An evolutionary perspective on paranoia

Raihani, Nichola; Bell, Vaughan

doi:10.1038/s41562-018-0495-0

Cited by 80 publications

(76 citation statements)

References 139 publications

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“…This perception promotes new learning and revision of past beliefs 24,28 . Hofstadter’s description of ‘paranoid style’ evokes the concept of unexpected uncertainty — i.e., living ‘constantly…at a turning point.’ 7 Excessive unexpected uncertainty is consistent with evolutionary theories attributing paranoia to the need to flexibly categorize or re-categorize social threats 16 . On the other hand, persecutory delusions are resistant to belief updating by definition, and even subclinical paranoia has been associated with reduced sensitivity to meaningful information in a task environment 29 .…”

supporting

confidence: 57%

“…If driven by excessive noradrenergic gain, protean defence may represent an extreme state along a heavily conserved, continuous common mechanism underlying vigilance and false alarms 67-69 , arousal-linked attentional biases and selective processing (i.e., focusing on narrow, most salient features versus broader context 70 ; attending to and learning from predisposition-conforming features 55 ), and behavioural and cognitive flexibility in response to unexpected uncertainty and Bayesian surprise (i.e., prediction error) 53,54,71 . We hypothesize that individuals with stable, trait-level paranoia, rather than having specific deficits in inferring others’ reputations 16 , exhibit disturbances across the domains of behavioural flexibility and stochasticity, false alarms and attentional bias, and inferential response to unexpected uncertainty. Our data suggest that that these perturbations exist outside of social settings and may be elicited in nonhuman models.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Obvious links with fear processing and social cognition, including sophisticated Game Theory driven approaches (such as the Dictator Game 14,15 ) have largely re-described the phenomenon — people who are paranoid self-report difficulties with trust. Those difficulties are recapitulated in laboratory tasks that require trust 16 . However, large-scale online work with inter-personal, Game Theory motivated tasks has shown that paranoia is not driven by personal threat per se, but by negative social representations of others 14,15 .…”

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confidence: 99%

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Expecting the unexpected: the paranoid style of belief updating across species

Reed

Uddenberg

Mathys

et al. 2020

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55Paranoia is the belief that harm is intended by others. It may arise from selective pressures to infer and avoid 56 social threats, particularly in ambiguous or changing circumstances. We propose that uncertainty may be 57 sufficient to elicit learning differences in paranoid individuals, without social threat. We used reversal learning 58 behaviour and computational modelling to estimate belief updating across individuals with and without mental 59 illness, online participants, and rats exposed to chronic methamphetamine, an elicitor of paranoia in humans. 60Paranoia is associated with a strong but immutable prior on volatility, accompanied by elevated sensitivity to 61 perceived changes in the task environment. Methamphetamine exposure in rats recapitulates this impaired 62 uncertainty-driven belief updating and rigid anticipation of a volatile environment. Our work provides evidence 63 of fundamental, domain-general learning differences in paranoid individuals. This paradigm enables further 64 assessment of the interplay between uncertainty and belief-updating across individuals and species. 66 67Paranoia & Belief Updating 3 Paranoia is excessive concern that harm will occur due to deliberate actions of others 1 . It manifests along a 68 continuum of increasing severity 2-5 . Fleeting paranoid thoughts prevail in the general population 6 . A survey of 69 over 7,000 individuals found that nearly 20% believed people were against them at times in the past year; 70 approximately 8% felt people had intentionally acted to harm them 4 . At a national level, paranoia may fuel 71 divisive ideological intolerance. Historian Richard Hofstadter famously described catastrophizing, context 72 insensitive political discourse as the 'paranoid style': 73 "The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms-he traffics in the birth 74 and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. He is always 75 manning the barricades of civilization. He constantly lives at a turning point." 7 76 77 At its most severe, paranoia manifests as rigid beliefs known as delusions of persecution. These delusions 78 occur frequently in psychotic illness, including nearly 90% of first episode patients 8 . However, paranoid beliefs 79 are common across psychiatric and neurologic disorders, such as anxiety 9 , depression 10 , epilepsy 11 , and 80 Alzheimer's disease 12 . Psychostimulants elicit severe paranoid states. Methamphetamine evoked new 81paranoid ideation in nearly half of 274 respondents, particularly after repeated exposure (86%) or escalating 82 dose (68%) 13 . Of those who became paranoid, the majority engaged in evasive defence strategies (hiding or 83 fleeing), but 37% obtained weapons, and 15% attacked others. There is a clear need to better manage 84 paranoia, and to understand and address its broader societal impact. 86Paranoia has thus far defied explanation in mechanistic terms, either at the levels of behaviour or brain 87 function. Obvious links with fear processing and social ...

