Study About Paranoid People Reveals That Paranoid People Are Right To Be Paranoid
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Posted
Thursday, Aug. 9, 2012, at 11:17 AM ET
Yippee. Another study about how your private insecurities are to
blame for troubled work relationships and probably everything else
that’s going wrong in your life. Researchers from the London Business
School have determined that self-conscious, paranoid people are more likely to be gossiped about behind their backs, because they’re so insanely self-conscious and paranoid.
In a paper called “Do
I want to know? How the motivation to acquire relationship-threatening
information in groups contributes to paranoid thought, suspicion
behavior and social rejection,” a team led by Jennifer Mason Carr
notes that it’s normal and healthy to wonder what others think of you—up
to a point. If you seem too invested in the question or sniff around
too eagerly for hints, your peers get weirded out. And then they develop
a negative opinion of you, based on the fact that you were so worried
they might have a negative opinion of you.
To find out how MARTI (“motivation to acquire
relationship-threatening information”) messes with people, Carr and her
colleagues assigned 102 test subjects a set of tasks. The researchers
then implied that some participants were doing a better job on the tasks
than others—and asked each subject if he or she wanted to exclude
certain group members from the mission. People who showed high MARTI
qualities were, on average, 3.63 times more likely to get the ax than
less paranoid people.
In other words, you’d better not care too much about what the world
thinks, or you’ll become a pariah! Of course, someone reasonably at
peace with the idea of being disliked would not obsess over just that
possibility— whereas if Carr’s research worries you, it may already be
too late: Your office probably has you pegged as a nut job. It’s a
self-fulfilling prophecy: Those who are anxious about others’
disapproval will ironically act in ways that attract that disapproval.
Or, as the researchers put it:
We propose that group members vary in
their motivation to search for diagnostic information about whether
other group members seek to cause them indirect harm….We hypothesize
that this motivation is associated with paranoid thought patterns and
suspicion behaviors that can anger other group members and lead them to
reject those who actively search for evidence that others are secretly
trying to harm them.
Ugh. I hate studies like this. What are the paranoiacs supposed to do
now? I can’t help thinking that the ethical response to such results
would have been to keep a lid on them, out of kindness to all the
self-conscious neurotics out there who might otherwise amplify their
misery by imagining conspiracies (and annoying co-workers) with renewed
vigor. In fact, the “vicious cycle” study—and its breathless recap in
the press—has become a bit of a subgenre. I wrote a few months ago on an
experiment suggesting that Facebook made lonely kids lonelier: Depressed students would post depressing status updates, thereby estranging the few friends they had. I titled the post, “If You Think Your Facebook “Friends” Don’t Like You, They Probably Don’t.”
Which was a jerky thing to do, in hindsight, because if the study is to
be believed, then maybe someone, somewhere, was saddened by the
headline, dropped a melancholy phrase onto her Facebook profile, and
irritated her peers, who then froze her out.
Anyway, the cat has vacated the bag on this MARTI research, but it’s
not too late to make the broader point that sometimes studies prove
useful to a general audience, and sometimes they don’t. Sometimes, in
fact, they are counterproductive. For instance, when a study informs
excitable people that they would be so much happier if only they could
turn off their excitability. So I find myself in the frustrating
position of having an emphatic answer to Carr’s clearly rhetorical
question.
“Do I want to know?”
No.
(But what do you think about me)?
end quote from:
http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2012/08/09/study_about_paranoid_people_reveals_that_paranoid_people_are_right_to_be_paranoid.html?google_editors_picks=true
For me, this is one of the funniest articles I have read in a long long time. And, in the end it totally proves my theory that we all create our own reality in the end.
You might ask how it proves that consciousness creates reality. Well. Let me start like this: They mention that people think people who are paranoid ARE paranoid and so don't tend to trust their decisions or their judgement. As a result of this Paranoid people are right to be paranoid. But they are right to be paranoid because they created the people believing they are paranoid. But they are only paranoid because they choose to be.
It's a choice! People choose to be paranoid. When you choose not to be paranoid you choose to focus on different thoughts. When you choose to think about more positive thoughts your life starts to become more positive. And what tends to create the most positivity in everyone? Gratitude. So, if you want to stop being paranoid start thinking about what you need to be grateful for and train yourself to think about how grateful you are: To Be Alive. To have a good education. To have a good place to live. To have good parents. To have good friends. To have good health. Unless you concentrate on what you have to be grateful for you will remain paranoid and it will definitely shorten your lifespan. So, make a choice to focus on what you are grateful for. By doing this you will begin to end your paranoias one by one.
I come from a long line (on my father's side) of people who survived literally anything. We came over to the U.S. in 1725 and up the Philadelphia River in something a lot like the Mayflower or it modern equivalent then in 1725. And since then starting in Pennsylvania, Kansas, Illinois, and states further west like Texas, Arizona, California, Washington and Oregon my family were always okay and survivors all the way.
