Athena Aktipis (00:00:04):
[dramatic whoosh] Have you been zombified by your own paranoia. Welcome to the zombified podcast, your source for fresh brains. I am your host, Athena Aktipis, psychology professor at ASU and chair of the zombie apocalypse medicine Alliance.

Dave Lundberg Kendrick (00:00:21):
I am your co-host, Dave Lundberg Kendrick, media outreach program manager at ASU and brain enthusiast.

Athena Aktipis (00:00:28):
Yeah. Brains. We're really, really into brains.

Dave Lundberg Kendrick (00:00:31):
So what are we talking about today?

Athena Aktipis (00:00:34):
Well we are talking about paranoia, what paranoia is fundamentally and how it can shape us and if it's functional.

Dave Lundberg Kendrick (00:00:47):
Ah.

Athena Aktipis (00:00:47):
Or if it's always just crazy.

Dave Lundberg Kendrick (00:00:50):
And what is your favorite part of today's...

Athena Aktipis (00:00:53):
My favorite part of today's podcast is this idea that maybe being paranoid is not always crazy. Like sometimes people really are talking about you behind your back.

Dave Lundberg Kendrick (00:01:09):
Ah. Interesting.

Athena Aktipis (00:01:09):
Yeah. And so our brains are maybe attuned to that.

Dave Lundberg Kendrick (00:01:13):
Cool.

Athena Aktipis (00:01:14):
Yeah. So, um, I think you're going to love the episode honestly. [Dave agrees] So we're talking with Nicola Raihani, who is in the psychology department at University College London and she's pretty amazing cause she has studied not just humans but all sorts of other organisms and how they interact with each other socially. And so she has a really broad perspective on behavior and cognition.

Dave Lundberg Kendrick (00:01:44):
Oh yeah. Sounds great.

Athena Aktipis (00:01:45):
All right. So, um, let's hear from this week's fresh brain, Nicola Raihani.

Intro (00:01:53):
[Psychological by Lemi]

Athena Aktipis (00:02:29):
Nicola, welcome to Zombified.

Nikola Raihani (00:02:32):
Thank you.

Athena Aktipis (00:02:32):
Would you start by introducing yourself in your own words?

Nikola Raihani (00:02:36):
Sure, so I, I'm a professor of, uh, evolution and behavior at University College London. I'm in the psychology department now, but, um, I don't really so much identify as being a psychologist. My background is more in evolutionary biology. Um, and I'm interested in the evolution, social behavior generally. So why individuals either, uh, work together to achieve collective outcomes, how they do that, what kinds of impediments there are to achieving that. Um, and yeah, so I'm interested in that question broadly in many species, including humans,

Athena Aktipis (00:03:16):
What other species have you-

Nikola Raihani (00:03:18):
So I've worked on a few, it's all a bit of a Motley crew of species. So, um, I did my PhD on a species of bird called the pied babbler, which is, um, a social bird that lives in very tight knit family groups in the Kalahari desert. So there are, uh, there, they're a bit like meercats, but birds, they, so they have a similar breeding system to meercats [Athena "interesting"], which is that, um, basically just one male and one female in the group breed, um, to the exclusion of all the group members and the, the, the job of the other group members is to basically help the breeding pair to raise youngling.

Nikola Raihani (00:03:57):
So obviously in a system like that, there are kind of disagreements that can arise [Athena: Mmhmm] over who's breeding and who's helping and how much help ought to be done and things like this. And so I was, my PhD was basically focusing on how fabulous resolve those conflicts that inevitably arise [Athena: Mmhmm] in a system where reproduction is so unfairly distributed.

Athena Aktipis (00:04:20):
Yeah, great. So evolution and behavior's kind of been your interests all along and you studied lots of different-

Nikola Raihani (00:04:25):
Yeah. So the other species I've worked on have been uh mole rats very briefly. Um, cleaner fish, uh possums a bit in Australia. Um, and humans [Athena "some"]. Yeah. A few.

Athena Aktipis (00:04:39):
Yeah. Well, and we're sitting here and you're in your garden, hence the, with the planes, the planes and the birds and other flying creatures around, which is a lovely day. And thank you for having- So I'm staying with you, which is awesome. And had the chance to meet your, your lab yesterday. I might- did I meet all of you?

Nikola Raihani (00:05:00):
So you met, you met Gabriel, who's my PhD student working on empathy and how, how, and why we feel empathy for other people, but you didn't meet Anna who is another PhD student working in my lab who is focusing on psychosis and understanding psychosis as a disorder of the social brain.

Athena Aktipis (00:05:20):
Excellent. And we were going to talk about some of that stuff today, right? [Nikola agrees]. So paranoia and how people see the world and how that kind of ties into our idea of zombification. [Nikola agrees] Yeah. Awesome. So in, in your mind, how does paranoia sort of relate to this issue of like, you know, feeling that other people might be controlling or in control or you're not in control of your behavior? Is there, is there a connection there? You see?

Nikola Raihani (00:05:53):
So I think, yeah, like loosely, there is a connection, I mean it probably helps to kind of take a step back and think about what is, what, when we say paranoia, what do we really mean by it? [Athena agrees]. And, uh, is it a binary trait? Like your paranoid and I'm not. Or is it something which exists more on a spectrum of severity? And in fact-

Athena Aktipis (00:06:14):
Are you saying, I'm paranoid?

Nikola Raihani (00:06:15):
[Both laugh] Well-

Athena Aktipis (00:06:19):
You're going to reserve judgment.

Athena Aktipis (00:06:21):
Yeah. So, basically what we, um, what we know about paranoia is that it's, it isn't a binary thing. It is something which exists on a spectrum of severity and which you can detect in the general population. Um, you know, just people walking around if you administer them a standard questionnaire about paranoid thoughts that they might have had over the last month or so, what you'll tend to find is that, um, most people are basically not tools.

