Instant Genius - How to overcome social paranoia and anxiety

Episode Date: February 26, 2024

Do you often find yourself worrying that people are talking about you behind your back? If so, don’t worry: according to our guest, Prof Daniel Freeman, it’s an extremely common thought pattern �� and one you can easily break free from. Daniel is a Professor of Psychology at Oxford University and author of new book Paranoia: A Psychologist’s Journey Into Extreme Mistrust and Anxiety. In this episode, he explains the link between paranoia and social anxiety, exactly how to tell how paranoid you are – and simple strategies to build self-esteem and reduce your social paranoia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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delivering digital precision with analogue warmth. So you can experience exceptional sound at home. Music just as the artist intended. Visit name audio.com to love. learn more. Oh, and welcome to Instant Genius, the Bitesize Masterclass in podcast form. I'm Thomas Ling, digital editor at BBC Science Focus magazine. Do you sometimes find yourself worrying that other people are talking about you behind your back? If so, do not worry. According to our guest today, Professor Daniel Freeman, it's an extremely common thought pattern and one you can easily break free from. Daniel is a professor

of psychology at Oxford University, an author of new book, Paranoia, a psychologist journey into extreme mistrust and anxiety. In this episode, he explains the link between paranoia and social anxiety, how to tell exactly how paranoid you are, and the simple strategies to build self-esteem and reduce everyday social paranoia. Hello, Daniel, welcome to the show. Hello, Thomas. Fantastic. So I'm going to start off by asking the big question here, which is what exactly is paranoia? So how are you defining it? I know lots of people might define it different ways, but scientifically, what does it mean? Yeah, good question. It is used in lots of different ways by people. But in the mental health world, paranoia is when you think others are

trying to harm you when they're not. So they are inaccurate or unfounded thoughts that others have a deliberate intention to try and get at you at some way to distress you or perhaps spread nasty rumours about you or perhaps to physically harm you or financially harm you. Okay. And how exactly did you get into researching this area? I understand it's a reasonably new realm of research in psychology? Yes, it's been a bit of a niche area really. I mean, I got into it about 30 years ago and really paranoia was thought to occur pretty much only within people who've got severe mental health problems, typically as a symptom of schizophrenia, and therefore you had to cure the schizophrenia, principally by medication, and then the paranoia would go.

What you didn't do, in fact, you were probably discouraged from doing really, is talking to the person about paranoia. And I was training as a clinical psychologist and met people with psychosis who were having severe paranoia, and talk to them. And a whole other story really emerged from this, which is, I think, far more interesting, far more accurate assessment or paranoia really is, but also tells us a bit more about some fundamental aspects of human behaviour. So previously it was just seen as more of a biological problem, not necessarily a psychological one. Yeah, absolutely. I think that's right. where the reality I think, although this is still contested, is that all of us have to make decisions whether to trust or mistrust other people.

It's easy to get wrong, and we get it wrong. That's the form of paranoia. And there's a spectrum of paranoia in the general population. Many people have a few paranoid thoughts, a few people have many. And it is the people who have a lot of them who are more likely to be at the clinical end to be seen in mental health services. but it's still the same sort of paranoia as that experienced by many of us in our everyday lives. And there's a whole host of reasons why sometimes we will get paranoid.

So it's quite interesting when you defined paranoia before, you sort of mentioned issues which could be connected to social anxiety. So people being scared about what other people sort of think of them, are people laughing about me behind my back? So I think that is quite a common thing. It is. So there is a large anxiety element to paranoia. from, for example, social anxiety is that in paranoia, you have this idea that there's a deliberate

intent to harm you. So in social anxiety, you're very often worried about looking foolish in front other people. In paranoia, you typically think that others are trying to make you look foolish. So there's that intent there? Yeah, that's the fundamental difference, but there's lots of similarities. And actually, the way I really first got into developing some new insights into paranoia was to see the the links with anxiety that actually our patients with severe paranoia were anticipating danger, they were worrying a lot, so they'd have negative images in their mind, all sorts of things that are very common in people with anxiety. And paranoia is almost a sort of anxiety about others' intentions, really, and there's great similarity there. But anxiety and paranoia and psychosis

