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Dissertation
Paranoia and the Social Brain
2022
Overview
Paranoia is typically defined as the belief that others intend you harm and that this harm will occur. However, it has a specific social phenomenology: paranoid concerns often involve selective identification of persecutors who are perceived to form malevolent groups, and who have specific social identities. Drawing on this, a recent synthesis suggests that paranoia stems from mechanisms evolved to navigate our coalitional environment. I present a series of studies that test hypotheses emerging from this perspective, investigating a number of different areas of social cognition, and recruiting participants from across the full paranoia continuum. In my first study, I investigated how between-individual differences in trait paranoia reflect exposure to coalitional safety and threat in the social environment. In my second study, I developed a novel game-theoretic paradigm to test how live paranoia changes in response to a coalitional threat cue, group cohesion, and if this responsivity varies with trait-level paranoia. In my third study, I extended this investigation to involve a clinical sample of individuals experiencing psychosis. In my fourth study, across three experiments, I sought to examine cognitive mechanisms underpinning social avoidance in paranoia, in particular testing whether paranoia is associated with betrayal aversion. In my fifth study I employed two experimental paradigms to test if social identification is weaker in paranoia, and if this can explain lower trust and cooperation typically observed in more paranoid individuals. Lastly, in the final study presented here, I examined if certain types of conspiracy thinking are more prominent in paranoia. I discuss the extent to which my results are compatible with the coalitional perspective of paranoia and consider the implications my findings have for applied mental health care contexts and for broader public policy.
Publisher
ProQuest Dissertations & Theses
Subject
