their opinions largely independently of each other. If all your friends recommend you go see a given movie because they have all seen the movie and liked it, it is probably good advice. But if only one of them has seen it, and the others all rely on this friend's opinion, then the consensus is much less indicative (although see [START_REF] Estlund | Opinion leaders, independence, and Condorcet's jury theorem[END_REF].

Several experiments have examined whether participants take cues to informational dependencies into account (e.g. [START_REF] Hess | Psychological adaptations for assessing gossip veracity[END_REF][START_REF] Maines | The effect of forecast redundancy on judgments of a consensus forecast's expected accuracy[END_REF][START_REF] Whalen | Sensitivity to shared information in social learning[END_REF] for review, see Mercier & Morin, submitted).

Most of them have yielded negative results. For example, one experiment found that participants did not appropriately discount the convergent opinions of several forecasters after being told that "the correlation among forecast errors was approximately +.8 for all forecaster pairs" (Maines, 1990, p. 36). 1 By contrast, a few experiments have shown that in some cases people can take informational dependencies into account. For instance, in an experiment designed for preschoolers but also conducted with adults, participants were provided with the contradictory opinions of two groups of informants [START_REF] Hu | Can Children Balance the Size of a Majority with the Quality of their Information[END_REF]. Informants from the first group all had perceptual access to the relevant information and thus formed their opinions independently of each other.

Informants from the second group formed their opinion mostly through hearsay: one informant had perceptual access to the relevant information, and communicated her opinion to the second informant, who communicated it to the third, etc. In this case, adult participants were more likely to follow the opinion of the first group even if it comprised only four members while the second comprised six members (see also [START_REF] Whalen | How do you know that? Sensitivity to statistical dependency in social learning[END_REF]. 2 This means that the adults discounted the opinion of the larger group, because all but one of these opinions depended on someone else's opinion, rather than on independent perceptual access.

Evolutionary validity of cues to informational dependencies

1 Even though the participants were "M.B.A. students in a financial statement analysis course at the University of Chicago [who] had been exposed previously to the concept of statistical correlation and its effect on the variance of a sum of random variables in prerequisite courses in statistics and finance." (Maine, 1990, p.36). 2 Preschoolers, by contrast, only favored perceptual access over hearsay when both groups were of the same size.

We suggest that, as for majority rules generally, this pattern of successes and failures can be explained within a framework that distinguishes evolutionarily valid from non-evolutionarily valid cues to informational dependencies. 3Experiments in which participants do not take informational dependencies into account use cues that are recent cultural inventions, such as correlation coefficients (e.g. [START_REF] Maines | The effect of forecast redundancy on judgments of a consensus forecast's expected accuracy[END_REF]. These cues would not be evolutionarily valid, thus explaining the participants' failure to take them into account.

By contrast, the cues present in the experiment by [START_REF] Hu | Can Children Balance the Size of a Majority with the Quality of their Information[END_REF] would be evolutionarily valid. If contemporary human societies, including small-scale ones, are any guide to the past, we can infer that throughout our recent evolution people would generally have had information about the sources of people's opinion. This information could have been gathered directly, as in the experiment by [START_REF] Hu | Can Children Balance the Size of a Majority with the Quality of their Information[END_REF], or it could have been provided by the speakers (e.g. Aikhenvald, 2004, p. 10ff). In some languages, providing information about the sources of one's opinions is made grammatically mandatory by evidentials. Even if evidentials do not make it mandatory to specify the exact source of one's opinion they give the audience some relevant information. For example, speakers of Wanka Quechua must add a marker to their assertions specifying whether the information was acquired via direct perception, inference (i.e. one's personal thought process), or hearsay (Aikhenvald, 2004, p. 43). In languages that do not have evidentials, information about the sources of one's opinions can be conveyed through a variety of means, for instance by making the source explicit ("Peter told me") (see, e.g. Aikhenvald, 2004, p. 10ff).

The literature on evidentials suggests that the most common of these markers specify whether the opinion stems from inference, hearsay, or first-person perception (as in the example above, see [START_REF] Aikhenvald | Evidentiality[END_REF]. Arguably, even in languages that do not have evidentials, these three categories tend to dominate the type of information about sources provided by informants (see, e.g. Aikhenvald, 2004, p. 10ff). This suggests that the two most obvious external sources of information that can yield informational dependencies are hearsay and perception. As a result, this type of information should be an evolutionarily valid cue, leading to our first two hypotheses: H1: People take informational dependencies into account when they know several individuals owe their beliefs to the same source through hearsay (i.e.

they have all heard the information from the same individual). H2: People take informational dependencies into account when they know several individuals owe their beliefs to perceiving the same event (e.g. they have all seen the same event).

Another cue that would have likely been present throughout our evolutionary history is the potential for motivational bias. One of the main dangers that our mechanisms of epistemic vigilance protect receivers against stems from the different incentives of senders and receivers. People do take incentives into account when evaluating communicated information, for instance by discounting self-serving messages [START_REF] Sniezek | Improving judgement with prepaid expert advice[END_REF]; for work on children, see [START_REF] Mills | The Development of Cynicism[END_REF][START_REF] Reyes-Jaquez | Playing by the rules: Self-interest information influences children's trust and trustworthiness in the absence of feedback[END_REF]. These incentives can also give rise to informational dependencies. If you expect several people of having the same incentives (say, being liked by the same person), and you expect these incentives to bias their opinions (to be more likely to claim this person is kind or competent), then you should expect all the opinions to be biased in the same way (they would all claim this person is great), providing a reason to discount the convergence between the opinions. A wealth of work in evolutionary psychology has shown the importance of coalitional thinking, and of recognizing when the incentives of various groups are aligned or not (e.g. [START_REF] Tooby | Cognitive adaptations for n-person exchange: the evolutionary roots of organizational behavior[END_REF]. This leads to our third hypothesis: H3: People take informational dependencies into account when they stem from common motivational biases (motivational dependencies).

Along with motivational biases, there have been discussions in the recent literature of how common cognitive factors can yield informational dependencies. For example, Page and colleagues [START_REF] Hong | Groups of diverse problem solvers can outperform groups of high-ability problem solvers[END_REF][START_REF] Page | The Difference: How the Power of Divesrity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools, and Societies[END_REF] have argued that people with a diverse set of cognitive tools form more efficient teams. Without being motivationally biased, people who possess the same cognitive tools (same heuristics, same knowledge, etc.) are likely to agree on, say, what the best solution to a problem might be. As a result, it is good to be mindful of cognitive diversity, and to grant it appropriate weight. However, in the environment in which we evolved, cognitive diversity was vastly reduced compared to the modern world. The range of expertise was infinitely smaller than it is now. The immense range and diversity of expertise present in our modern environment might help explain why people find it so difficult to recognize the competence of those who have vastly superior expertise [START_REF] Kruger | Unskilled and unaware of it: how difficulties in recognizing one's own incompetence lead to inflated self-assessments[END_REF]. Similarly, people might not be able to take the cognitive diversity of informants into account when assessing communicated information. In an experiment participants had been asked to rate the strength of an argument purely based on the reaction of an audience to the argument [START_REF] Mercier | Evaluating arguments from the reaction of the audience[END_REF]. Although participants reacted appropriately to several factors (such as audience size), they did not take audience diversity into account. This suggests that the participants did not consider the potential for cognitive dependencies between the audience members to lower the value of their opinion. These considerations lead to hypothesis 4: H4: People do not take informational dependencies into account when they stem from similarities in the cognitive makeup of individuals (cognitive dependencies).

