ArticleNature human behaviour2021
Paranoia and belief updating during the COVID-19 crisis.
Article in Nature human behaviour, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 61 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
61 citing papers in PubMed, 126 citations in OpenAlex.
- Prior Expectations of Volatility Following Psychotherapy for Delusions: A Randomized Clinical Trial.JAMA network open · 2025Trial
- Refining the role of behavioural and social sciences in pandemic response post-COVID-19.Nature human behaviour · 2026Review
- Anhedonia and Anxious Arousal Are Associated With Distinct Expectations About the Statistics of a Volatile Environment.Biological psychiatry global open science · 2026Article
- Relating latent factors of reasoning, affect, and cognition to the delusional experience.Schizophrenia (Heidelberg, Germany) · 2026Article
- Threading the Needle: Practical Considerations for Merging Theory-Driven Computational Psychiatry With Data-Driven Analytics to Enhance Precision Health at Scale.Biological psychiatry. Cognitive neuroscience and neuroimaging · 2026Review
- Belief inflexibility reduces the impact of allostatic overload on psychotic-like experiences among Ukrainian refugees.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2026Article
- Self-Reflection Protects Behavior from Volatile Beliefs Linked to Paranoia.Computational psychiatry (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2026Article
- Neural Dynamics of Social Cognition: A Single-Trial Computational Analysis of Learning Under Uncertainty.Human brain mapping · 2026Article
- Excessive Switching in OCD and Paranoia Arises From Different Deficits in Belief-Updating.Computational psychiatry (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2026Article
- Human Strategy Adaptation in Reinforcement Learning Resembles Policy Gradient Ascent.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- The joint estimation of uncertainty and its relationship with psychotic-like traits and psychometric schizotypy.Npj mental health research · 2025Article
- Deep Learning Improves Parameter Estimation in Reinforcement Learning Models.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Identifying individuals at clinical high risk for psychosis using a battery of tasks sensitive to symptom mechanisms.Translational psychiatry · 2025Article
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- Belief Updating, Childhood Maltreatment, and Paranoia in Schizophrenia-Spectrum Disorders.Schizophrenia bulletin · 2025Article
- First-Episode Psychosis incidence pre-, during, and post-COVID-19 pandemic: a six-year natural quasi-experimental study in South London.EClinicalMedicine · 2025Article
- The utility of animal models to inform the next generation of human space exploration.NPJ microgravity · 2025Review
- A prospective study of the effect of COVID-19 on psychiatric symptoms and sleep problems from infection to 9-month follow-up.European archives of psychiatry and clinical neuroscience · 2025Article
- Neural correlates of uncertainty processing in psychosis spectrum disorder.Brain communications · 2025Article
1 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
- Update of
Authors and funding
12 authors at 4 institutions in 4 countries.
Funding
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.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.