Athena Aktipis (00:06:49):
So what counts? Paranoid thought.

Nikola Raihani (00:06:51):
Yeah, that's actually a good question. So yeah, before we jump into who, were the people fall on that spectrum? Uh, basically there's a sort of colloquial assumption. I think that paranoia implies that you are, have a mistaken belief that people are out to get you right. And, um, the-

Athena Aktipis (00:07:09):
But you're saying people really are out to get you.

Nikola Raihani (00:07:10):
Well now [Athena laughs] I think, I think the emphasis on people being mistaken is misguided because I think sometimes people can be, can have a heightened perception that people are out to get them, but that can actually be true for them in the world that they live in. Right? [Athena: Hmm]. So I don't think it's that helpful to think of paranoia as being, um, mistaken per se. But I think, I think it's better to characterize it in terms of just an exaggerated tendency to think that other people intend you harm. So-

Athena Aktipis (00:07:41):
So would it be like if you would say it's not mistaken if like there really is someone who has bad intentions towards you, but maybe you're over perceiving how much harm they would do to you or something like that?

Nikola Raihani (00:07:55):
Even over perceiving a thing has the connotation of it being mistaken. I think it's just an exaggerated perception of threat from other people. So strictly speaking, like if you go to a clinical psychology textbook, they will say that paranoia is the belief that harm will happen and that somebody intends that somebody intends that harm to happen to you. Okay. So that's quite a broad kind of definition. Um, when you actually want to start breaking it down and measuring what, what kinds of paranoid thoughts do people have, um, typically you can sort of group them into ideas about social reference, which basically means, um, concerns about other people's, what other people are thinking or talking about you. [Athena agrees]. So concerns, concerns about your, how people in your social world are maybe perceiving you are talking about you to other people. So that's one that's part of the paranoid that would be part of the paranoid mindset.

Nikola Raihani (00:08:55):
And then the other sort of more severe and of the paranoid spectrum is when people start to experience frank delusions that, um, which can often be quite, um, bizarre in nature and sort of plausible. Uh, so things like, um, believing that, uh, some powerful organization have done something to you, for example, have turned all of your bones to steam or are monitoring you through, through surveillance, through items in your household or you know, there's lots of debt-

Athena Aktipis (00:09:33):
But that actually is happening. [Both laugh]

Nikola Raihani (00:09:35):
So that's why I think it's not helpful to me to tell people that I'm mistaken if they're paranoid. And actually it's not helpful. I mean, I'm not a clinician, but I work with, um, Von bell, who is a clinician. And one of the things that he has said to me in the past that really stuck with me is that it's really unhelpful as a clinician if you have a patient with psychosis who is experiencing paranoid symptoms and delusional symptoms it is really unhelpful to try to correct those beliefs. Because one of the other defining feature of a delusional belief is that it is held with, it is fiercely held, right? So you cannot be convinced otherwise of the, your belief is, you know, wrong or maybe misguided or something. And so I think in terms of a definition, it isn't helpful necessarily to, to classify these paranoia as being the fact that you're mistaken about people's intent to harm you. And even like apparently even in clinical settings, it isn't very helpful to emphasize the mistaken nature of those beliefs either. Yeah.

Athena Aktipis (00:10:46):
So you focus on the kind of exaggerated, like you're, you're defining it in terms of exaggeration as opposed to the state-

Nikola Raihani (00:10:53):
Yeah, we're basically our view is that, um, our view is that paranoia is basically part of a normal evolved human psychology as part as part of the brain that we all have, can be prone in some situations to attributing harmful intent to other people. And that's probably quite an important thing to be able to do if you are a social species. Like we are, that lives in quite complex groups where maybe not everybody all of the time is necessarily having your best interests at heart. Right? [Athena: Mmhmm.] So we, we think that, uh, a brain that has the ability to try to detect when other individuals might not might be working against you rather than with you or might be trying to maybe harm you rather than help you a brain that is able to detect those possibilities and to make those inferences is probably something that was quite heavily selected for over the course of human evolution. So-

Athena Aktipis (00:12:00):
So if people really are out to get you, sometimes they might have been in our evolutionary history, [Nikola agrees] they likely were because they were, we know that there was warfare. We know that there is conflict within groups. Like all of those things had been going on since time immemorial. And so if that is happening then you're saying it makes sense to have a brain that is sensitive to signals in the environment and signals from other people that might give you information that while yes, somebody is out to get your side and you can be more careful, [Nikola: Mmhmm] you can maybe make it less likely that you'll get harmed or you know-

Nikola Raihani (00:12:37):
So that's exactly, yeah. That's basically the premise of the work that we've been doing is to say paranoia should the capacity for paranoia by which we mean the tendency to attribute harmful intent to the people. Should be something that is very responsive and labile, um, and, and basically can be moved up and down even in the same individual in response to the kind of situation that they find themselves in. Right? [Athena: Mmhmm]. So, uh, one, one of the predictions of the work that, you know, an overarching prediction if you like, of the work that we've been doing is that paranoia. You, you shouldn't just have a fixed level of paranoia and all the interactions that you're in. Individuals should be responsive to the kind of interaction they're in and they should be more likely to, uh, attribute harmful intent, even in very ambiguous situations where they really can't know very much about the intentions of the other person at all. They should be more likely to attribute harmful intent in a situation that, uh, is objectively more threatening than, uh, than, uh, than a more neutral situation-

Athena Aktipis (00:13:43):
Like for example...