Experiments on informational conformity tend to assume that informants reveal their true opinions. However, this is obviously not always the case. An informant could doubt the trustworthiness of all the informants who agree on a given opinion, in which case this opinion should obviously be discounted. More interesting is the case in which the trustworthiness of only a minority of the informants is in doubt. Two reactions are then possible. The fact that the majority, composed of trustworthy informants, agrees with a minority composed of less trustworthy informants might suggest that the less trustworthy informants can in fact be trusted, and thus that their opinions should be counted as if they were trustworthy. We should then expect little or no difference between the weight granted the opinion of a group of trustworthy informants, and that of a group of informants containing a majority of trustworthy informants as well as a few untrustworthy informants. Alternatively, doubts regarding the trustworthiness of some informants might affect how much weight is granted to an opinion, even if the opinion is also supported by a majority of trustworthy informants.

The latter option is arguably more rational, because the opinions of the less trustworthy informants are not truly independent. If the opinions of trustworthy informants are used to assess the trustworthiness of other informants, then the opinions of the latter informants become partly dependent on that of the former. As a result, even if the opinion of the trustworthy informants can lead to a change of mind regarding the trustworthiness of other informants, then the opinion of these informants should still be discounted to some extent.

One of the functions of epistemic vigilance is to ward off messages from untrustworthy sources. Moreover, given the costs of deception, epistemic vigilance mechanisms should tend to err on the side of caution, leading us to reject more potentially reliable messages than we accept potentially unreliable ones. This leads us to our fifth and final hypothesis: H5: People discount majority opinions when a few members of the majority are suspected of not being trustworthy, compared to a situation in which no such suspicion arises.

Each hypothesis is tested in one experiment, with each experiment having two sets of materials. Each experiment is then subject to an exact replication.

Experiment 1

The goal of this experiment is to test the following hypothesis: H1: People take informational dependencies into account when they know several individuals owe their beliefs to the same source through hearsay (i.e.

they have all heard the information from the same individual).

Three different variables are manipulated in Experiment 1: number of informants, dependency between the opinion of the informants, and framing.

Participants are provided with the opinions of either one (One informant condition) or three (Three informants condition) informants regarding a fictitious restaurant. The participants then have to rate the restaurant, with the information provided by the informants as only basis. The degree of dependency between the informants' opinions is manipulated: in the No Dependency condition, the opinions appear independent, whereas in the Dependency condition, they are clearly dependent on a common third party through hearsay. We also manipulate whether the opinions were positive or negative, as a robustness check (Positive / Negative framing conditions).

Methods

Participants 3984 participants were recruited through Amazon Mechanical Turk (191 females, M age = 34.94, SD = 12.23). Participants were paid $0.2 for their participation. This sample size was selected because power analyses suggested it would provide us with sufficient power to detect effects of moderate size (such as those obtained in the most closely related past experiments, [START_REF] Hu | Can Children Balance the Size of a Majority with the Quality of their Information[END_REF].

Design

After completing a consent form, participants read a short vignette and answered one question related to the vignette, before providing some simple demographic information. All variables were manipulated between-participants: each participant read a single vignette.

Materials

The vignettes from the negative framing can be found in

Results and discussion

Figure 1. Ratings provided by participants in Experiment 1, in which the dependency was due to hearsay. The scale ranged from 0 to 100, however, to make it easier to compare the positive and negative framings, ratings from the negative framing condition were inverted (e.g. 40 becomes 60), so that higher numbers reflect more negative ratings. Each point is a data point, the horizontal bars represent averages, the boxes Bayesian highest density intervals, and the beans smoothed densities of answers.

Figure 1 provides the results of Experiment 1. H1 predicts that participants, in rating the restaurant, should take the number of informants into account more when their opinions are independent of each other: the difference in the ratings between the One informant and the Three informants conditions should be larger in the No Dependency condition than in the Dependency condition. This means that we should observe an interaction between the number of informants (One, Three) and the degree of dependency (Dependency, No Dependency).

A Three-Way analysis of variance (ANOVA)5 was conducted on the influence A difference between One and Three informants was expected in the No dependency condition which explains the overall effect of One vs. Three informants.

The difference in framing means that the positive messages ("I think it's good) were more persuasive than the negative messages ("I don't think it's great"). Since we had not attempted to precisely calibrate the positive and negative framing, observing such a difference is unsurprising. Since neither of these two main effects have a direct bearing on our hypotheses, they will not be discussed in the following experiments.

The critical interaction revealed that, as predicted by H1, participants were able to take informational dependencies due to hearsay into account: they put less weight on the opinion of three informants, relative to the opinion of one informant, when the opinion of the three informants all relied on the same third party, than when they appeared independent.

Replication of Experiment 1

This is an exact replication of Experiment 1, with the same design and materials.

Participants 394 participants were recruited through Amazon Mechanical Turk ( 213females, M age = 36.81, SD = 11.74). Participants were paid $0.2 for their participation. These results support H1.

Results and discussion

Experiment 2

The goal of this experiment is to test the following hypothesis:

H2: People take informational dependencies into account when they know several individuals owe their beliefs to perceiving the same event (e.g. they have all seen the same event).

Experiment 2 manipulates the same three variables as in Experiment 1: number of informants, dependency between the opinion of the informants, and framing. Participants are provided with the opinions of either one (One informant condition) or three informants (Three informants condition) regarding a fictitious colleague (we changed from the restaurant setting of Experiment 1 so that we could use direct visual perception instead of taste). The participants are then asked to rate the colleague, with the information provided by the informants as their only basis. The degree of dependency between the informants' opinions is manipulated: in the No Dependency condition, the opinions appear independent, while the opinions are clearly dependent on having perceived the same event in the Dependency condition.

As in Experiment 1, we also manipulate whether the opinions are positive or negative (Positive / Negative framing conditions).

Methods

Participants 399 participants were recruited through Amazon Mechanical Turk (176 females, M age = 35.41, SD = 11.40). Participants were paid $0.2 for their participation.

Design

After completing a consent form, participants read a short vignette and answered one question related to it, before providing some simple demographic information. All variables were manipulated between-participants: each participant only read a single vignette.

