The challenge was to harbour beliefs that are robust to noise but sensitive to real contingency changes 7.īefore the pandemic, people who were more paranoid (scoring in the clinical range on standard scales 6, 8) were more likely to switch their choices between options, even after positive feedback 5. Hence, the task assayed belief formation and updating under uncertainty 7. Participants were forewarned that the best option may change but not when or how often 7. The best option changed and, part way through the task, the underlying probabilities became more difficult to distinguish, increasing unexpected uncertainty and blurring the distinction between probabilistic errors and errors that signified a shift in the underlying contingencies. Participants chose between options with different reward probabilities to learn the best option (Fig. We administered a probabilistic reversal learning task. Relating paranoia to task-derived belief updating We chose to continue gathering data on participants’ belief updating and leverage publicly available data in an effort to explore and explain the differences we observed. Our interests evolved as the pandemic did. Finally, since different states responded more or less vigorously to the pandemic and the residents of those states complied with those policies differently, we expected that efforts to quell the pandemic would change perceived real-world volatility and thus paranoid ideation and task-based belief updating.
PARANOID MEANING UPDATE
Furthermore, we expected that real-world volatility would change individuals’ sensitivity to task-based volatility, causing them to update their beliefs in a computerized task accordingly 5.
We hypothesized that paranoia would increase during the pandemic, perhaps driven by the need to explain and understand real-world volatility 1. We further explored the impact of state-level pandemic responses on beliefs and behaviour. 1a) spanning three time periods: before the pandemic lockdown during lockdown and into reopening. We examined self-rated paranoia 6 alongside social and non-social belief updating in computer-based tasks (Fig. The COVID-19 pandemic increased real-world uncertainty and provided an unprecedented opportunity to track the impact of an unfolding crisis on human beliefs. Paranoia may be driven by altered social inferences 3 or by domain-general mechanisms for processing uncertainty 4, 5. Taken together, we found that real-world uncertainty increases paranoia and influences laboratory task behaviour.Ĭrises, from terrorist attacks 1 to viral pandemics, are fertile grounds for paranoia 2, the belief that others bear malicious intent towards us. These beliefs were associated with erratic task behaviour and changed priors. People who were more paranoid endorsed conspiracies about mask-wearing and potential vaccines and the QAnon conspiracy theories.
Computational analyses of participant behaviour suggested that people with higher paranoia expected the task to be more unstable. This was most evident in states where adherence to mask-wearing rules was poor but where rule following is typically more common. However, state-mandated mask-wearing increased paranoia and induced more erratic behaviour. A proactive lockdown made people’s belief updating less capricious.
Here, we show that the initial phase of the pandemic in 2020 increased individuals’ paranoia and made their belief updating more erratic. Such crises can lead people to feel that others are a threat. The COVID-19 pandemic has made the world seem less predictable.
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