Nikola Raihani (00:13:45):
For example, so one of the things we thought would be, would trigger paranoid thinking if you like, would be interacting with um, an outgroup. So somebody who doesn't share your worldview or is in some way not, uh, not perceived to be an ally. So one of the ways we did that was, um, to have people interact with political in group, like we said, we asked them if they are Democrat or uh, to where they fall on a spectrum of liberal versus conservative. And then we tell them that they're either interacting with somebody who is also politically like-minded or who is politically counter affiliated to them. And our expectation is that if you identify as being strongly conservative, for example, and then you get told that you're now playing this, uh, social interaction game with someone who is very liberal, you should perceive that as more threatening, uh, than playing with somebody who you think is similar to you. And you should be then more likely to think that that person has harmful intentions towards you even when their intentions are actually very ambiguous.

Athena Aktipis (00:14:54):
Mmhmm. Is this a prediction or is this something that you test-

Nikola Raihani (00:14:58):
We actually test that. We've tested that in multiple different ways and using multiple different um, experimental manipulations of social threat. So we've done one where we use this angry power grip, uh, manipulation that I mentioned. We've manipulated social threat by telling, by having people tell us where they see themselves on a, on a ladder with the bottom rung being the very bottom of society and the top rung being the very top. And then we tell them that um, they are now interacting with somebody either higher up the social ladder than them or lower down the social ladder. And our expectation again is that if you get told you're interacting with somebody higher up the food chain than you that should be perceived as more threatening than when you feel like you're above on the ladder than them. [Athena: Oh.].

Nikola Raihani (00:15:42):
So we've, in all these studies we've found basically more or less the same effect. So we've manipulated social, threatened with this angry pout group. We've manipulated it with social status and we've manipulated it by having people play social tasks against a pair of opponents. But where they're told that the pair of opponents is in a team, they're united cohesive team versus they're just playing against the pair of opponents who are not, don't have any shared goals or shared aims. And again, the prediction here is that if you believe that you're playing against a cohesive team of opponents as opposed to a non cohesive pair, you should experience that as being a more threatening, more socially threatening situation. And basically what we find across all those kinds of experimental settings is that when you have people play, uh, a game where they, where their partner's intentions really are ambiguous, they attribute more harmful intent when they are exposed to social threat. So basically we can, we can push people's paranoid thinking up and down in the lab. We can make people more prone to paranoid thinking or we can make them less prone to paranoid thinking with a very simple experimental manipulation. Um, and that is a prediction of, of this hypothesis that paranoia is part of a psychology that is geared towards, you know, monitoring the social environment [Athena: yeah] and detecting social threats in it.

Athena Aktipis (00:17:14):
So if you're interacting with someone who's an outgroup or someone who you think has power over you, then your paranoia system is like more active.

Nikola Raihani (00:17:24):
Yeah. So it might help if I describe the task actually because um, so basically the task that we'll use is a game which is quite common in behavioral economics called the dictator game. And it's quite a simple task. So basically in the dictator game, in the classic dictator game, there's two players. One of them has given some money and they can choose whether to give any to their partner or keep it for themselves.

Athena Aktipis (00:17:50):
So you give me $10-

Nikola Raihani (00:17:51):
I gave you $10 and I say, do you want to give five, I give you two choices, right? So I say, here's your $10 if you want, you can give five to Nikola and keep five for you. Or if you want, you can actually just keep everything for you and give nothing to Nikola. Right? So what we're actually interested in here is not actually what the dictators are doing in this case, but we're interested in how people interpret the behavior of the dictator that they're with. So if you think, if you put yourself in the shoes of me for a moment and let's say you Athena have been selfish and decided to give me nothing and keep all the $10 for yourself, I might make, I might basically draw one of many inferences about why you did that. Right? [Athena agrees]. The two that we are most interested in that we try to disambiguate between is, is firstly do I just assume that you're just greedy and self interested and you want the money for yourself? And that's kind of arguably the most parsimonious thing [Athena agrees] to, to infer from, from that kind of behavior. Or if I also have to decide whether you kept all the money because you didn't want me to have any because you are motivated by a kind of harmful intent.

Athena Aktipis (00:19:00):
Interesting.

Nikola Raihani (00:19:01):
And, uh, how much do I make those kinds of attributions. And what we find is that in that game, in that, in that dictator game where people asked to make those attributions of either self interest or harmful intent to their partner, we find that people are more likely to attribute harmful intent to a partner when they experience social threat of the kind that I described.

Athena Aktipis (00:19:25):
Yeah. So in this sort of way of thinking about paranoia or the sort of spectrum of paranoia, it's actually an adaptive thing that an individual is able to do?

Nikola Raihani (00:19:38):
I don't think we're in a position to say whether it's adaptive because we haven't measured that, but we're, I suppose we're testing a hypothesis that comes from a, as if it were, our hypothesis is, is saying, if this is adaptive, we expect to see this [Athena agrees] instead of we're testing a prediction of a hypothesis that presumes it is adaptive. But whether it really is, I think you would really need to do, uh, you would need to do different studies. But I think so,

Athena Aktipis (00:20:06):
But what you found so far is consistent-

Nikola Raihani (00:20:09):
Consistent with the idea that it could be adaptive. Yeah. Yeah. But it's not, I don't think it's, I think it would be stretch to say that we've shown that.

Athena Aktipis (00:20:15):
Do you think it misfires or gets disregulated in extreme situations?

Nikola Raihani (00:20:18):
So yeah. So basically the interesting other question in a way is when we, when you have people who are already quite paranoid and their daily lives play a game like the one that I described, how did they respond to, you know, a neutral versus a socially threatening situation. Right? So if you're somebody who um, when we administer a kind of paranoia questionnaire to you that comes at scores very highly on this questionnaire and says, yes, I frequently think people are talking about me and I frequently thought people were looking at me because they wanted to harm me and I frequently thought that people had it in for me and you know, answers give answers yes to a lot of the questions that they know, a paranoid kind of thinking style. [Athena agrees]. How, when those people play our game, which we do, you can recruit those people from the general population.

Athena Aktipis (00:21:09):
Okay.

