Paranoia and Survival of the Fittest?

An article in Medical News Today (“Extent of Public Paranoia Revealed by Virtual Reality Underground Ride”) reported findings of a study on paranoia. The study sent a number of subjects on a virtual tour around the London Underground, examined their judgment of people around them, and concluded that paranoia is by no means limited to the severely mentally ill. The article quotes one of the investigators: “About one-third of the general population regularly experience persecutory thoughts. This shouldn't be surprising. At the heart of all social interactions is a vital judgment whether to trust or mistrust, but it is a judgment that is error-prone. We are more likely to make paranoid errors if we are anxious, ruminate and have had bad experiences from others in the past."

Naturally, given the current climate of global politics, the researchers link the presence of paranoia among subway users to general fears of terrorism. And in that way, the issue of inter-cultural or inter-ethnic conflict – and stereotypes – enter into this issue of social judgments. Perhaps in an effort to strike a positive note on these issues of conflict and mistrust, the researchers suggest that the existence of paranoid thoughts (and the social judgments to which it is linked) may be the only thing we all have in common as human beings.

I wrote an article, years ago, about the universality of the human need to define oneself in contrast with an ‘other’ (this, of course, being a big concept in anthropology. It is, for better or worse, our subject matter). I argued in this article that individuals and groups always need a contrast to paint themselves against; we do not know who we are if we cannot point to someone who is everything we are not. In that article I didn’t go into the possible evolutionary or biological reasons for this need – and I think it’s a murky subject, as anything related to evolutionary psychology is. But it seems to me that this need to contrast oneself to an ‘other’ is linked, conceptually, to these judgments, and to the paranoia engendered by those we judge untrustworthy. And it seems plausible that all that might be linked to some basic mechanisms for survival. I can imagine that in a world dominated by survival of the fittest, in which human beings need the help of others but also compete with them, snap judgments are sometimes necessary. Is this person going to help me survive, or will he threaten my right to live? And perhaps paranoia (or conflict, or prejudice – which I think can reasonably be linked to paranoia) is a mental mechanism that induces the individual to keep his distance from those deemed threatening.

But despite this potential universality, I’d be interested also in the cultural and gender variation in these judgments. Because there must be variation in these judgments: a woman will react differently to a particular man than another man will, and in the same way a Westerner ignorant of Middle Eastern cultures will react differently to an encounter with a man wearing a turban than a person from Calcutta will. And that’s interesting, because that suggests that universal, neurological mechanisms are shaped by culture and thus manifest themselves differently in people from different backgrounds. I wonder if this study looked into such variations at all.