Materials

The vignettes from the negative framing can be found in Table 2, the equivalent positive framing in the ESM. All stories had the same introduction:

You are the manager in a clothing store, and you are talking with the other three employees about Michael, who is finishing up his trial period. The three employees-Paul, Rick, and Bob-are reporting their impressions of Michael, and telling of various things they've seen him do, some of which are positive, some negative.

Participants were asked: "How competent to you think Michael is?" They had to provide a numerical answer from 0 to 100. Compared to the vignettes from Experiment 1, we chose to leave the negative judgments implicit in the Dependency condition, as, in this higher-stakes context, participants might have inferred that the judgments did not rest only on perceiving this one event, thereby reducing the informational dependency.

No dependency

Results and discussion

Figure 3. Ratings provided by participants in Experiment 2, in which the dependency was due to having perceived the same event (see Figure 1 for explanations).

Figure 3 provides the results of Experiment 2. As H1, H2 predicts that participants, in rating the colleague, should take the number of informants into account more when their opinions are independent of each other, so that we should observe an interaction between the number of informants (One, Three) and the degree of dependency (Dependency, No Dependency).

A Three-Way analysis of variance (ANOVA) was conducted on the influence of As predicted by H2, participants were able to take informational dependencies due to perception of the same event into account: they put less weight on the opinion of three informants, relative to the opinion of one informant, when the opinion of the three informants all relied on the same event.

Replication of Experiment 2

This is an exact replication of Experiment 2, with the same design and materials.

Participants 400 participants were recruited through Amazon Mechanical Turk (188 females, M age = 35.47, SD = 10.50). Participants were paid $0.2 for their participation. These results confirm the validity of H2.

Results and discussion

Experiment 3

The goal of this experiment is to test the following hypothesis:

H3: People take informational dependencies into account when they stem from common motivational biases (motivational dependencies).

As in Experiment 1, participants are provided with the opinions of either one (One informant condition) or three informants (Three informants condition) regarding a fictitious restaurant. The participants then have to rate the restaurant, with the information provided by the informants as only basis. The degree of dependency between the informants' opinions is manipulated: in the No Dependency condition, the opinions appear independent, whereas in the Dependency condition, they are dependent as all three informants have the same personal relationship with the restaurant's owner. As in Experiment 1, we also manipulate whether the opinions are positive or negative.

Methods

Participants 395 participants were recruited through Amazon Mechanical Turk (164 females, M age = 32.46, SD = 9.33). Participants were paid $0.2 for their participation.

Design

After completing a consent form, participants read a short vignette and answered one question related to it, before providing some simple demographic information. All variables were manipulated between-participants: each participant only read a single vignette.

Materials

The vignettes from the negative framing can be found in Figure 5 provides the results of Experiment 3. As H1 and H2, H3 predicts that participants, in rating the restaurant, should take the number of informants into account more when their opinions are independent of each other, so that we should observe an interaction between the number of informants (One, Three) and the degree of dependency (Dependency, No Dependency).

Results and discussion

A Three-Way analysis of variance (ANOVA) was conducted on the influence of As predicted by H3, participants were able to take informational dependencies due to common motivation into account: they put less weight on the opinion of three informants, relative to the opinion of one informant, when the opinion of the three informants could all have been influenced by the same motivation.

Replication of Experiment 3

This is an exact replication of Experiment 3, with the same design and materials.

Participants 397 participants were recruited through Amazon Mechanical Turk (199 females, M age = 37.15, SD = 12.03). Participants were paid $0.2 for their participation. These results support H3.

Results and discussion

Experiment 4

The goal of this experiment is to test the following hypothesis: H4: People do not take informational dependencies into account when they stem from similarities in the cognitive makeup of individuals (cognitive dependencies).

As in Experiments 1 and 3, participants are provided with the opinions of either one (One informant condition) or three (Three informants condition) informants regarding a fictitious restaurant. The participants then have to rate the restaurant, with the information provided by the informants as only basis. The degree of dependency between the informants' opinions is manipulated: the opinions are either independent (No Dependency condition) or dependent as all three informants have the same tastes (Dependency condition). As in the previous experiments, we also manipulate whether the opinions are positive or negative (Positive / Negative framing conditions).

Methods

Participants 403 participants were recruited through Amazon Mechanical Turk (205 females, M age = 37.45, SD = 12.09). Participants were paid $0.2 for their participation.

Design

After completing a consent form, participants read a short vignette and answered one question related to it, before providing some simple demographic information. All variables were manipulated between-participants: each participant only read a single vignette.

Materials

The vignettes from the negative framing can be found in Participants did not take informational dependencies due common cognitive traits into account-in accordance with H4. Given that Experiments 1 to 3, and their replications, managed to detect the expected interactions, the current design and sample size should have been able to detect at least a similarly powerful effect.

Results and discussion

Replication of Experiment 4

This is a straight replication of Experiment 4, with exactly the same design and materials.

Participants 398 participants were recruited through Amazon Mechanical Turk (201 females, M age = 37.18, SD = 11.41). Participants were paid $0.2 for their participation. Again, this supports H4.

Results and discussion

Experiment 5

The goal of this experiment is to test the following hypothesis:

H5: People discount majority opinions when a few members of the majority are suspected of not being trustworthy, compared to a situation in which no such suspicion arises.

Participants are provided with the opinions of either one, two, or three informants (One, Two, and Three informants conditions) regarding either the accused in a trial (Trial condition), or the position of troops in war (Scouts condition).

Compared to the previous experiments, three changes are made. First, the number of informants is more finely graded (1, 2, or 3 instead of 1 or 3), so that we can observe whether treating one informant as untrustworthy is similar to simply ignoring this informant. Second, in one condition we suggest that one of the informants is untrustworthy (in the case of the trial vignettes, by saying they are friends with the accused). Third, constructing a negative framing version of the trial vignettes being difficult, we offer an altogether different scenario instead, to play the same role of robustness check as the negative framings in the other experiments.

Methods

Participants 888 participants were recruited through Amazon Mechanical Turk (397 females, M age = 34.27, SD = 10.98). Participants were paid $0.2 for their participation.

Design

After completing a consent form, participants read a short vignette and answered one question related to it, before providing some simple demographic information. All variables were manipulated between-participants: each participant only read a single vignette.

Materials

The vignettes from the trial framing can be found in Table 5, the equivalent scout framing in the ESM. All trial vignettes started with: "Imagine that you are a juror in a trial. The accused stands trial for robbing a jewelry store." Participants were asked: "Do you think the accused was at the auto repair shop?" They had to provide a numerical answer from 0 to 100.

No Third witness: "I was there too, and I saw him in that auto repair shop."

One of these three witnesses is a good friend of the accused.