Nikola Raihani (00:21:09):
It is not is you can recruit the full spectrum of severity from the general population. All the way from, you're not all paranoid to you would be, you are over what would be classed as a clinical threshold for experiencing paranoid thoughts.

Athena Aktipis (00:21:23):
So...

Nikola Raihani (00:21:24):
When you recruit, so if you administer that same game to people who have, who have really paradigm age, our expectation, a priority was that those people would be, would, would overreact to social threat, right? [Athena: Mmhmm]. So we expected to see that, uh, they would, their responses, their tendency to attribute harmful intent in, uh, in a socially threatening situation would kind of be off the scale. Right?

Athena Aktipis (00:21:49):
Okay.

Nikola Raihani (00:21:49):
And what we found actually has really not that at all. What we found is that, um, being, um, having a higher level of paranoia generally means that you start from, you have a higher, uh, baseline level of tendency to attribute harmful intent. Even in a neutral situation. Your threshold is, is raised compared to the threshold of somebody who is not that paranoid. Okay? So in a neutral situation, you experienced that as more threatening than somebody who is not so paranoid. But when you are exposed to social threats and experimentally you scale up your response in exactly the same way as the people who were not as paranoid.

Athena Aktipis (00:22:34):
So, so if you're really, if you're, you know, quote unquote really paranoid, it's not that you're off the scale for responding to threat, it's more that in the ambiguous situations you're more responsive.

Nikola Raihani (00:22:46):
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, that's exactly what it is. So basically it's just that you're starting from a different baseline-

Athena Aktipis (00:22:50):
Your, like, thresholds are lower

Nikola Raihani (00:22:53):
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So basically at a new neutral situation, you're already, you're already saying this person had harmful intentions towards me. [Athena: Uh huh.] And then from that point you just scale up in the same way that other people scale up. But you know, you end up at a higher level ultimately, but you're not, your responses are not disregulated in the way that we actually a priori thought they would be.

Athena Aktipis (00:23:15):
Interesting. Hmm. So does it have to be harmful intent? Cause like earlier you mentioned this idea, right, that you know, well they're, you know, items in your household that are collecting information about you [Nikola: Hmm.] and we know that actually is happening now. Whether there's harmful intent there or not is another question. But I mean, as even the idea that there are things gathering information about you, does that count as paranoia?

Nikola Raihani (00:23:41):
I think- Yeah. So, um, strictly speaking with paranoia, there is an assumption of that there's a malicious intent somewhere. Um,

Athena Aktipis (00:23:57):
What if you're like, you know, agnostic about the intent, but you [Nikola "uuuh"] think that there and she's gathering information about you.

Nikola Raihani (00:24:08):
Um, it's hard. I don't know. It's quite-

Athena Aktipis (00:24:10):
Yeah, you can just speculate too, like what do you think?

Nikola Raihani (00:24:12):
I mean I think I'm finding it hard to think of a situation where people might be worried about devices gathering information on the, um, but, but also at the same time thinking that it wasn't nefarious. So like I said, I guess like for most people who would be worried about devices gathering information on them, they might also think that this might be used, uh, this could potentially be used against the person [Athena: Mmhmm] at one point and that's why they're worried about it. Um, I think, I think if you're genuine, if you basically, you just genuinely like, Oh, Alexa knows everything about me, but basically I don't care. I wouldn't class that as paranoia. [Athena agrees] That isn't, that isn't, that doesn't speak to the definition of paranoia. Paranoia really is like, I think harm is going to happen to me and somebody intends that harm to happen. [Athena: Mmhmm]. So that is really a central part of the definition of what it means to be paranoid.

Athena Aktipis (00:25:04):
But what if it's like, you know, Alexa or Amazon, you know, they know everything about me and so they know how to capture my attention better. And I don't know what the consequences of that are for my wellbeing.

Nikola Raihani (00:25:20):
So you're sort of nudging and to sort of what I would call conspiracy theorizing and kind of territory and like we know that tendency to, um, believe in conspiracy theories is something which overlaps quite heavily with a proneness to paranoid thinking. [Athena: Mmhmm.] So that is, you know, those things do overlap. There is shared territory between conspiracy thinking and paranoid thinking. And we know also know that lots of the social threats that I described that seemed to prompt paranoid thinking and, uh, you know, just anyone you test basically are also things that prompt conspiracy thinking. So typically conspiracy, conspiracy thinking is elevated when you perceive yourself to be in a position of weakness. But you perceive that there's a group of coordinated actors who have high power and probably nefarious aims that, that have a way to do something, you know, bad that could affect you. And I think one of the key differences between conspiracy thinking generally and paranoia really like where they start to come apart is that conspiracy theorists might believe that powerful agents have malevolent intentions but they don't, the perception of who's going to get harmed or who's, who is the target of that malevolent intention-

Athena Aktipis (00:26:40):
Interesting.

Nikola Raihani (00:26:40):
Is not necessarily you.

Athena Aktipis (00:26:42):
Yeah so what's the relationship between conspiracy thinking and um, paranoia and also the idea of like, you know, are, are we actually being controlled by things, you know, so like kind of pull it into the theme of the show about zombification.

Nikola Raihani (00:27:00):
I mean it's actually quite interesting. So, um, conspiracy thinking overlaps quite heavily with 10 premise paranoid thinking. It has several of those structural features in common with paranoid thinking. And the, um, conspiracy thinking can be, is often more common in situations where you think that you are powerless and that there is a more powerful group of actors who have nefarious intentions. Um, but one of the points of departure between conspiracy thinking and paranoid thinking is that, um, for conspiracy thinking, uh, although you might think people have bad intentions and have the power to execute those bad intentions, people don't often think that those, um, those bad things are going to be directed personally at them cause they didn't think that they are the target of this, this organized conspiracy. [Athena "right"]. Um, so for example, if you don't believe that vaccines are safe, you might believe that as a cover up and that, you know, there's some kind of secret data that really vaccines cause different disorders or are bad for you, but you don't believe that you are there doing that specifically to harm you or your child. You just believed that there is some kind of conspiracy going on.

