scholarly journals Paranoia, self-deception and overconfidence

2021 ◽  
Vol 17 (10) ◽  
pp. e1009453
Author(s):  
Rosa A. Rossi-Goldthorpe ◽  
Yuan Chang Leong ◽  
Pantelis Leptourgos ◽  
Philip R. Corlett

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.

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rosa Rossi-Goldthorpe ◽  
Yuan Chang Leong ◽  
Pantelis Leptourgos ◽  
Philip R. Corlett

Self-deception, paranoia, and overconfidence involve misbeliefs about 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 normative 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 normative 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 costly wars.


2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Uri Hertz ◽  
Vaughan Bell ◽  
Joseph M Barnby ◽  
Andrew McQuillin ◽  
Bahador Bahrami

Abstract Sharing privately held information, for example, one’s confidence in the likelihood of future events, can greatly help others make better decisions as well as promoting one’s reputation and social influence. Differences in metacognition on the one hand, and difficulties in social functioning and social cognition on the other, have been reported in people diagnosed with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. However, despite clear relevance few studies have investigated the link between these abilities and psychosis. In this exploratory study, we compared individuals diagnosed with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and a group of unselected general population controls, in an online competitive advice-giving task. Participants gave advice to a client by making a probabilistic perceptual judgment. They could strategically adapt the advice confidence to gain influence over the client. Crucially, participants competed with a rival adviser to attract the client’s endorsement. We observe that participants diagnosed with schizophrenia displayed an overall overconfidence in their advice compared with other, bipolar, and unselected control groups, but did not differ in metacognitive efficiency from controls. Symptom-based analysis revealed that the social-influence effect was associated with the presence of delusions but not hallucinations or mood symptoms. These results suggest that the social communication of uncertainty should be further investigated in psychosis.


1989 ◽  
Vol 34 (5) ◽  
pp. 450-451
Author(s):  
William P. Smith

1989 ◽  
Vol 34 (11) ◽  
pp. 1046-1046
Author(s):  
No authorship indicated

2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (5) ◽  
pp. 456-469
Author(s):  
Habiba Abou Hafs ◽  
◽  
Fadila Boutora ◽  

The question of project manager competencies and especially in social projects is a key issue for social organizations seeking to progress and achieve success. If the manager has an important role to play with regard to the social organization, he’s however dependent on his behavioral, professional and personal capacities. The purpose of this paper is to show, on the basis of a quantitative study carried out among 120 managers of social projects in cooperatives located in the city of Agadir (Morocco), that the success of projects is conditioned by the leadership skills. Consequently, factors related to behavioral skills such as Solidarity; Involvement; Patience; Creativity; Empathy; Motivation; Trust; Commitment; Self-esteem; Transparency; Self-control; Discipline and other factors related to professional characteristics and personal characteristics of project managers prove a positive and significant relationship with the criterion of success studied.


2012 ◽  
Vol 2012 (1) ◽  
pp. 163-192
Author(s):  
Sonja Rinofner-Kreidl

Autonomy is associated with intellectual self-preservation and self-determination. Shame, on the contrary, bears a loss of approval, self-esteem and control. Being afflicted with shame, we suffer from social dependencies that by no means have been freely chosen. Moreover, undergoing various experiences of shame, our power of reflection turns out to be severly limited owing to emotional embarrassment. In both ways, shame seems to be bound to heteronomy. This situation strongly calls for conceptual clarification. For this purpose, we introduce a threestage model of self-determination which comprises i) autonomy as capability of decision-making relating to given sets of choices, ii) self-commitment in terms of setting and harmonizing goals, and iii) self-realization in compliance with some range of persistently approved goals. Accordingly, the presuppositions and distinctive marks of shame-experiences are made explicit. Within this framework, we explore the intricate relation between autonomy and shame by focusing on two questions: on what conditions could conventional behavior be considered as self-determined? How should one characterize the varying roles of actors that are involved in typical cases of shame-experiences? In this connection, we advance the thesis that the social dynamics of shame turns into ambiguous positions relating to motivation, intentional content,and actors’ roles.


Author(s):  
Peggy J. Miller ◽  
Grace E. Cho

Chapter 12, “Commentary: Personalization,” discusses the process of personalization, based on the portraits presented in Chapters 8–11. Personalization is not just a matter of individual variation; it is a form of active engagement through which individuals endow imaginaries with personal meanings and refract the imaginary through their own experiences. The portraits illustrate how the social imaginary of childrearing and self-esteem entered into dialogue with the complex realities of people’s lives. Parents’ ability to implement their childrearing goals was constrained and enabled by their past experiences and by socioeconomic conditions. The individual children were developing different strategies of self-evaluation, different expectations about how affirming the world would be, and different self-defining interests, and their self-making varied, depending on the situation. Some children received diagnoses of low self-esteem as early as preschool.


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