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confidence: 57%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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confidence: 99%

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Expecting the unexpected: the paranoid style of belief updating across species

Reed

Uddenberg

Mathys

et al. 2020

Preprint

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“…Our findings may extend these conclusions. Indeed, better encoding of harmful agents may be evolutionarily adaptive within-individuals [ 30 ]. In contrast, selfish impressions do not pose the same need for vigilance.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Reduction in social learning and increased policy uncertainty about harmful intent is associated with pre-existing paranoid beliefs: Evidence from modelling a modified serial dictator game

et al. 2020

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Current computational models suggest that paranoia may be explained by stronger higher-order beliefs about others and increased sensitivity to environments. However, it is unclear whether this applies to social contexts, and whether it is specific to harmful intent attributions, the live expression of paranoia. We sought to fill this gap by fitting a computational model to data (n = 1754) from a modified serial dictator game, to explore whether pre-existing paranoia could be accounted by specific alterations to cognitive parameters characterising harmful intent attributions. We constructed a ‘Bayesian brain’ model of others’ intent, which we fitted to harmful intent and self-interest attributions made over 18 trials, across three different partners. We found that pre-existing paranoia was associated with greater uncertainty about other’s actions. It moderated the relationship between learning rates and harmful intent attributions, making harmful intent attributions less reliant on prior interactions. Overall, the magnitude of harmful intent attributions was directly related to their uncertainty, and importantly, the opposite was true for self-interest attributions. Our results explain how pre-existing paranoia may be the result of an increased need to attend to immediate experiences in determining intentional threat, at the expense of what is already known, and more broadly, they suggest that environments that induce greater probabilities of harmful intent attributions may also induce states of uncertainty, potentially as an adaptive mechanism to better detect threatening others. Importantly, we suggest that if paranoia were able to be explained exclusively by core domain-general alterations we would not observe differential parameter estimates underlying harmful-intent and self-interest attributions.

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“…Paranoia involves the belief that harm will occur and that this harm is intended by others (Freeman and Garety, 2000). In the general population, paranoia exists on a spectrum of severity, ranging from mildly suspicious thoughts to frank persecutory delusions (Freeman, 2016;Raihani and Bell, 2018). Recent work has begun to explore how paranoia affects social cognition and behaviour in social interactions using paradigmatic game theory tasks (Fett et al, 2012a;Gromann et al, 2014;Bell, 2017a, 2017b;Saalfeld et al, 2018).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Social reward, punishment and prosociality in paranoia

Raihani¹,

Martinez-Gatell²,

Bell³

et al. 2019

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Paranoia is the belief that harm will occur and is intended by others. Although commonly framed in terms of attributing malicious intent to others, recent work has explored how paranoia also affects social behaviour, using economic games. Previous work found that paranoia is associated with decreased cooperation and increased punishment in the Dictator Game (where cooperating and punishing involve paying a cost to respectively increase or decrease a partner’s income). These findings suggest that paranoia might be associated with variation in subjective reward from experiencing positive and/or negative social interactions; a possibility we explore using a pre-registered experiment with US-based participants (n=2,004). Paranoia was associated with increased self-reported enjoyment of negative social interactions and decreased self-reported enjoyment of prosocial interactions. More paranoid participants attributed stronger harmful intent to a partner. Harmful intent attributions and the enjoyment of negative social interactions positively predicted the tendency to pay to punish the partner. Cooperation was positively associated with the tendency to enjoy prosocial interactions, and increased with participant age. There was no main effect of paranoia on tendency to cooperate in this setting. We discuss these findings in light of previous research.

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An evolutionary perspective on paranoia

Cited by 80 publications

References 139 publications

Expecting the unexpected: the paranoid style of belief updating across species

Expecting the unexpected: the paranoid style of belief updating across species

Reduction in social learning and increased policy uncertainty about harmful intent is associated with pre-existing paranoid beliefs: Evidence from modelling a modified serial dictator game

Social reward, punishment and prosociality in paranoia

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