Table 5. Vignettes from the trial framing conditions of Experiment 5. As predicted by H5, participants were able to take informational dependencies due to untrustworthiness into account: they largely discounted the opinion of an untrustworthy informant, even if their opinion converged with the opinion of trustworthy informants.

Results and discussion

Replication of Experiment 5

This is a straight replication of Experiment 5, with exactly the same design and materials.

Participants 988 participants were recruited through Amazon Mechanical Turk (513 females, M age = 37.47, SD = 12.29). Participants were paid $0.2 for their participation.

Results and discussion

Conclusion

Previous experiments have revealed that participants adequately take into account a number of cues regarding how much weight they should grant majority opinions-such as the absolute and relative size of the majority, or the competence of its members (whom we call 'informants') (for review, see Mercier & Morin, submitted). However, the results regarding informational dependency are much less clear. In some cases, participants appropriately discount majority opinions when the opinions of the informants have not been acquired independently. In other cases, participants fail to discount such opinions. We suggested that an evolutionary framework (Mercier & Morin, submitted;[START_REF] Sperber | Epistemic vigilance[END_REF] could help account for these discrepancies by pointing out that some cues to informational dependencies are likely evolutionarily valid-that is, they were present and reliable in human evolution-and others not. Evolutionarily valid cues should be easily and spontaneously taken into account, while non-evolutionarily valid cues should require specific training. The existing literature seems to fit well with this framework (compare for instance: [START_REF] Maines | The effect of forecast redundancy on judgments of a consensus forecast's expected accuracy[END_REF][START_REF] Hu | Can Children Balance the Size of a Majority with the Quality of their Information[END_REF] for review, see Mercier & Morin, submitted).

The present article tested five novel hypotheses derived from this framework.

The first three hypotheses relate to cues that people should be able to take into account when computing informational dependencies, namely: (H1) that the informants owe their beliefs to the same hearsay, (H2) that the informants owe their beliefs to having perceived the same event, (H3) that the informants owe their beliefs to a common motivation. Experiments 1, 2, and 3 (each replicated), suggest that our participants were able to take these cues into account, discounting the opinion of three informants when these cues to informational dependency were present.

The fourth hypotheses suggested that, by contrast with the cues described in hypotheses 1 to 3, cognitive dependency would not be an evolutionarily valid cue to informational dependency. In Experiment 4 (and its replication), participants did not take cognitive dependency into account when evaluating majority opinion, supporting H4. Although this is a null result, our interpretation in favor of H4 is comforted by the fact that participants were able to take a variety of other cues into account in very similar settings (Experiments 1 to 3).

Finally, the fifth hypothesis bore on a more subtle use of informational conformity. It predicted that people would not be deceived into thinking that an untrustworthy member of a majority had an equal weight to more trustworthy members simply because they supported the majority opinion. Experiment 5 (and its replication) supported this hypothesis.

This series of experiments adds to the existing literature on the role of dependency in informational conformity in three direct ways. First, it confirms, using more ecologically valid stimuli, that participants are able to take simple cues to informational dependency into account. Second, it offers, to the best of our knowledge, the first experiments bearing directly on whether participants can take internal dependencies (cognitive or motivational) into account. Third, it offers, again to the best of our knowledge, the first experiments on the interaction between informational conformity and informant trustworthiness.

This set of experiments also argues for the fruitfulness of the distinction between evolutionarily valid cues and non-evolutionarily valid cues. Future experiments should pay special attention to whether the cues to dependency presented are evolutionarily valid or not. It should be noted that even if, in the present experiments, we have attempted to render our stimuli more ecologically valid, they still suffer from the fundamental limitations of the vignette format. For instance, participants are not directly exposed to a conversation, they are told about a conversation, and the topic at issue is of no relevance to them. We believe this limitation does not affect the interpretation of our positive results-if people can take some cues into account even in these conditions, presumably they can also do so in more ecologically valid conditions. However, it might affect the interpretation of our negative results, which might have been different in more ecologically valid conditions. Motivation has been shown to play a crucial role in the type of cues participants utilize when evaluating communicated information, with a greater reliance on more complex and reliable cues with increased motivation (e.g. [START_REF] Petty | The elaboration likelihood model of persuasion[END_REF]. It is thus possible that participants would make an even finer use of cues to informational dependencies if the opinions they had to evaluate were personally relevant to them.

Finally, the fact that our experiments are not perfectly ecological-in particular, participants are given information by the experimenter, rather than being directly provided information by other people-might have produced some task demands.

Participants might have guessed what we expected of them. Although we cannot entirely rule out that possibility, the fact that all our experiments were performed between-participants, with each participant seeing a single vignette, would have made it more difficult for them to infer the goal of the experiment.

The present work could be pursued in different directions. Practically, it would be interesting to test interventions aimed at making people aware of the benefits of cognitive diversity, so they put more weight on a convergence of opinions if those whose opinions converge are more cognitively diverse. Theoretically, it would be interesting to further test the evolutionarily valid cues / non-evolutionarily valid cues distinction, for instance by directly contrasting the two types of cues in the same experiment (see, e.g. Mercier, Majima, et al., submitted).

  of three independent variables (Dependency, Number of Informants, Framing) on the ratings the participants gave to the restaurant. This 2 (Dependency) x 2 (Number of Informants) x 2 (Framing) analysis yielded: no significant main effect of Dependency F(1, 390) = 0.91, p >.05, η p 2 = .002, No Dependency (M = 67.74, SE = 1.021), Dependency (M = 66.35, SE = 1.037); a significant main effect of Number of Informants, F(1, 390) = 34.62, p <.001, η p 2 = .082, One Informant (M = 62.76, SE = 1.029), Three Informants (M = 71.32, SE = 1.029); a significant main effect of Framing, F(1, 390) = 7.43, p = .007, η p 2 = .019, Positive (M = 69.02, SE = 1.032), Negative (M = 65.06, SE = 1.026). 6 The critical interaction between Dependency and Number of informants was significant, F(1, 390) = 10.91, p = .001, η p 2 = .027.

Figure 2 .

 2 Figure 2. Ratings provided by participants in the replication of Experiment 1 (see Figure 1 for explanations).

Figure 2

 2 Figure 2 displays the results of the replication of Experiment 1. Detailed

  three independent variables (Dependency, Number of Informants, Framing) on the ratings the participants gave to the colleague. This 2 (Dependency) x 2 (Number of Informants) x 2 (Framing) analysis yielded: no significant main effect of Dependency F(1, 391) = 1.28, p =.26, η p 2 = .003, No Dependency (M = 69.09, SE = 1.094), Dependency (M = 67.33, SE = 1.097); a significant main effect of Number of Informants, F(1, 391) = 34.26, p <.001, η p 2 = .081, One Informant (M = 63.68, SE = 1.097), Three Informants (M = 72.74, SE = 1.094); a significant main effect of Framing, F(1, 391) = 170.87, p < .001, η p 2 = .304, Positive (M = 78.34, SE = 1.088), Negative (M = 58.09, SE = 1.102). The critical interaction between Dependency and Number of informants was significant, F(1, 391) = 20.91, p < .001, η p 2 = .051.

