Important disclaimer
This is going to be a multi-post topic. Although I never claim my posts are the definitive, complete description of a topic, this one is so broad and so complicated that I really feel I’m doing a disservice to it with a post this short. On the other hand, a full treatment would probably be multiple PhD theses, and I doubt many people would read that. So even more than usual, please do not take this as a definitive, complete examination of what paranoia is and how it works. This is, at best, a very superficial beginning. I will almost certainly be coming back to this when I’ve improved my understanding.
Actual beginning
As we saw in last week’s post, perceptions of privacy-conscious people as “paranoid” are… I don’t want to say common, but not unusual. All the common statements we’ve heard before are based on this, especially the crowd favourite “what do you have to hide?”. Basically the idea being your perception of the “threat” posed by law enforcement or corporations is excessive, the surveillance isn’t so broad or even if it is the legitimate authorities mean you no harm.
I’m not getting into the ways in which these statements are right or wrong – that’s the realm of politics and philosophy, and on this blog we concern ourselves with psychology. But people often accuse privacy-conscious people of being paranoid. Are we? What does that even mean? And, of course the eternal question:
Is it paranoia if they really are out to get you?
Not if They’re bad at hiding it.
OK, OK, I probably should go more into detail.
Paranoia is surprisingly tricky to define and measure as a separate construct from things like fear, anxiety, threat perception, etc. Further complicating the factor that a lot of the research talks about delusions and personality disorders, especially those with a persecutory or paranoid theme, so a lot of the way they talk about paranoia is within that context. For our purposes, the working definition of paranoia I’m going with here is “a belief or fear that harm is intended to the person or their social group by some individual or group, to a degree that is clearly excessive given the amount of evidence available and in a way that is not consistent with cultural norms”. This isn’t a great definition, but it has the advantage of getting what I think is the essence of paranoia while still being pretty comprehensible to most people. I’ll talk about some parts that don’t technically fall within this later, but for our purposes, this will mostly do.
An important and often-underappreciated aspect of paranoia is that, like many psychological concepts, it is best thought of as a trait that we all have to some extent, that may well serve an important adaptive function, but can under some circumstances become maladaptive. In the same way anxiety is really healthy and desirable in some cases, but can also become a crippling disorder, inferring or fearing threat from others serves an obvious useful function when sometimes people do mean you harm. If I do not perceive someone waving a gun in my face saying “I’m going to shoot you in the face” as a threat, I’m probably not doing to do very well, for example.
So we all have some level of paranoia, and for most of us that’s probably broadly a healthy level. We are unlikely to trust every e-mail we get claiming to be from royalty who just needs a hand, but we’re also probably not thinking our neighbours are reading our thoughts through our toasters. And this level can be driven up (or down) to unhealthy levels by various factors – trauma, psychosis (delusions or hallucinations), or drugs, for example.
So, within that context, let us look back at the question: “is it paranoia if they really are out to get you”? Let’s look at it within a real-life context; conspiracy theories about mass government surveillance. In the 1990s, people who thought this was going on were considered paranoid, with attributions made of having watched The X-Files (with its themes of government surveillance) a few too many times. When the US brought in the PATRIOT Act, people who pointed out that it would lead to mass surveillance of innocent people were accused of having read 1984 (with its themes of government surveillance) a few too many times. When people said the British government was listening in on the phone calls of its citizens… you get the idea. These people were, we now know, substantially correct (on this point, anyway. No word yet on the aliens). Were they paranoid?
Within the definition we are working with, they had a belief or fear of harm intended to them or their social groups in excess of the evidence available to them at the time in ways that is not consistent with cultural norms. Their governments were spying on them, but they didn’t have any actual evidence that justified their fears. Remember, these people were talking, non-ironically, about tin-foil hats protecting themselves from “electronic torture”.
I think what trips people up is a simple category error: they assume that “crazy” or “insane” (not actual psychological terms, to be clear) is synonymous with “wrong”. This is incorrect. Yes, people with severe mental health issues will often be very mistaken about things – people with depression are (probably) not actually the worst people on the planet, people with hypochondria are (probably) not suffering from rare diseases. But bear in mind that so-called “healthy” people are also probably wrong about many things as well – there’s a near-infinite number of ways to be wrong, and only a small number of ways to be right, after all. The odds of you believing all the correct things is so implausible as to be not worth considering. And of course there’s people with severe mental health issues who are (so far as we can tell) correct about things.