Athena Aktipis (00:28:26):
So is it that you believe that there's some individuals maybe who are doing something to benefit themselves as opposed to like they're doing something to harm you?

Nikola Raihani (00:28:36):
Yeah, so you believe that there are agents that bad intentions, but those you're not necessarily the target of these bad intentions, personally. You remember part of a group that might be affected by them but you're not being targeted. Um, where paranoia starts to sort of differentiate itself from conspiracy thinking is that you, you will be more likely to believe that there is a, uh, group of actors that have malicious intentions and that you are the target of those malicious intentions. And often it's actually quite interesting with paranoia that, um, the tendency to have partner thinking is not just a general, "Oh, everyone's out to get me." Okay. So often like paranoid concerns are really specific about who exactly is it that is out to get you. [Athena: Mmhmm.] So, for example, um, if you are, if you are experiencing the frank paranoid delusion, you might believe that the FBI is out to get you, but you wouldn't, it wouldn't be the CIA as well. It would be quite specific to the group of actors that correspond to some real group in the world that you, that exists. [Athena: Hmm]. Um, and, and, and so again, we think that's also likely to be part of this kind of what we call or what Pascal Boyer actually has called the coalitional psychology, which recognizes the presence of groups in the world recognizes that groups, individuals in groups behave in coordinated ways to achieve goals. [Athena agrees]. And sometimes you might be, you, you know, you might be the target of some of those goals, right? And so it's not, paranoia isn't just this general tendency to think that everyone's out to get you. It's much more nuanced than that. And much more specific about who it is that you think is basically out to get you.

Athena Aktipis (00:30:34):
So once you've got the psychology, that essentially is exaggerating or potentially exaggerating threats out there in the world. Is it possible for that to actually get hijacked by others in order to manipulate you or is it not so much of a vulnerability or-

Nikola Raihani (00:31:02):
or basically like the wilt? [Athena laughs] So the rise of populism and I mean I guess you can if, if that's how, if all psychology will excite that if all psychology is sensitive to threat and to the possibility that someone will harm you and intend to harm you, of course you can hijack that kind of system. We hijack it in the lab. I mean we hijacked that system by exposing people to social threat in the lab when we make them become more paranoid in real time. So if we can do that with a very simple manipulation where really the kind of social threat we're exposing people to is pretty mild, I think that there is vast potential to hijack those systems and with more realistic kinds of social threat in the real world.

Athena Aktipis (00:31:56):
So like what kind of examples do you think-

Nikola Raihani (00:32:01):
Well, I don't know, it's hard to say. This is just very much like hand-wavy, but anything which basically, uh, reminds people suggests to people that there is a group of agents that is, that has the aims, coordinate aims and goals that are to harm them. I mean, you know, we're, we're like a super groupish species, right? And we have one of the features of being a human and having evolved in these social groups, there's not just intense cooperation and prosociality but it's also our evolutionary history is really also a history of intergroup conflict and intercoalition conflict within groups as well. And so anything you do that reminds people of that or suggests that that is more, that that is happening or, or it's possible I think would tap into this capacity for paranoid thinking.

Athena Aktipis (00:32:58):
So like, you know, news story is about, you know, out group people who people see as not part of their group doing things that might be threatening or exaggerated stories about things like that. Is that kind of what, what you're thinking about?

Nikola Raihani (00:33:14):
Yeah, I think so. [Athena agrees] I think that, um, yeah, I think those things have potential to tap into parallel thinking for sure. And it's actually one of the other things we've found that is, um, has been reported in the literature before actually is that to some extent your, um, political ideology and your proneness to paranoia are weakly but related. They are, it's a weak relationship but there is a relationship. And so, um, what we found in our study when we asked people to tell us their political kind of leading between being more, more liberal versus more conservative is that there's a weak association between being a more conservative thinker and being also more prone to paranoid thinking in general. Right. So, um, and the other thing that we found that is interesting as well about again, this ought to be replicated really before we really take it seriously. Cause it wasn't a finding we anticipated. But um, we also found that people's position on the social ladder also affected their proneness to paranoid thinking, but not in the way that we had actually envisaged. So in the epidemiological studies, what has been found frequently is that people who are low status or who, um, live in poverty or otherwise experienced social threat in their day to day lives. Like for example, they're part of a marginalized ethnic minority group or all these things have risk factors for being prone to psychosis and to paranoia by extension. So we expected that we would find that people telling us they're from this bottom rung of the ladder would also be like the most paranoid people in our sample.

Nikola Raihani (00:35:00):
So we did find that but we also found this other effect, which is the people who told us they were at the top of the social ladder, they're run nine among 10 or would like the most paranoid people in our entire sampled.

Athena Aktipis (00:35:13):
Really?

Nikola Raihani (00:35:13):
Yeah. So it's quite interesting because this is all a kind of called the paranoia of the elites. I mean probably in certain individuals spring to mind, but um, it's also when you actually look at the data, the literature from more broadly at the literature in humans and in nonhuman primates, there is this general finding often that being in a position of dominance is actually can be associated with higher stress, can be quite a stressful race [Athena: Right] to be if there's an unstable hierarchy. Right? [Athena agrees] Being at the top of the pile isn't necessarily always the best place to be. If there's other individuals who are jostling beneath you to try and get to that position that you're in.