Figure 4 .

 4 Figure 4. Ratings provided by participants in the replication of Experiment 2 (see Figure 1 for explanations).

Figure 4

 4 Figure 4 displays the results of the replication of Experiment 2. The detailed

Figure 5 .

 5 Figure 5. Ratings provided by participants in Experiment 3, in which the dependency was due to common motivation (see Figure 1 for explanations).

  three independent variables (Dependency, Number of Informants, Framing) on the ratings the participants gave to the restaurant. This 2 (Dependency) x 2 (Number of Informants) x 2 (Framing) analysis yielded: a significant main effect of Dependency F(1, 387) = 13.49, p <.001, η p 2 = .034, No Dependency (M = 70.02, SE = 0.993), Dependency (M = 64.89, SE = 0.980); a significant main effect of Number of Informants, F(1, 387) = 32.40, p <.001, η p 2 = .077, One Informant (M = 63.48, SE = 1.001), Three Informants (M = 71.43, SE = 0.973); a significant main effect of Framing, F(1, 387) = 38.31, p < .001, η p 2 = .090, Positive (M = 71.77, SE = 0.989), Negative (M = 63.13, SE = 0.985). The critical interaction between Dependency and Number of informants was significant, F(1, 387) = 8.07, p < .001, η p 2 = .020.

Figure 6 .

 6 Figure 6. Ratings provided by participants in the replication of Experiment 3 (see Figure 1 for explanations).

Figure 6

 6 Figure 6 displays the results of the replication of Experiment 3. The detailed

Figure 7 .

 7 Figure 7. Ratings provided by participants in Experiment 4, in which the dependency was due to cognitive similarity (see Figure 1 for explanations).

Figure 7

 7 Figure 7 provides the results of Experiment 4. By contrast with H1, H2, and

Figure 8 .

 8 Figure 8. Ratings provided by participants in the replication of Experiment 4 (see Figure 1 for explanations).

Figure 8

 8 Figure 8 displays the results of the replication of Experiment 4. The detailed

  of the witnesses says: "I saw him at an auto repair shop on the other side of town at the time of the robbery." One of the witnesses says: "I saw him at an auto repair shop on the other side of town at the time of the robberywitness: "I saw him at an auto repair shop on the other side of town at the time of the robbery." Second witness: "I also saw him at that auto repair shop at the time of the robbery." One of these two witnesses is a good friend of the accused. 3 Informants Here is what some of the Here is what some of the witnesses witnesses say: First witness: "I saw him at an auto repair shop on the other side of town at the time of the robbery." Second witness: "I also saw him at that auto repair shop at the time of the robbery." Third witness: "I was there too, and I saw him in that auto repair shop." say: First witness: "I saw him at an auto repair shop on the other side of town at the time of the robbery." Second witness: "I also saw him at that auto repair shop at the time of the robbery."

Figure 9 .

 9 Figure 9. Ratings provided by participants in Experiment 5 (see Figure 1 for explanations).

Figure 9

 9 Figure9provides the results of Experiment 5. H5 predicts that participants, in

Figure 10 .

 10 Figure 10. Ratings provided by participants in the replication of Experiment 5 (see Figure 1 for explanations).

Figure 10

 10 Figure 10 displays the results of the replication of Experiment 5. A Three-Way

Table 1

 1

	, the

She tells you: "I don't think it's great.

Olivia: "I agree it isn't great. Peter told me it was barely alright."

Table 1 .

 1 Vignettes from the negative framing conditions of Experiment 1.

Table 2 .

 2 Vignettes from the negative framing conditions of Experiment 2.

Table 3

 3

	, the

Table 3 .

 3 Vignettes from the negative framing conditions of Experiment 3.

Table 4

 4

	, the

Table 4 .

 4 Vignettes from the negative framing conditions of Experiment 4.

An exception might be the recent experiments by[START_REF] Yousif | Any consensus will do: The failure to distinguish between 'true'and 'false' consensus[END_REF]. A potential interpretation of their findings it that people interpreted the context in which the different sources were presented (i.e. newspapers having called on either different experts or the same expert) as providing independent evidence of the competence of the sources, such that an expert called on by multiple newspapers would have been perceived as more competent (see[START_REF] Estlund | Opinion leaders, independence, and Condorcet's jury theorem[END_REF].

A round number of participants were requested in each experiment (e.g. 400 here), but a small share failed to complete the survey.

All ANOVAs are Type III Sum of Squares conducted using JASP (version 0.9.0.1).

Reminder: the scores in the negative framing conditions were inverted before analysis, since otherwise the difference between the two conditions would be trivial. As a result, a significant difference in framing means that the scores in one condition are more extreme than in the other.

Acknowledgments. We would like to thank Olivier Morin and Christophe Heintz for feedback on this project. H.M.'s work is supported by an Agence Nationale de la Recherche grant EUR FrontCog ANR-17-EURE-0017. H.M.'s work is supported by the European Research Council under the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) and ERC grant agreement no. 609819 (SOMICS).

Data accessibility statement. All our data is available at https://osf.io/8wbz9/?view_only=53b2d522b6564d39b21eb4e88e323eac


Maya Corman
email: maya.corman@etudiant.univ-bpclermont.fr

Michaël Dambrun

Jacques-Olivier Bay

Régis Peffault

French adaptation and analysis of psychometric properties of the Avoidance and Fusion Questionnaire (AFQ) in an adult sample

Keywords: Adulte, échelle d'évaluation, mécanisme de défense, thérapie d'acceptation et d Adult, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), Assessment scale, Defense mechanism

de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, émanant des établissements d'enseignement et de recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires publics ou privés.

L'analyse de fiabilité de la version française démontre une bonne consistance interne (α = .84). Ensuite, l'Analyse en Composantes Principales (ACP) met en avant que la validité de construit est congruente avec les validations antérieures : l'échelle présente un construit unique. Enfin, l'analyse des corrélations avec des construits supposément reliés tels que la