There is a time to be paranoid and there is a time to be Positive. But most of the time you have to be positive or you won't survive anything. So, if you are paranoid all the time you are either with the wrong people or in the wrong place. Otherwise, being paranoid all the time just isn't survivable long term.
Also, in my own life I found that working in any office situation can be very difficult. For me, it was awful usually. Especially because from 12 to 17 and again for awhile when I was 21 I worked as an Electrician's helper summers and the for about a year I was an electrician in Los Angeles County. But, when you work in construction at that time (early 1960s through 1965 and then 1969) if you didn't follow through on what you promised you could always expect to be beaten up to lose your front teeth or worse. Construction then was like a battlefield if you made a promise and failed other workers often took it out in blood. This was just a given. So, when I worked in an office I was horrified at all the back biting and lying and dishonesty and back stabbing there was. I chose not to do that except in an emergency ever because of this. Eventually I found my niche as an entrepreneur but I was 28 or 29 before I really started to get good at this. So, there was a lot of torturous jobs until I found myself owning my own businesses. Then since I made the rules, chose what hours I would work and wouldn't on a daily basis it didn't matter anymore because the buck stopped here. So, if you don't want to be paranoid it helps if you are self employed as some kind of business owner or contractor. This is my personal experience. Because working in an office setting would tend to make me paranoid even though I am not naturally that way. However, the one thing my 20s did is to make me so incredibly angry in regard to working in an office that I refused to do that and my anger helped make me successful as an entrepreneur because I just couldn't suffer fools and bad and nasty people anymore while working in offices.
Oh, by the way. Until you get to the point where you really don't care what ANYONE thinks of you you aren't going anywhere anyhow.
This doesn't mean you aren't compassionate to all living beings. It just means what most petty human beings think of you means less than nothing in the end.
end quote from:
http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2012/08/09/study_about_paranoid_people_reveals_that_paranoid_people_are_right_to_be_paranoid.html?google_editors_picks=true
For me, this is one of the funniest articles I have read in a long long time. And, in the end it totally proves my theory that we all create our own reality in the end.
You might ask how it proves that consciousness creates reality. Well. Let me start like this: They mention that people think people who are paranoid ARE paranoid and so don't tend to trust their decisions or their judgement. As a result of this Paranoid people are right to be paranoid. But they are right to be paranoid because they created the people believing they are paranoid. But they are only paranoid because they choose to be.
It's a choice! People choose to be paranoid. When you choose not to be paranoid you choose to focus on different thoughts. When you choose to think about more positive thoughts your life starts to become more positive. And what tends to create the most positivity in everyone? Gratitude. So, if you want to stop being paranoid start thinking about what you need to be grateful for and train yourself to think about how grateful you are: To Be Alive. To have a good education. To have a good place to live. To have good parents. To have good friends. To have good health. Unless you concentrate on what you have to be grateful for you will remain paranoid and it will definitely shorten your lifespan. So, make a choice to focus on what you are grateful for. By doing this you will begin to end your paranoias one by one.
I come from a long line (on my father's side) of people who survived literally anything. We came over to the U.S. in 1725 and up the Philadelphia River in something a lot like the Mayflower or it modern equivalent then in 1725. And since then starting in Pennsylvania, Kansas, Illinois, and states further west like Texas, Arizona, California, Washington and Oregon my family were always okay and survivors all the way.
There is a time to be paranoid and there is a time to be Positive. But most of the time you have to be positive or you won't survive anything. So, if you are paranoid all the time you are either with the wrong people or in the wrong place. Otherwise, being paranoid all the time just isn't survivable long term.
Also, in my own life I found that working in any office situation can be very difficult. For me, it was awful usually. Especially because from 12 to 17 and again for awhile when I was 21 I worked as an Electrician's helper summers and the for about a year I was an electrician in Los Angeles County. But, when you work in construction at that time (early 1960s through 1965 and then 1969) if you didn't follow through on what you promised you could always expect to be beaten up to lose your front teeth or worse. Construction then was like a battlefield if you made a promise and failed other workers often took it out in blood. This was just a given. So, when I worked in an office I was horrified at all the back biting and lying and dishonesty and back stabbing there was. I chose not to do that except in an emergency ever because of this. Eventually I found my niche as an entrepreneur but I was 28 or 29 before I really started to get good at this. So, there was a lot of torturous jobs until I found myself owning my own businesses. Then since I made the rules, chose what hours I would work and wouldn't on a daily basis it didn't matter anymore because the buck stopped here. So, if you don't want to be paranoid it helps if you are self employed as some kind of business owner or contractor. This is my personal experience. Because working in an office setting would tend to make me paranoid even though I am not naturally that way. However, the one thing my 20s did is to make me so incredibly angry in regard to working in an office that I refused to do that and my anger helped make me successful as an entrepreneur because I just couldn't suffer fools and bad and nasty people anymore while working in offices.
Oh, by the way. Until you get to the point where you really don't care what ANYONE thinks of you you aren't going anywhere anyhow.
This doesn't mean you aren't compassionate to all living beings. It just means what most petty human beings think of you means less than nothing in the end.
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