Parasocial Cognition and Paranoia

It has been argued that social processes are relevant to belief formation and maintenance and thence to persecutory delusions – the fixed false beliefs that others intend harm. We call this the social turn in delusions research. It suggests that paranoia is the purview of a specialized mechanism for coalitional cognition – thinking about group membership and reputation management. Here we suggest instead that a simpler, parasocial, learning mechanism may underwrite persecutory and other delusions. We make our case in terms of computations (prediction, not coalition), algorithm (association rather than recursion), and implementation (dopaminergic domain-general rather than social-specific regions). We conclude with suggestions for adversarial collaboration that will clarify the contributions of domain-general versus social-specific processes to delusions.