Year: 2024
Type: article
Abstract: Paranoia (belief that others intend harm) and excessive teleological thinking (ascription of purpose to events) are problematic because they can cause a departure from consensual reality. Aberrant theorizing about other minds has been implicated in these higher-level cognitive processes. But we know that human vision can also detect social agents and extract rich information about their goals and intentions even before higher-level theory-of-mind processes are engaged. Might paranoia and teleological thinking have roots in earlier visual perception? Using simple displays that evoke the impression that one disc (the ‘wolf’) is pursuing another (the ‘sheep’) amongst distractors, we find that human participants with more paranoid and excessive teleological thinking tend to perceive chasing even when there is none (experiments 1 and 2) — errors that might be characterized as “social hallucinations”. However, in both between- (experiment 3) and within-participant designs (experiments 4a and 4b), we find that paranoid people have problems detecting sheep, while those high in teleology have problems detecting wolves — each confidently mis-ascribing that role (the wolf for teleology, the sheep for paranoia) to the wrong discs. Moreover, both types of errors correlate with hallucinatory percepts in the real world. These data demonstrate that different people are prone to hallucinate different kinds of social relationships — each colored by different beliefs about intentions, each with their own phenomenology and cognitive/emotional consequences, yet each operating even in visual detection itself, beyond higher-level reasoning.
Source: Communications Psychology
Institutions: Yale University, University of British Columbia, The New School
Language: English
Subfield: Cognitive Neuroscience
Field: Neuroscience
Domain: Life Sciences
Open Access status: gold
Estimated APC paid: $2,090
OpenAlex ID: W4405459528