Introduction

Une nouvelle conception de la théorie du soin psychothérapeutique, l'approche transdiagnostique, permet de proposer une prise en charge basée sur des principes psychothérapeutiques communs afin de traiter plusieurs troubles différents [START_REF] Barlow | Toward a unified treatment for emotional disorders[END_REF][START_REF] Mansell | Conceptual foundations of the transdiagnostic approach to CBT[END_REF][START_REF] Monestès | L'approche transdiagnostique en psychopathologie[END_REF]. Parmi ces approches, la thérapie d'acceptation et d'engagement ou Acceptance and Commitment Therapy en anglais (ACT) [11][12][13] répond à ce principe. Son objectif est de changer la perception que la personne a de ses pensées, émotions, sensations, et même le rapport entretenu avec ces manifestations [START_REF] Monestès | L'approche transdiagnostique en psychopathologie[END_REF]. Parmi les mécanismes ciblés par l'ACT, il existerait un phénomène commun aux troubles psychopathologiques [6,7,[START_REF] Kashdan | Psychological flexibility as a fundamental aspect of health[END_REF][START_REF] Kashdan | Experiential avoidance as a generalized psychological vulnerability: Comparisons with coping and emotion regulation strategies[END_REF][START_REF] Mccracken | Psychological flexibility in adults with chronic pain: a study of acceptance, mindfulness, and values-based action in primary care[END_REF][START_REF] Mccracken | Acceptance of chronic pain: component analysis and a revised assessment method[END_REF][START_REF] Purdon | White bears and other elusive intrusions assessing the relevance of thought suppression for obsessional phenomena[END_REF] : l'évitement expérientiel. Ce dernier a été défini par Hayes, Wilson, Guifford, Follette et Strosahl [15] comme « la volonté de ne pas rester en contact avec des expériences privées particulières (e.

g. sensations corporelles, émotions, pensées, souvenirs) et d'agir afin de modifier la forme et la fréquence de ces expériences ou des contextes qui les occasionnent » (traduit par nous, p. 1155). Cette « fuite » peut amener l'individu à adopter un style comportemental et cognitif d'action rigide et inflexible qui l'éloigne de la réalisation des buts qu'il s'est fixé [8]. En très étroite relation avec l'évitement expérientiel se trouve le processus de fusion/défusion cognitive. La fusion cognitive correspond à l'adhésion de l'individu à des règles verbales de façon littérale. En d'autres termes, la personne prendra pour vraies ses pensées et agira en fonction, au lieu de considérer ces événements internes comme des phénomènes passagers et transitoires [10,12]. Par exemple, une personne qui croit à la pensée « je ne suis pas courageux », aura tendance à agir en adéquation avec cette pensée et non de façon flexible et en fonction du contexte présent. Cette manifestation rigide tend par conséquent à alimenter l'évitement expérientiel. La fusion cognitive étant vécue comme une expérience interne désagréable, l'individu va vouloir l'éviter. Évitement expérientiel et fusion cognitive traduisent ainsi une inflexibilité psychologique qui se manifeste lorsque « le langage et la cognition interagissent en contingences directes pour produire une incapacité à persister ou à changer de comportements au service de valeurs finales » ( [12], traduit par nous, p. 6). À l'inverse, la flexibilité psychologique se définit comme étant « la capacité à entrer en contact avec le moment présent, tel qu'il est et sans défense psychologique, et reposant sur ce que la situation offre, pour changer ou persister dans un comportement en adéquation avec ses propres valeurs » ( [12], traduit par nous, p. 9). L'ACT vise donc à diminuer cette inflexibilité psychologique pour tendre vers une plus grande flexibilité. Ce travail peut être facilité par la pratique de l'ACT, pour laquelle des échelles spécifiques sont utilisées.

Il existe plusieurs échelles utilisées et validées dans le cadre de l'ACT pour mesurer l'inflexibilité psychologique. Parmi ces questionnaires utilisés spécifiquement pour une population adulte, l'Acceptance and Action Questionnaire (AAQ) [14] ou questionnaire d'acceptation et d'action, permet de mesurer le construit de flexibilité psychologique. Une seconde version, l'AAQ II [5], a été validée en français [START_REF] Monestès | Traduction et validation française du questionnaire d'acceptation et d'action (AAQ-II)[END_REF]. Elle présente de meilleures qualités psychométriques que la première version [5,7]. Cependant, cet outil a des limites qui viennent questionner son utilisation exclusive. En effet, d'une part l'AAQ, quelle que soit la version, n'implique pas la dimension d'évitement des sensations physiques, ce qui n'évalue pas l'évitement de manière générale. D'autre part, elle utilise un langage spécifique à l'ACT, qui peut paraître relativement abscons au novice. Elle implique une connaissance minimale des processus en jeu pour comprendre le sens de certains items [START_REF] Livheim | Psychometric properties of the Avoidance and Fusion Questionnaire for Youth: A psychological measure of psychological inflexibility in youth[END_REF][START_REF] Schmalz | Measuring experiential avoidance in adults: The Avoidance and Fusion Questionnaire[END_REF]. Selon Bond et al. [5], « La flexibilité/inflexibilité psychologique est un construit subtil qui peut être difficile à convertir en de courts énoncés qui sont compréhensibles pour des personnes non initiées à l'ACT » (traduit par nous, p. 10) et donc pousse les personnes à répondre de façon biaisée.

Ainsi, Schmalz et Murell [START_REF] Schmalz | Measuring experiential avoidance in adults: The Avoidance and Fusion Questionnaire[END_REF] ainsi que Fergus, Valentiner, Gillen, Hiraoka, Twohig et Abramowitz [9] ont testé l'applicabilité d'un autre outil, à l'origine destiné aux jeunes, sur une population d'adulte. Il s'agit de « l'Avoidance and Fusion Questionnaire for Youth » (AFQ-Y) i. e. questionnaire d'évitement et de fusion pour enfants et adolescents [10]. Les auteurs [9,[START_REF] Schmalz | Measuring experiential avoidance in adults: The Avoidance and Fusion Questionnaire[END_REF] sont partis du constat que la formulation des items de l'AFQ-Y n'était pas spécifique à un âge donné (i. e. formulation claire et simple) et que, par conséquent, ils pallieraient les potentiels problèmes de compréhension relatifs à l'AAQ et à l'AAQ II.

L'AFQ-Y présente des qualités psychométriques très satisfaisantes dont une forte consistance interne (α =.90) est prédicteur de problèmes scolaires chez les enfants et adolescents. Schmalz et Murell [START_REF] Schmalz | Measuring experiential avoidance in adults: The Avoidance and Fusion Questionnaire[END_REF] et Fergus et al. [9] ont donc proposé cet outil comme une alternative à l'AAQ et l'AAQ-II pour la population adulte. Les résultats de leurs études, menées auprès de cohortes d'adultes, révèlent une fiabilité très satisfaisante (α = .92 pour l'étude de Schmalz et Murell [START_REF] Schmalz | Measuring experiential avoidance in adults: The Avoidance and Fusion Questionnaire[END_REF] ; α = .93 et α = .90 respectivement pour la population témoin et pour les adultes anxio-dépressifs de l'étude de Fergus et al. [9]). Les validités de convergence et discriminante sont satisfaisantes. Conformément aux résultats antérieurs de Greco et al. [10], les analyses confirment l'existence d'un construit unique. L'AFQ est également fortement corrélée à l'AAQ (r = .70 pour l'étude de Fergus et al. [9]) et partage une corrélation significative et modérée avec divers symptômes tels que l'anxiété, la dépression, la panique et l'obsessioncompulsion [9]. Une version anglaise de l'AFQ-Y existe pour adulte (seul l'item 13 relatif à l'école est modifié pour être adapté à la population adulte), mais à notre connaissance il n'existe pas de version française. L'objectif de cette étude est donc de valider une traduction française de l'AFQ adaptée aux adultes et d'explorer ses qualités psychométriques comparativement aux études anglophones antérieures.