Now, obviously that’s not the same thing. Mental illness is defined – in part – by impairments in perception or judgement or other mental faculties, which you would expect would lead to less ability to perceive and reason “correctly”, so you would expect people with unmanaged mental illness to be incorrect more often, and that would be a totally reasonable and valid argument (if one prone to supporting prejudiced behaviours, but we shan’t get into that). But that assumes that the space in which people are judging is equally weighted, which it obviously isn’t. People who are prone to detecting threat are going to be more likely to detect threat when threat is actually present as well as when it’s not present, all else being equal. It just so happens that there was a threat here that nobody else picked up on.
I once read a paper that has really stuck with me. Basically, it argued that while there are definitely theories that are almost certainly wrong and supported by totally bonkers arguments or non-evidence, the term “conspiracy theory” is used as a rhetorical device to discredit ideas that the speaker doesn’t believe in, or are politically inconvenient, even if they are potentially plausible. We can see this in practice, where if you say “I’m concerned the federal government is harvesting my personal information”, people might respond with some variant of “you’re being paranoid”. Notice how this does not engage with the topic you’ve expressed; they may as well say “your shirt is blue” for all the relevance it has. Or when the news describes someone as a “conspiracy theorist” – people are already not going to view what the person has to say positively.
So what is paranoia?
This is… complicated. I’ve spent a lot of time reading about the topic specifically, on top of what I’ve obviously learned previously, and honestly I still don’t really feel that I have a good handle on the topic. Part of it is because so often it’s talked about in the specific clinical context of delusions. These are clearly contexts where someone’s paranoia is negatively impacting their or other’s lives, in addition to the complex and multi-faceted nature of psychosis, so it’s hard to separate out the impacts of paranoia and delusion.
But there does seem to be some broad trends. First, paranoia seems to feed on anxiety, and can in part be thought of as a specific form of anxiety. Some people are anxious about their health, some are anxious about nuclear weapons, some are anxious about governments or corporations. While these are all different and have their own characteristics, they all share the same root description of fear or worry about something potentially happening.
There was a pretty cool study where they got members of the public, screened them for diagnosable mental illness including psychosis, and put them in a virtual reality train, with other people (who were programmed to behave in neutral ways), and then asked to describe the behaviours of the virtual people. And they found that people with greater tendency towards anxiety or worry were more likely to report hostile behaviours on the part of the virtual people such as laughing at the participant or looking aggressive. Another work suggested that mild social anxiety (the worry that the people you spoke to at that party don’t actually like you very much) is the same mechanism as paranoia, just much more mild, which seems to line up with the evidence we have. This suggests that mild social anxiety about people thinking you’re boring and people thinking their neighbour is trying to drive them mad by playing The Fray on an endless loop are, basically, the same thing – one is just more severe, albeit probably triggered by other factors.
There’s also some argument that paranoia serves as a kind of self-protection. Remember before how we were talking about how inferring threat from others is a good thing sometimes? This view argues that paranoia can, in some cases, serve as a kind of ego-protection. Basically, if I feel bad about not getting that job, I can instead believe “well, they didn’t give me the job because they were threatened by how awesome I am, they were afraid I’d get promoted over their head”. Or, to turn the dial up a few notches, “they didn’t give me the job because they secretly hate me and want me to fail”. Either way, the belief serves to make me feel better about not getting the job. This view points out that paranoia is (strongly) associated with lowered self-esteem or depression, and it’s a lot more palatable to believe that the reason you’re fat or ugly or unlovable (or whatever other false thing your brain is telling you) isn’t because of flaws in your behaviour or choices, but because They mean you harm. Even if you can’t do anything about Them, it means it’s not your fault, which for a certain kind of mindset is a massive relief, especially if your brain is prone to telling you everything from your weight to starvation in poor countries is specifically your fault.
This is further supported by the broad categorisation of paranoia into two broad forms, called “poor me” and “bad me”. “Poor me” is basically the form where the person is being attacked by Them for no reason, or because They are simply malevolent people. The person is innocent, and They are evil. “Bad me”, in contrast, is strongly associated with depressive tendencies, and takes the form that the person is being targeted by Them because of some wrongdoing or flaw in the person – it’s the person’s fault they’re being persecuted. In this view, the “poor me” paranoid person is defending their self-image by blaming their bad feeling or perceived poor situation on Them, while the “bad me” is simply using the idea of Them to further justify their brains trying to kill them.
Personally, I’m not sure I believe this view. Oh, in some cases it may well be true, but as a general explanation of paranoia? It just doesn’t jibe. First, so-called “bad me” might be pretty rare – turns out depressed people don’t need to invent malevolent entities to torment them, they’re pretty good at tormenting themselves (psychotic depression is a thing). So it’s more likely that these two phenomena aren’t really directly related.
