Derationalizing Delusions

Abstract

Because of the traditional conceptualization of delusion as “irrational belief,” cognitive models of delusions largely focus on impairments to domain-general reasoning. Nevertheless, current rationality-impairment models do not account for the fact that (a) equivalently irrational beliefs can be induced through adaptive social cognitive processes, reflecting social integration rather than impairment; (b) delusions are overwhelmingly socially themed; and (c) delusions show a reduced sensitivity to social context both in terms of how they are shaped and how they are communicated. Consequently, we argue that models of delusions need to include alteration to coalitional cognition—processes involved in affiliation, group perception, and the strategic management of relationships. This approach has the advantage of better accounting for both content (social themes) and form (fixity) of delusion. It is also supported by the established role of mesolimbic dopamine in both delusions and social organization and the ongoing reconceptualization of belief as serving a social organizational function.

Uncovering the realities of delusional experience in schizophrenia: a qualitative phenomenological study in Belgium

“…This finding possibly accounts for the relatively limited success of empirical research that attempts to explain delusions in terms of suboptimal reasoning strategies. 33 Overall, participants were often well aware that delusional experience would be judged as bizarre or unlikely when set against normal evidential standards. The more relevant point for participants, however, was not epistemic but experiential; delusional experience constituted a radical break with ordinary reality experience, a fact that participants arduously attempted to reconcile with their everyday outlook in different ways.…”

Conjecturing Harmful Intent and Preemptive Strike in Paranoia

“…Cognitions or behaviors related to coalitions, such as detection or avoidance of social threats, are considered the evolutionary foundation of paranoia ( Gilbert, 2001 ; Green and Phillips, 2004 ; Raihani and Bell, 2019 ; Bell et al, 2021 ). From this perspective, recent works have investigated the role of paranoia in detecting social threats using experiments wherein group affiliation, relative social status, and group cohesion are manipulated ( Saalfeld et al, 2018 ; Greenburgh et al, 2019 ).…”

The Referential Problem Space revisited: An ecological hypothesis of the evolutionary and developmental origins of pointing

“…Despite efforts to characterize confabulations and delusions as pathologies (e.g., Kopelman, 2010), in fact, human beings are routinely subject to confirmation bias, confabulation, and delusion regarding the causal underpinnings of overt behavior. Bell et al (2020) noted that "there are many examples of how strongly held, affectively loaded, epistemically irrational beliefs can be reliably formed through social influence-demonstrating that adaptive social processes, rather than individual impairments in rationality, are sufficient to form delusion-like beliefs in cognitively intact people" (p. 3), and they listed numerous examples. Therefore, the capacity to make a verbal claim about the underlying causes of one's own or another's behavior does not provide any objective evidence about these putative causes, in the absence of publicly available, objective confirmatory information (Baum, 2016;Nisbett & Wilson, 1977).…”