Méthode

Caractéristiques de la population

L'échantillon était composé de 162 personnes, dont 101 femmes et 61 hommes, issues de la population générale et d'une ville française de taille moyenne. L'âge moyen de cet échantillon était de 42.86 ans (ET=17,97). Le sujet le plus jeune avait 18 ans et le plus âgé 80.

Cent cinquante-six personnes ont répondu de façon complète à l'AFQ (M = 35.35 ; ET = 11.47) sachant que le score maximum pouvant être atteint est de 68 (voir Tableau I).

Procédure

Traduction du questionnaire d'évitement et de fusion

Outils de mesure

Le questionnaire d'évitement et de fusion pour adultes ou Avoidance and Fusion

Questionnaire for Adults (AFQ) L'AFQ (Avoidance and Fusion Questionnaire for Adult) est à la base un questionnaire destiné à évaluer la flexibilité psychologique chez une population d'enfants et d'adolescents [10]. Une version destinée à la population adulte a été validée par Schmalz et al. [START_REF] Schmalz | Measuring experiential avoidance in adults: The Avoidance and Fusion Questionnaire[END_REF] et [START_REF] Luoma | Substance abuse and psychological flexibility: The development of a new measure[END_REF] Fergus et al. [9]. Ce questionnaire est composé de 17 items. Les personnes doivent indiquer leur degré d'accord avec chacune des propositions sur une échelle en 4 points allant de 0, « pas du tout vrai », à 4, « très vrai ».

Le questionnaire des cinq facettes de la pleine conscience ou Five Facets Mindfulness

Questionnaire (FFMQ)

Le FFMQ (Five Facets Mindfulness Questionnaire) [1], validé en français [16]

Échelle d'alexithyme de Toronto-20 ou Toronto Alexithymia Scale-20 (TAS-20)

La TAS-20 (Toronto Alexithymia Scale-20) [2,[START_REF] Loas | Confirmatory factor analysis of the French translation of the 20-item Toronto Alexithymia Scale[END_REF]

Résultats

Fiabilité de la version française de l'AFQ

de fiabilité. La consistance interne de l'échelle extraite à partir des 156 données valides est très satisfaisante puisque l'alpha de Cronbach s'élève à .84.

Structure factorielle de la version française de l'AFQ

La validité de convergence de la version française de l'AFQ

La validité de convergence de l'AFQ a été évaluée en examinant les corrélations de

Pearson entre cette échelle et différents construits psychologiques (voir Tableau III). Comme attendu, l'AFQ est reliée positivement et significativement avec l'anxiété (r = .32, p < .001), la dépression (r = .31, p < .001), et l'alexithymie (r = .45, p < .001). L'AFQ est également reliée significativement et négativement avec l'AAQ-II (r = -.64, p < .001) et la FFMQ (r = -.42, p < .001). Une analyse sur les cinq composantes de la FFMQ révèle que trois composantes sont particulièrement reliées à l'AFQ : la capacité à décrire l'expérience intérieure (r = -.28, p < .001), la capacité à agir avec conscience (r = -.34, p < .001), et l'absence de jugement de l'expérience intérieure (r = -.51, p < .001). En revanche, la capacité à observer l'expérience intérieure et l'absence de réaction immédiate à l'expérience intérieure ne sont pas reliées à l'AFQ.

La validité discriminante de la version française de l'AFQ

La validité discriminante de l'AFQ a été testée en examinant la relation entre cette

Article reçu le 10

 10 juillet 2017 ; accepté le 10 janvier 2018 Résumé L'approche transdiagnostique des troubles psychologiques met en avant un ensemble de manifestations psychologiques qui seraient responsables du maintien et de l'aggravation de certains troubles. L'évitement d'événements internes tels que les pensées, les émotions et les sensations ainsi que la fusion cognitive (prendre ses pensées comme des faits réels) font partie de ces symptômes. Ces derniers engendreraient une inflexibilité psychologique chez l'individu. L'Avoidance and Fusion Questionnaire permet de dépister cette inflexibilité psychologique. Ce questionnaire, destiné à l'origine à une population d'enfants et d'adolescents, a été adapté et validé chez une population adulte mais pas en langue française. Nous l'avons donc traduit et exploré ses qualités psychométriques sur un échantillon de 156 adultes (M= 42.86 ans, ET = 17.97) à l'aide du logiciel de traitements statistiques SPSS.

2 . 3 .

 23 L'AFQ a été traduit par trois personnes ayant pour langue maternelle le français, et ayant une bonne connaissance de l'anglais. Cette première version française a été retraduite en anglais par une personne bilingue ayant l'anglais comme langue maternelle. La version d'origine et la version re-traduite ont ensuite été comparée. La version française n'a fait l'objet que de quelques corrections mineures supplémentaires. L'ensemble des questionnaires était couvert par l'anonymat et soumis au consentement libre du participant. Les sujets ont obtenu les questionnaires via des étudiants en psychologie (première année) de l'université Clermont-Auvergne (UCA) qui devaient chacun faire passer ce questionnaire à une ou deux personnes de leur entourage. Les sujets avaient en moyenne une semaine pour le remplir et le remettre à la personne qui le leur avait donné. Analyse de données L'ensemble des analyses statistiques a été réalisé avec la version 20 du logiciel SPSS. Des statistiques descriptives ont été menées dans un premier temps. Dans un deuxième temps, une analyse de fiabilité a été faite afin d'analyser la consistance interne de l'échelle via l'alpha de Cronbach. Une analyse factorielle avec rotation oblimin directe a ensuite été réalisée afin d'explorer la structure factorielle de la version française de cette échelle. Enfin, nous avons analysé les validités de convergence et discriminante. Pour ce faire, nous avons réalisé une matrice de corrélation entre l'AFQ et différents construits psychologiques et variables sociodémographiques.

  est l'outil le plus utilisé pour mesurer le concept d'alexythimie. Elle est composée de 20 items divisés en 3 sous-échelles : la difficulté à identifier les émotions, la difficulté à verbaliser les états émotionnels d'autrui, et la pensée opératoire. Il s'agit d'une échelle en 5 points allant de 1 (fortement en désaccord) à 5 (fortement d'accord). Le score est considéré comme clinique lorsqu'il s'étend au-delà de 61.