Athena Aktipis (00:35:57):
Right. And if you're at the top and you're in a social structure where there is jostling for that position, then it makes sense to be paranoid that others might be meaning you harm, because-

Nikola Raihani (00:36:10):
Well to be aware of the possibility at least- yeah, so I mean that in a way we didn't fate this finding. But in hindsight also when we then look more broadly, we saw, well maybe we should really have expected this because there was all these data from humans and also from nonhuman primates that do suggest that, you know, this top rank position is not always the easiest place to be for individuals. And so I think there's some that it's, I think it's really interesting to look like to basically look at what, what features of the social world as a human might render you more or less prone to paranoid thinking. And then how can we understand that in terms of a, an evolved that if we think of paranoia as part of an evolved psychology for dealing with the kinds of social threats that you might face in your ancestrally and currently face in our social worlds, it can, I think it can be more illuminating than just thinking of paranoia as a pathological symptom of a mental disorder. Sure.

Athena Aktipis (00:37:12):
That makes sense. So I'm just going to ask you to speculate here, cause I'm, I don't think that there is any work actually on this, but do you think that there might actually be an evolved set of sort of mechanisms for also hijacking someone else's paranoid psychology? Like to, you know, use the fact that you can like get someone worried or paranoid about something to manipulate them to do what you want them to do?

Nikola Raihani (00:37:46):
Um, I don't know how, I'm trying to think how we would tap into that kind of thing in the lab, but my guess would be that, that we're a species that has the ability to loosely mind read, right?. [Athena "mhm"] So we, those kinds of social cognitive abilities are part of the rearing of a human brain. And we can do those things. We can make inferences about what people believe, what they, uh, maybe even what they fear and things like that. So I don't think it's beyond the realms of possibility that you could try to make an individual more paranoid for some purpose, suited you.

Athena Aktipis (00:38:26):
Yeah. So, you know, we had a episode in season one with Mark Flynn where we talked about social stress and the idea of like witchcraft. And he had this really interesting way of thinking about it and talking about where he said that essentially what happens in witchcraft in the field and Dominica where he works is that people are essentially manipulating the stress system of others in order to kind of get them into this state where they're like, their bodies are literally, you know, in this stress state where they're more vulnerable to disease and they, you know, I think it kind of relates to this, this paranoia thing. It's like, you know, if you can stress somebody out strategically, either directly or maybe by influencing others to treat somebody differently.

Nikola Raihani (00:39:24):
Well that's it. Again, I think, I think this is probably more just repeating what I said already in some ways, but definitely those kinds of, I mean we even thought about witchcraft to some extent, witchcraft accusations as one of the sort of things that can happen to you in your social world. That could be a precursor to paranoid kind of thinking. And you know, which we're now in the West, you kind of don't use, don't really think about witches and witchcraft accusations so much, but in, in a lot of the world, it's still really common for people to be targeted with those kinds of accusations and then singled out and the consequences of being called a witch can be really bad in some, you know, you can be, you know, maybe you get isolated from the group, you don't, your net, your social network becomes smaller. People don't want to interact with you as much or you know, some places also you might be killed as well, right? [Athena agrees].

Athena Aktipis (00:40:25):
And I mean, and we don't have witches in the West really, but there are bitches [Nikola laughs] and, right? And if someone says that person's a bitch, and then that spreads. That's-

Nikola Raihani (00:40:34):
I think we still have the same thing. We don't call it witchcraft accusation, but we official have like stigmatization and scapegoating and all these things are very much alive and well. [Athena agrees]. Uh, and even in, you know, the Western industrialized world. And, um, I think that as a human, because the chance that you can be the target of those accusations is to some extent unpredictable and sporadic. Um, you have to be constantly aware of the possibility that people are maneuvering to try to, you know, to harm you socially or physically. It's not just physical harm. It can mostly be social harm, right? It can be damaging you in many ways,

Athena Aktipis (00:41:15):
Right, so the consequences can be very serious. [Nikola agrees] So you want the system to be sensitive enough to pick up on the possibility and try to respond in a way that makes sense or to avoid the possibility.

Nikola Raihani (00:41:29):
Yeah. One of the other interesting things with respect to paranoia is, um, so there are a whole, there are a whole load of social and environmental for things that render you more prone to paranoid thinking. So we've discussed some of those already. Um, things like, you know, being low status, having a small social network, um, being a marginalized ethnic minority, living in poverty, there are all these kind of socio social kind of threat in your environment. [Athena agrees] Predictive of it can be associated with a high tendency towards paranoid thinking. One really interesting finding is that, um, if you're part of a much revised ethnic group, uh, the risks that that puts you out for increased partner thinking can be buffered to some extent if you then live at a high density with people like you with, people of your-

Athena Aktipis (00:42:20):
Huh. That's interesting.

Nikola Raihani (00:42:20):
So that's something called the ethnic density effect. [Athena: Huh]. You, you know, and an epidemiological study, would be kind of treated as this sort of puzzling anomaly. But from an evolutionary perspective, makes a lot of sense because even if you are part of a marginalized group, um, maybe it's less threatening to, to live in, you know, in a majority rather than being living as a, as just a minority in that, in that-

Athena Aktipis (00:42:45):
That's interesting.

Nikola Raihani (00:42:45):
In that particular environment. Um, so there's only socioeconomic things that predispose to paranoia. But then there's also a whole load of things that are related to, for example, if you have a brain injury or if you um, have sleep deprivation or if you use or abuse recreational drugs or, a whole- and lots of things you can do that can impair or damage the way your brain works.

Athena Aktipis (00:43:11):
Do all of those things-

Athena Aktipis (00:43:11):
All of those, predisposed paranoia. So one of the really interesting questions actually, which you asked before is to what extent is it, is paranoia really adaptive? And one of the, one of the sort of very skeptical, uh, sorry, not skeptical or very, um, what's the word I'm looking for? A speculative [Athena agrees] kind of, um, hypothesis is that maybe a brain, that if you are damaged in any way in your, if your brain is impaired and it's normal functioning in some way, if you, you have had a physical brain injury or a, or some kind of injury to the brain or impairment or, um, or any of these things that can sort of impair the way your brain works, it could be that the default setting of being more paranoid is actually a pretty good thing to do.

