Ryan McKay
Address: Department of Psychology
Royal Holloway, University of London
Egham, Surrey TW20 0EX
United Kingdom
Royal Holloway, University of London
Egham, Surrey TW20 0EX
United Kingdom
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Papers by Ryan McKay
Methods: Healthy participants (n=112) completed an incentivised probabilistic reasoning task, in which correct decisions were rewarded and additional information could be requested for a small price. This combination of rewards and costs generated optimal decision points. Participants also completed measures of delusion-proneness, intelligence, and risk aversion.
Results: Replicating the standard relative finding, we found that delusion-proneness significantly predicted task decisions, such that the more delusion-prone participants were, the earlier they decided. This finding was robust when accounting for the effects of risk aversion and intelligence. Importantly, high-delusion-prone participants also decided in advance of an objective rational optimum, gathering less data than would have maximised their expected payoff. Surprisingly, we found that even low-delusion-prone participants jumped to conclusions in this absolute sense.
Conclusions: Our findings support and clarify the claim that delusion formation is associated with a tendency to “jump to conclusions”. In short, most people jump to conclusions, but more delusion-prone individuals “jump further”.
Material and methods: Thirty-two healthy right-handed men estimated their own relative risk of contracting a series of illnesses in the future, and then completed a novel computer task assessing their recognition of illness names presented to the left or right visual field. To check that effects were specific to the recognition of illness (rather than reflecting recognition of lexical items per se), we also administered a standard lateralized lexical decision task.
Results: Highly optimistic participants tended to be more conservative in detecting ill- nesses, especially harmful illnesses presented to the right visual field. Contrary to expec- tation, they were also more sensitive to illness names in this half-field.
Conclusions: We suggest that, in evolutionary terms, unrealistic optimism may be an adaptive trait that combines a high perceptual sensitivity to threat with a high threshold for acknowledging its presence. The signal detection approach to nosognosia developed here may open up new avenues for the understanding of anosognosia in neurological patients.