  Afin d'explorer la structure factorielle de l'échelle AFQ, une analyse factorielle avec rotation oblimin directe a été réalisée (KMO = .82 ; test de sphéricité de Bartlett : χ 2 (136) = 665.7, p < .001). Le test de Cattell sur les valeurs propres indique une cassure très nette entre la première composante (valeur propre = 4.82) et la deuxième composante (valeur propre = 1.59 ; voir le tracé d'effondrement présenté en Figure I). Autrement dit, cette analyse factorielle révèle une solution à un facteur unique qui est cohérente avec la version d'origine anglophone de l'AFQ. Le tableau II présente pour chaque item l'indice de charge factorielle (CF ; de .31 à .70) ainsi que la corrélation totale avec l'ensemble des autres items (CT ; de .24 à .61). Chaque item contribue positivement et de manière adéquate à l'ensemble de l'échelle.

[ 22 ]

 22 . Enfin, il ne faut pas négliger le fait que notre échantillon se limite à l'entourage d'étudiants de première année en psychologie, ce qui peut soulever la question de la généralisation de cette version à une population plus large. Quoi qu'il en soit, la qualité de la validité de convergence montre que cette échelle englobe un certain nombre de composantes psychologiques qui confirme sa pertinence transdiagnostique pour repérer une vulnérabilité à différents troubles émotionnels. De plus, cette échelle semble tout à fait adaptée à une population d'adulte, comme le démontrent les résultats de cette étude.Liens d'intérêts :Les auteurs déclarent ne pas avoir de liens d'intérêt.[31] Zigmond AS, Snaith RP. The hospital anxiety and depression scale. Acta psychiatrica scandinavica 1983;67:361-70.

Figure I .

 I Figure I. Graphique des valeurs propres issues de l'analyse en composantes principales des items de l'AFQ (rotation oblimin directe).

  échelle et différentes variables sociodémographiques. Comme attendu, l'AFQ n'est pas reliée significativement à l'âge (r = .07, p > .40) ni au niveau d'étude (r = -.13, p > .11). La croyance religieuse n'a pas d'effet significatif sur l'AFQ (F (1, 149) = 1.53, p > .22), ni la catégorie socio-professionnelle (F (7, 145) = 1.51, p > .17). sons) et de sensations physiques, au détriment de stimuli internes tels que les pensées et les émotions. Ces items ne reflèteraient pas suffisamment la dimension « d'observation » de l'expérience intérieure, représentative de la pleine conscience. Cette remarque peut s'appliquer pour interpréter cette absence de relation avec l'AFQ dont la majorité des items traduisent des ressentis émotionnels, des pensées et moins des perceptions externes ou sensations physiques.Des limites sont malgré tout présentes dans cette étude. Tout d'abord, on ne peut pas déterminer si notre population témoin est « saine » car certains facteurs n'ont pas pu être contrôlés tels que la présence ou non de troubles somatiques (e. g. maladies chroniques) ou psychologiques (e. g. troubles psychiatriques, addictions). Une autre limite est imputable à la trop faible représentativité des hommes par rapport aux femmes. Or, il existe des différences de prévalence des troubles dépressifs selon le genre[4]. En outre, certaines habitudes de vie telles que l'abus de substances (e.g. consommation d'alcool) n'ont pas été exploitées.

	4. Discussion
	La version française de l'AFQ présente des qualités psychométriques satisfaisantes :
	une bonne fiabilité interne, une structure factorielle unidimensionnelle similaire aux
	validations précédentes et une bonne validité de convergence. Les liens retrouvés avec la
	dépression et l'anxiété, présents dans les autres validations de cette échelle,
	démontrent qu'un faible niveau de flexibilité psychologique peut expliquer ou être expliqué
	par une symptomatologie dépressive et anxieuse. La causalité n'a pas été explorée dans cette
	étude, mais la validation américaine de Fergus et al., [9] met en avant que l'AFQ prédirait
	plusieurs symptômes psychologiques comme les symptômes dépressifs, l'anxiété sociale ou
	les symptômes d'agoraphobie.
	On retrouve une relation négative importante entre l'AAQ et l'AFQ. Cela appuie bien
	le fait que ces deux mesures évaluent des dimensions psychologiques très proches situées aux
	deux extrêmes d'un continuum mais pas suffisamment pour exclure l'un de ses outils au profit
	de l'autre. Pour la dimension de la pleine conscience (évaluée par le FFMQ), des hauts scores
	sur cette dimension indiquent de bas scores d'évitement expérientiel et de fusion cognitive.
	Ces résultats sont cohérents avec ceux retrouvés dans un article de Baer et al. [1] qui explore
	les différentes facettes du FFMQ et les relations existantes avec d'autres mesures
	psychologiques. De plus, ces données sont illustratives de la correspondance existante entre
	les mécanismes sous-tendant la flexibilité psychologique et les définitions de la pleine
	conscience [17]. En effet, la pleine conscience consiste en l'action de diriger son attention sur
	le moment présent de manière intentionnelle et sans jugement de valeurs. Les principes de
	l'ACT se superposent finalement aux fondements de la pleine conscience puisqu'il s'agit
	entre autres d'amener l'individu à accepter son expérience interne (ne pas émettre de
	jugement de valeurs) et à se détacher des expériences du passé et du futur (être dans l'instant
	présent). Les méthodes basées sur la pleine conscience sont d'ailleurs utilisées dans la
	pratique de l'ACT [30]. Cependant, à l'instar de Baer et al. [1] dans leur étude sur la

validation de la FFMQ, aucun lien n'est trouvé entre la facette « observation » et l'évitement expérientiel, évalué par eux avec l'AAQ-II. Selon les auteurs, les items de la composante « observation » du FFMQ sont plutôt des items centrés sur l'observation de stimuli externes (odeurs, Pourtant, ces comportements peuvent constituer une stratégie d'évitement qu'il serait pertinent de mettre en relation avec les différents mécanismes d'inflexibilité psychologique

  Tableau I. Score moyen, écart-type et alpha de Cronbach de chaque échelle (n = 156). Note : AFQ : Avoidance and Fusion Questionnaire ; AAQ-II : Acceptance and Action Questionnaire ; HAD : Hospital Anxiety and Depression scale (A : Anxiety ; D : Depression) ; TAS-20 : Toronto Alexithymia Scale ; FFMQ : Five Facets Mindfulness Questionnaire Tableau II. Charges factorielles (CF), Moyennes (M), écart-types (ET), et corrélations totales (CT) par item de la version française de l'AFQ (N = 156) Items de la version française de l'AFQ CF M

			AFQ	AAQ-II	HAD(A)	HAD(D)	TAS-20	FFMQ
	Moyenne	des	35.35	44.34	8.62	5.09	53.44	124.60
	scores	(Ecart-	(11.47)	(9.42)	(3.38)	(2.84)	(10.93)	(15.56)
	type)
	Alpha	de	0.84	0.77	0.71	0.61	0.80	0.81
	Cronbach