were viewed as different worlds when I first started. There's a fundamental divide between psychosis, which was considered un-understandable, and neurosis, things like anxiety, depression, that were considered much more understandable. Psychosis and paranoia, the first studies of worry, levels of worry in those patients was done in my PhD because people didn't worry, assess worry in patients with psychosis because that was a problem of neurosis, not psychosis. So there was a huge division, but actually there's much more overlap across all mental health conditions than perhaps was, used to be thought. It's quite a widespread thing then. So do you know what the prevalence of paranoid thoughts are? I don't suppose there's any sort of percentages you could throw away?

Oh, I certainly can. So for example, in the past month, a number of people who think that certain individuals have had it in for them, that's around one in five people. We have data from last year with a representative sample of 10,000 people in the UK that suggests about one in four people think they are generally mistrustful other people, and of those two-thirds of people would actually want help to be more trusting. So it depends on the precise nature of the type of paranoid thought, but it is rather common. And that's not surprising, because we always have to make these sorts of judgments,

and reading other people's intentions is very hard to do. Is there a difference between healthy anxiety and unhealthy paranoia? like where's that line? How would you define that? Yeah, I mean, it often can be very difficult to make that judgment. There are often very clear instances. So I may be seeing people who are 100% convinced of their fears, are thinking about it all the time, are distressed by it, and it's affecting every aspect of their life.

So then it's clearly gone too far. But each of those is a dimension, really. So the degree to which you believe it, the degree to which you're preoccupied by it, and the degree to which distresses interferes with your life, is where the marker is. But of course, you know, you can have quite strong paranoia, but getting on with every other aspect of your life and be fine. So in a sense, like with most mental health conditions, it's the impact that has on your day-to-day life that is the marker

of it being a real significant problem. But, you know, I think paranoia has a creative effect within relationships, mistrust, because that's the foundation of healthy relationships. And when we mistrust, that can cause a lot of problems. And, most commonly avoidance. So people end up not connecting with people or not going to various events or just in fact retreating into their home in the superior instances. What would you say to those people who would argue that it pays to be paranoid? You know, the price of security is insecurity, that it's better to be vigilant rather than a victim. Yeah. So of course, you know, people do bad things to each other, and at times mistrust is a very sensible strategy. And I don't think that's paranoia.

Paranoia is when it's gone too far. And really, the way sometimes to think about it is that the dose makes the poison. Sometimes a little bit of something is fine, but you have too much of it, and then it becomes poisonous, a real problem. And that, I think, is the same with paranoia. You know, we shouldn't always be believing everything we hear. Particularly, you know, from whatever we hear on the internet or whatever, we should. A healthy dose of scepticism is often entirely reasonable, but pushing it too far, I think, is a problem. Of course, it depends where you live, what the circumstances of your life are.

There are some situations where it does make sense. But mostly, say in the UK, on the whole, the people around us, it's okay. And we need to have an appropriate level of trust, because that's what binds us together and that enables us to get on with our lives. But, you know, you've always got to pay attention to your safety. There's risk assessment here. All of us think wisely. There are obviously risky situations.

But trust to a degree or the safety that we have is somewhat fluid. It's going to vary by time, place, situation, those sorts of things. So again, a flexibility in the use of it is advisable. Okay. What traits do highly paranoid people share? Yeah, good question. The cause is a paranoia. There's not really a single cause. So to a certain degree, there's a contribution of just basic genetics. So some people might be just more inclined to. So about 50% of the variation in the population might be attributed to genetics, but then the rest down to

