Paranoia, self-deception and overconfidence.

ABSTRACT: 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

SUBMITTER: Rossi-Goldthorpe RA 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8525769 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature