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Paranoia, self-deception and overconfidence

Self-deception, paranoia, and overconfidence involve misbeliefs about the self, others, and world. They are often considered mistaken. Here we explore whether they might be adaptive, and further, whether they might be explicable in Bayesian terms. We administered a difficult perceptual judgment task...

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Autores principales: Rossi-Goldthorpe, Rosa A., Leong, Yuan Chang, Leptourgos, Pantelis, Corlett, Philip R.
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Public Library of Science 2021
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8525769/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34618805
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1009453
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author Rossi-Goldthorpe, Rosa A.
Leong, Yuan Chang
Leptourgos, Pantelis
Corlett, Philip R.
author_facet Rossi-Goldthorpe, Rosa A.
Leong, Yuan Chang
Leptourgos, Pantelis
Corlett, Philip R.
author_sort Rossi-Goldthorpe, Rosa A.
collection PubMed
description Self-deception, paranoia, and overconfidence involve misbeliefs about the self, others, and world. They are often considered mistaken. Here we explore whether they might be adaptive, and further, whether they might be explicable in Bayesian terms. We administered a difficult perceptual judgment task with and without social influence (suggestions from a cooperating or competing partner). Crucially, the social influence was uninformative. We found that participants heeded the suggestions most under the most uncertain conditions and that they did so with high confidence, particularly if they were more paranoid. Model fitting to participant behavior revealed that their prior beliefs changed depending on whether the partner was a collaborator or competitor, however, those beliefs did not differ as a function of paranoia. Instead, paranoia, self-deception, and overconfidence were associated with participants’ perceived instability of their own performance. These data are consistent with the idea that self-deception, paranoia, and overconfidence flourish under uncertainty, and have their roots in low self-esteem, rather than excessive social concern. The model suggests that spurious beliefs can have value–self-deception is irrational yet can facilitate optimal behavior. This occurs even at the expense of monetary rewards, perhaps explaining why self-deception and paranoia contribute to costly decisions which can spark financial crashes and devastating wars.
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spelling pubmed-85257692021-10-20 Paranoia, self-deception and overconfidence Rossi-Goldthorpe, Rosa A. Leong, Yuan Chang Leptourgos, Pantelis Corlett, Philip R. PLoS Comput Biol Research Article Self-deception, paranoia, and overconfidence involve misbeliefs about the self, others, and world. They are often considered mistaken. Here we explore whether they might be adaptive, and further, whether they might be explicable in Bayesian terms. We administered a difficult perceptual judgment task with and without social influence (suggestions from a cooperating or competing partner). Crucially, the social influence was uninformative. We found that participants heeded the suggestions most under the most uncertain conditions and that they did so with high confidence, particularly if they were more paranoid. Model fitting to participant behavior revealed that their prior beliefs changed depending on whether the partner was a collaborator or competitor, however, those beliefs did not differ as a function of paranoia. Instead, paranoia, self-deception, and overconfidence were associated with participants’ perceived instability of their own performance. These data are consistent with the idea that self-deception, paranoia, and overconfidence flourish under uncertainty, and have their roots in low self-esteem, rather than excessive social concern. The model suggests that spurious beliefs can have value–self-deception is irrational yet can facilitate optimal behavior. This occurs even at the expense of monetary rewards, perhaps explaining why self-deception and paranoia contribute to costly decisions which can spark financial crashes and devastating wars. Public Library of Science 2021-10-07 /pmc/articles/PMC8525769/ /pubmed/34618805 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1009453 Text en © 2021 Rossi-Goldthorpe et al https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
spellingShingle Research Article
Rossi-Goldthorpe, Rosa A.
Leong, Yuan Chang
Leptourgos, Pantelis
Corlett, Philip R.
Paranoia, self-deception and overconfidence
title Paranoia, self-deception and overconfidence
title_full Paranoia, self-deception and overconfidence
title_fullStr Paranoia, self-deception and overconfidence
title_full_unstemmed Paranoia, self-deception and overconfidence
title_short Paranoia, self-deception and overconfidence
title_sort paranoia, self-deception and overconfidence
topic Research Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8525769/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34618805
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1009453
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