Social reward, punishment, and prosociality in paranoia.

Abstract

Paranoia is the exaggerated 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 decision-making, 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 positive and/or negative social decision-making, a possibility we explore using a preregistered experiment with U.S.-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.

Conjecturing harmful intent and preemptive strike in paranoia

“…However, extrapolating clear conclusions is not yet possible due to the limited research regarding the PSG. Considering the association between paranoia and behaviors in economic games, results that repudiate past findings have also been reported, perhaps due to experimental settings (e.g., Raihani et al, 2021). Hopefully, future research will accumulate empirical evidence on the robustness of the impact of paranoia on social behaviors.…”

“…Some studies outline a connection between paranoia and various behaviors in economic games, such as defection in the Prisoner's Dilemma (Ellett et al, 2013;Savulich et al, 2018) and low generous distributions in the Dictator game . Recent studies argue that paranoia may reflect an orientation towards selfinterest rather than distrust Raihani et al, 2021). In contrast to these economic games, we cannot logically elucidate whether the attack in the PSG is based on self-interest because the attack is costly.…”

“…Nonetheless, highly paranoid recipients tend to perceive such intentions as more harmful than low-paranoid participants (Barnby et al, 2020;Raihani & Bell, 2017;Saalfeld et al, 2018). Contrariwise, the proclivity to attribute intentions of others with self-interest does not differ among recipients with high-and low-paranoid thoughts (Barnby et al, 2020;Greenburgh et al, 2018;Raihani & Bell, 2017Raihani et al, 2021;Saalfeld et al, 2018).…”

“…Several empirical studies have evaluated mechanisms of social cognition in paranoia utilizing economic games (Barnby et al, 2020;Ellett, Allen-Crooks, Stevens, Wildschut, & Chadwick, 2013;Fett et al, 2012;Greenburgh, Bell, & Raihani, 2018;Raihani & Bell, 2017Raihani, Martinez-Gatell, Bell, & Foulkes, 2021;Saalfeld, Ramadan, Bell, & Raihani, 2018;Savulich et al, 2018). For example, the Dictator game, wherein a "dictator" decides the amount of money allocated to a "recipient," is usually conducted during social interactions to inspect the relationship between paranoid thoughts and attribution of harmful intent.…”

“…For instance, paranoid thoughts are associated with defection in Prisoner's Dilemma (Ellett et al, 2013;Savulich et al, 2018), reduce trusting behavior in the Trust game (Fett et al, 2012), and generate low generosity in the Dictator and Ultimatum games Savulich et al, 2018). Another study highlights no effect of paranoia on predicting generosity (Raihani et al, 2021). In economic games, paranoia also predicts punitive behaviors or sentiments toward the opponents .…”