Second, paranoid people tend to have significantly lower self-esteem. If paranoia was to serve an ego-protection role, you’d expect self-esteem to be more-or-less normal, or even elevated. But, nope, that’s not what we find. There’s some attempts to further tease out the differences (this article has a good summary of the work if you’re interested), looking at specific beliefs or separating explicit self-esteem from implicit belief associations, but they’re rarely successful, and frankly it’s starting to look a bit desperate to me. There might be something there, but if so it’s almost certainly more complicated than ego-protection against poor self-image.
But it does lead to an interesting perspective: what function does paranoia serve? Not just as a normal trait turned up to 11, but does it serve a useful function even at high levels? And it turns out, there’s a theory which I find quite interesting.
Hostile World Beliefs
Most of my work has to do with identity and world-view, although that’s not what my current work is dealing with, at least directly. But any theory that attempts to tie constructs to this dynamic is always going to catch my eye, and during my reading I did come across a few references to something called “hostile world beliefs”.
Hostile world beliefs or hostile world scenarios (HWB/HWS) posits, basically, that people view the world as basically hostile, either to them specifically, their group, or just in general. In some form, survival is difficult. Again, this is not necessarily wrong or harmful – for some people in some contexts, thinking of the world as basically hostile is really helpful; people living in civil war zones, for example. Or in a more mild form, when a loved one passes on, or when you’re fired from a job. These things challenge our feelings of safety or happiness – they are, in a sense, “hostile” events that we need to navigate. And we have lots of ways of doing that, but part of what I want to talk about today is the way in which this view can help us feel better about ourselves.
Remember “poor me” paranoia, in which you are being persecuted by Them for no good reason? While I’m skeptical of the ego-protection theory as a general explanation of paranoia, I’m completely on board with the idea that people adopt world-views that serve their cognitive and emotional needs. And you know what makes me feel even better than being the awesome person I am? Being this awesome despite the forces arrayed against me. This doesn’t even need to be a conscious, malevolent Them – things like being able to run a marathon despite having one lung is legitimately impressive, or being able to complete amazing works despite suffering from serious mental illness. We would generally agree that accomplishing a high level of achievement is more impressive if there was some additional hardship in the way, and is less impressive if the person had some unreasonable advantage – me making $1 billion is less impressive if I was born with $10 billion than if I was born with no money at all, for example.
We see this on an individual level. A common finding of people who have undergone trauma or hardship is what’s called “post-traumatic growth” – basically, people can take their hardship and incorporate it into their identity in such a way that it encourages them to be more compassionate or spiritual or grateful or whatever.
HWB can serve a similar function. By integrating the hostile nature of the world into our world-view, our achievements become more impressive. The meaning we take from our experiences becomes greater, because they were “earned” under the context of a fundamentally challenging world. I didn’t just browse the Internet, I evaded the ever-watchful eye of Google or Facebook. I didn’t just pirate a movie or album or textbook, I fought against unjust copyright laws that unfairly protect large corporations and squash independent artists. I didn’t just buy a pair of shoes, I hunted and found a great bargain. It’s not (necessarily) wrong in the sense of being inconsistent with observed facts, it’s just a different framing of those facts.
Within that framework, we can see how paranoia, or at least some paranoid framings, can be psychologically helpful. A while ago I wrote about extreme threat modellers (ETMs), and I alluded to paranoia being relevant to their motivations. This is part of what I was talking about – by constructing a worldview in which every single thing we do is noted and logged, any achievements of privacy are impressive. But the Watchers (government, corporations, whatever) are so powerful that nothing but the most extreme measures will have any effect. Most VPNs are honeypots, every operating system is either malicious or naive on security, you have to go above and beyond to accomplish anything within this context.
Which means, for those who get anywhere… that’s pretty impressive. In the same way that Winston Smith in 1984 managed to hide by having a nook in his quarters unobserved by the telescreen, keeping even a fraction of your behaviour hidden is a Hurculean feat. From the book I linked above (p. 148):
SWB (subjective well-being) and HWS can also cofunction. Here, SWB does not serve to ward off the HWS; rather, SWB lets people benefit from the favorable psychological environment while remaining vigilant for hostile conditions. This strategy may be effective for handling complex situations, where the favorable psychological environment facilitates exploration and manipulation of certain HWS representations.
Subjective well-being isn’t quite the same thing as happiness, including elements like “how satisfied are you with your life” and “how much meaning do you feel your life has”, but it’s close enough for our purposes.
Within this context, you can see how poor threat modelling is common, or even necessary. If a massive effort is necessary for any gains whatsoever, anything which inhibits this must be jettisoned. And besides, isn’t the idea that the CIA isn’t reading each and every one of your personal notes exactly what They would want you to think?
Of course not. That’s paranoid.