Athena Aktipis (00:44:04):
Interesting.

Nikola Raihani (00:44:04):
Because you are more vulnerable to exploitation in those situations as well. And that's something that I think with a lot of the clinical stuff hasn't really been sort of explored and that's a detail, but-

Athena Aktipis (00:44:17):
Interesting. And also, you know, if you've been harmed, right. And then it kind of makes sense almost that the default setting should be to upregulate the paranoia because some harm has happened.

Nikola Raihani (00:44:33):
Yeah. Even if it's just, yeah, I mean, so even if it's just, uh, you know, it results the harm results from not a social harm, right? It results from taking recreational drugs or it results from you smashed your head on something or you know, the kind of one the interesting pattern in a way is why is the, why is the direction of travel always towards being more paranoid [Athena agrees] than being more trusting that paranoia is a symptom of loads of things that can go wrong with your brain. So it's not only if it can happen for sure when we're supposed to use social and environmental things that we see in epidemiological studies, but it also happens in response to a lot of things that are not related to directly to your social environment. And that- yeah.

Athena Aktipis (00:45:19):
That's really interesting. I mean, it kind of suggests that not being paranoid is something that requires that your brain is doing a bunch of sort of complex regulatory stuff on the information that you're taking in to keep it from triggering paranoia in a way, right?

Nikola Raihani (00:45:39):
Maybe. Yeah. Maybe. Maybe. Yeah.

Athena Aktipis (00:45:39):
Right? That's one potential explanation for what's going on.

Nikola Raihani (00:45:42):
Yeah, I mean, I think that there's a lot we don't know. Right?

Athena Aktipis (00:45:46):
Yeah. Yeah. That's cool. So, uh, one question I always ask it towards the end of the podcast is what is your sort of version of zombie apocalypse, which is like everyone being zombified by paranoia. So you know, if, if you take what you know about the psychology of paranoia and you like ramp that up so it's like way more intense and then you have the possibility of that getting hijacked.

Nikola Raihani (00:46:22):
Out into the world.

Athena Aktipis (00:46:22):
Yeah. Like, you know, if everyone was just ramped up in terms of their paranoia, like what is the apocalypse of that?

Nikola Raihani (00:46:31):
I don't think that's the world we want to live in. I mean, I, well, I mean, human interaction is like all of what it means to be human and to all the good stuff about being a human is predicated on trust, right? [Athena agrees]. Everything we do, every when you traveled to live on the train, when you bought coffee from the coffee shop, when you, I don't know, you go in your office, do you want to put all these things? Everything you do is predicated on trust and trust in people you know and trust in people who you don't know, right. If we have everyone wandering around in the zombie apocalypse with these heightened perceptions that other people are out to get them rather than a trustworthy [Athena"Yeah"]. I think a lot of these good things about the good features of society will be gone right then. I don't think I will not live in that world.

Athena Aktipis (00:47:27):
Right. So if we're just all extra paranoid, then we can't actually take advantage of the benefits of being social.

Nikola Raihani (00:47:35):
Well, yeah, I mean trade, there'll be no trade. There'll be no social exchange, there'll be no, uh, you know, it will just be you and your family probably. But I mean-

Athena Aktipis (00:47:48):
But you might get paranoid about them, too-

Nikola Raihani (00:47:48):
I think it's, um, yeah, I mean I think in, even though obviously that's a very exaggerated vision of the world, I think we, I do feel like in some ways we are, we're moving towards, uh, a society that is increasingly like that. And, um, again, right, with these kinds of concerns being stoked by politicians and other people who have an interest in us being, feeling threatened or feeling vulnerable and, and so, yeah, I mean the zombie apocalypse obviously is sort of hopefully an unrealistic vision, but I also think we are, we're maybe a bit closer to that than we would like to believe also in some ways.

Athena Aktipis (00:48:37):
So what are things that we can all do to keep that sort of dark vision of the future from coming about? Are there takeaways from-

Nikola Raihani (00:48:51):
profoundly paranoid thinking? I mean, again, I don't know if there's a good, it's not necessarily good to tell people to. I mean, under this worldview that paranoia has a function and in your, in real, in the real world, I wouldn't necessarily advocate for telling people to just become less paranoid. I said paranoia can be good in certain situations. Right. Um, I think that say if you're, if you wanted to think about things like interventions that could help people who are at the more paranoid end of the spectrum to be, to feel less paranoid than they do in sort of neutral social interactions. I think things like building up support networks, building a social circle, um, having basically more supportive interactions in everyday life or the kinds of things that then can increase the perception of social support and accordingly decrease the tendency towards paranoid thinking. So hanging out with your friends, try and, you know, be nice to people if you think they haven't got as many friends, those kinds of things probably are quite helpful and easy to do.

Athena Aktipis (00:50:01):
And will probably make your life better in general anyway. Right? [Nikola agrees]. And then how about in terms of sort of reducing your vulnerability to being hijacked by paranoid information that might be, you know, coming at you that not, that isn't necessarily, um, information that's serving your interests to be responding to?

Nikola Raihani (00:50:25):
I think that's what Dan Sperber would call epistemic vigilance. So paying attention, not just to, um, information that comes to you from other people, but also the potential, um, goals of that individual who is giving the information. So yeah, it's hard to say. I mean, I feel like a system that's kind of a similar question to the, how do you help people to be less paranoid? If that sort of, how do you, how do you help yourself to not be hijacked by people who, who would, who would like to do that? I think it's just a tightrope, a balancing act. Right? [Athena agrees] And like you don't want to, that's what we're all doing every day, isn't it? We all, we're all trying to walk a tightrope of trusting people who are trustworthy but weeding out the people that are not trustworthy. And sometimes we're going to get that right and sometimes we're going to get it wrong, but going completely bombed in one direction or the other direction is probably not going to be the right thing to do. Right? [Athena agrees].

