Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic has made the world seem less predictable. Such crises can lead people to feel that others are a threat. Here, we show that the initial phase of the pandemic in 2020 increased individuals’ paranoia and made their belief updating more erratic. A proactive lockdown made people’s belief updating less capricious. However, state-mandated mask-wearing increased paranoia and induced more erratic behaviour. This was most evident in states where adherence to mask-wearing rules was poor but where rule following is typically more common. Computational analyses of participant behaviour suggested that people with higher paranoia expected the task to be more unstable. People who were more paranoid endorsed conspiracies about mask-wearing and potential vaccines and the QAnon conspiracy theories. These beliefs were associated with erratic task behaviour and changed priors. Taken together, we found that real-world uncertainty increases paranoia and influences laboratory task behaviour.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 1190-1202 |
| Number of pages | 13 |
| Journal | Nature Human Behaviour |
| Volume | 5 |
| Issue number | 9 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Sep 2021 |
| Externally published | Yes |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:This work was supported by the Yale University Department of Psychiatry, the Connecticut Mental Health Center and Connecticut State Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services. It was funded by an International Mental Health Research Organization/Janssen Rising Star Translational Research Award, an Interacting Minds Center (Aarhus) Pilot Project Award, National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) grant no. R01MH12887 (P.R.C.), NIMH grant no. R21MH120799-01 (P.R.C. and S.M.G.) and an Aarhus Universitets Forskningsfond Starting Grant (C.D.M.). E.J.R. was supported by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Medical Scientist Training Program training grant no. GM007205, National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke Neurobiology of Cortical Systems grant no. T32 NS007224 and a Gustavus and Louise Pfeiffer Research Foundation Fellowship. S.U. received funding from an NIH T32 fellowship (no. MH065214). S.M.G. and J.R.T. were supported by a National Institute on Drug Abuse grant no. DA DA041480. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish or preparation of the manuscript. L.L., J.R. and A.J.M. are employees of CloudResearch.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2021, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Limited.