PARANOIA

The King's College London Institute of Psychiatry posted a story on April Fool's Day that seems not to be a joke: "Virtual reality tube ride reveals extent of public paranoia."

Researchers stuck 200 test subjects on a four-minute virtual-reality simulation of a subway train ride. "The carriage contained neutral computer people (avatars) that breathed, looked around, and sometimes met the gaze of the participants." And lo and behold, the test subjects were spooked!

The research, led by psychologist Dr Daniel Freeman, and funded by the Wellcome Trust, demonstrates that suspicious or paranoid thoughts are much more common in the general population than was previously thought and that they are almost as common as anxiety and depression. [...]

Dr Freeman and colleagues found that the participants interpreted the same computer characters very differently. The most common reaction was to find the virtual reality characters friendly or neutral, but almost 40% of the participants experienced at least one paranoid thought. The participants were extensively assessed before entering the train ride, and it was found that those who were anxious, worried, focused on the worst-case scenarios and had low self-esteem were the most likely to have paranoid thoughts. [...]

"In the past, only those with a severe mental illness were thought to experience paranoid thoughts, but now we know that this is simply not the case," says Dr Freeman. "About one-third of the general population regularly experience persecutory thoughts. This shouldn’t be surprising. At the heart of all social interactions is a vital judgment whether to trust or mistrust, but it is a judgment that is error-prone. We are more likely to make paranoid errors if we are anxious, ruminate and have had bad experiences from others in the past." [...]

People who feared terrorism on the Underground tended to report more paranoid thoughts in the virtual train, possibly reflecting the after-effects of the London bombings on 7 July 2005. However, the researchers also found that people who regularly used the Underground experienced less paranoid thoughts in the virtual train.

Wow, science is really marching on at King's. Comments on the Slashdot topic "VR Study Says 40% of Us Are Paranoid" highlight the junk-science angle, especially this one from LighterShadeOfBlack:

A VR reproduction of the London underground? A place where you're crowded by people, a place which in all honesty does have a reputation for being a haven for pickpockets (whether that's deserved or not, I don't know), and oh yes, one other thing -- the site of the last major (successful) terrorist attack on Britain. [...] Being somewhat cautious in that particular situation is a world away from the headlines implicating that 40% of us are clinically paranoid all the time.