Athena Aktipis (00:51:28):
Well we get a lot of our information now, not necessarily from sort of people who we know and trust, but from, you know, news sources that, you know, maybe there's a, an author for the story, but it's not like it's someone, your neighbor telling you something and you know, your neighbor sometimes exaggerates or whatever. It's uh, you know, it's a different way of kind of getting information. [Nikola agrees]. About the world.

Nikola Raihani (00:51:55):
And how have we got, how do we stop ourselves from believing fake news kind of question afternoon. I think it's really difficult, right? Like we get, we get the news that, that we, we get fed basically. So I think you just have to be vigilant to the fact that not you have to bear in mind that not everything you, um, that people say or do or the signals people sending them might not always be truthful.

Athena Aktipis (00:52:25):
And I mean, the irony is that, you know, the system that we have, it sounds like it's, it's designed, it's there to protect us from harm, but then if someone is trying to hijack us and they tell us something that, you know, we then perceive as harmful, like it, it could end up actually damaging us that we're attending to this information that we see as threatening. So it's the sort of evolutionary irony almost said you have this vulnerability because of a system that's there ideally to protect you from harm.

Nikola Raihani (00:53:04):
Yeah.

Athena Aktipis (00:53:06):
Um, yeah. Are we fucked or...? [Both laugh].

Nikola Raihani (00:53:09):
I think most, I think pretty much like most, I think we, I think most people... I'd be surprised if we were systematically fucked. Do you know what I mean? Like I think for most people, most of the time things tend to work pretty well. Um, yes, yes, some of those systems often are able to like novel methods of sort of exploitation that maybe we haven't really had an evolutionary history of dealing with. Um, but, but by and large, most when you look in the general population, for example, the most people, the vast majority of people fall in the category of being not so paranoid. And then it's a, um, a half normal distribution. So a long tail. [Athena: Hmm]. But increasingly paranoid thinking with a small minority of people who are extremely-

Athena Aktipis (00:54:00):
Interesting.

Nikola Raihani (00:54:00):
-prone to paranoid thinking. So most people, most of the time are not very paranoid and are probably willing to believe that other people will have benign rather than harmful intentions towards them, but that there are some situations, um, some people that can have that where paranoid thinking is more readily, evoked. And whether that where you then draw the line between not being something which is still part of a normally functioning human psychology and where that tips over into being something that is actually pathological. Maladaptive is a very, it's an open question and actually, um, super difficult to really clearly define that. [Athena agrees]. I think like where would you say is the line between this is adaptive versus this is clearly not and there's a, they have from questions. Basically there's the opening things we don't know that we can maybe start to find out.

Athena Aktipis (00:54:58):
Well, it seems like there's a lot of exciting opportunities for more work in this area to really understand the psychology and how it evolved [Nikola: Mmhmm] and maybe even learn some things that will help us prevent the paranoid zombie apocalypse.

Nikola Raihani (00:55:15):
Yeah. Let's hope so. [Both laugh].

Athena Aktipis (00:55:15):
Well, thanks so much Nikola, for sharing your brains with us this episode.

Nikola Raihani (00:55:19):
Bye, Ms. Athena.

Outro (00:55:21):
[Psychological by Lemi]

Athena Aktipis (00:56:38):
Zombified is a production of Arizona State University and the Zombie Apocalypse Medicine Alliance. Thank you to the department of psychology, the interdisciplinary cooperation initiative and the president's office at ASU, the Lincoln center for applied ethics and all of the brains [brains crunching] that helped make this podcast including tol rom who does our sound, Neil Smith, our amazing illustrator, Lemi, the creator of our song, Psychological and the Z team, an amazing group of graduate students and undergraduates who help to transcribe all of our episodes and do all sorts of other things related to making the podcast happen. You can follow us on Twitter and Instagram. We're Zombified pod and we're zombified podcast on Facebook. Our website is zombified.org and on our website you can buy our merchandise. We have awesome tee shirts with our floating head and stickers also with the floating head, and if you want to support us in a more longterm way, you can become a patron on Patreon and for just $1 a month you will help to make Zombified happen and help keep us ad free and totally educational, which is how we want to stay.

Athena Aktipis (00:57:58):
All right. At the end of every episode, I offer a little something. And today I'm thinking that for me, the, the biggest connection to my work from what Nikola was talking about today really comes from, I think there's an important connection between paranoia and cooperation, cheating. So a lot of my work looks at the evolution of cooperation and what makes cooperation stable across systems, everything from how humans interact to how cells interact. Um, but I think that the paranoia angle, it's really interesting because essentially not being paranoid requires that you have trust, right? And in a way, being paranoid is about having a fear that you'll be cheated or you could say zombified by others who might be sort of pretending to have your interest at heart. Um, or maybe they're just pretending to be neutral. Um, but they actually have bad intentions towards you. And to me this is really interesting because it's, it's essentially an information processing problem that we're- all of us face.

Athena Aktipis (00:59:10):
Um, so you know, what cues tell us that somebody has aligned interest with us, what cues tell us that they have conflicting interests with us? And then it becomes a really complicated game theoretic issue because if they actually are trying to exploit us, then they may be trying to not look like they're exploiting us. And that means that cheaters can presumably cheat more effectively if they're able to go undetected. So maybe the paranoia system kind of makes sense in that game theoretic perspective. It may be that paranoia helps us to be suspicious when somebody is interacting with us who might not be showing obvious signs of trying to manipulate us. But there's some other cues that sort of hint that that might be what's going on. Thank you for listening to Zombified your source for fresh brains.

Outro (01:00:04):
[Psychological by Lemi]