environmental circumstances. But I think the way to think about it really probably is that some people are a bit more predisposed to it. Then if you have bad things happen to you, then you're like to feel more vulnerable, but also that people potentially more hostile, and that could be a driver of paranoia. If you spend more time worrying, then naturally these ideas play on your mind more, you elaborate them, you think they're more like to happen than they are. If you are sleeping badly, again, that can actually affect your judgments of trust and mistrust, for example. And then, if you start to react to these thoughts you're having and start to put up the defences, start to avoid people or places or if you are out and about, you might start to not have conversations

to people, avoid eye contact, or just rush around and get out there fast. As soon as you start putting up the defences, then these fears start to get locked into place. And then, of course, the less you're doing, the more time you actually spend on your own ruminating, and that takes you to worse places too. What about sort of thinking patterns then that paranoid people might sort of share? So are paranoid people more likely to jump to conclusions, for instance? Yeah, that's right. So there are a number of thinking stars that contribute. So one of them is what's called jumping to conclusions, which is about actually not gathering much evidence before reaching certain in your beliefs. There is also a tendency to not consider alternative explanations for events. And related to that, you can think about it actually. We often think about two types of reasoning. One is this kind of gut fast reasoning that we use most of the time, but also more analytic reasoning and people with paranoid perhaps are less inclined to use analytic thinking. So that's sort of stepping back and reviewing our beliefs. So there's a number of those

sorts of reasoning biases that contribute to the occurrence of paranoia. How might these sort of jumping to conclusions, thought pattern, contribute to paranoid thinking? Well, because it means you're likely to believe quickly and without much of a data search, fearful beliefs. So you can imagine, Obviously, if you start to think there's a threat, it's very understandable why you may want to act upon it and fast. And jumping exclusions kind of feeds into that really by forestalling a wider data search. You kind of go with that initial, often gut feeling of fear. And often your body is telling you as danger because you're feeling anxious. So people go with that and then, you know, you get locked into this one narrative really without seeing potential turns of explanations for events.

And when you're dealing with human behavior and trying to explain what others are doing, there are always alternative explanations for what's going on. Yeah, I think a lot of people might jump to conclusions in certain social situations, what we spoke about earlier, about people sort of being anxious, that other people might be sort of laughing at them or have some sort of malintent there. What would you say to someone who's now a bit paranoid after hearing that, that they suffer from paranoia? How can actually people measure their own levels of paranoia?

Yeah, the only real way to know is by asking someone really in terms of the assessments we do. We ask people directly, you know, have you had thoughts that other people are trying to harm you? If you felt others are, you know, spreading nasty rumours about you. But of course, in a clinical assessment, you also have to make a judgment of whether actually this is inaccurate or not. So if the ideas are particularly extreme, then actually probably doesn't take too long to work out that actually the person is probably okay. But obviously, at other instances, it takes more work to understand that. But what we do find, and we do have evidence for, actually, is that when people are often able to know when their

fears have got too much, to begin to distinguish between what is an accurate representation, but what may be going too far in terms of perceptions of other people. So an example might be that it's very common for people to get very mistrust of a lot that they've been assaulted, for example, which is entirely understandable. You know, you've been mugged or something. If you're going to walk down the street, you're going to get anxious, you're going to skew towards mistrust. It makes sense. But what can happen for some people is it generalises to, you know, all people, all places, and starts to expand in a way the person then begins to recognise. So not everyone recognises it's a difficulty for them, for certain instances, people just think it

is the perpetrators of the perceived harm. But actually, for a lot of people, there is a bit of correlation between endorsement of some of the self-report assessments of paranoia and the person's own perception of the things perhaps have got too much. So there are sort of questionnaires which people could turn to you to give them some inkling? Yeah, so we often rely on on initial screening with questionnaires and then a clinical interview certainly as well. So would you advise people to be sort of searching out for these questionnaires if they are worried or get in touch with their doctor? And if they should be looking at these sort of questionnaires, what exactly are they called and where can they be found? Yeah. So with all these things,

obviously, a first step is always to actually check out your judgment with someone that you trust. And that's no bad thing about doing that, checking to see whether other people around you may think. and if you are getting concerned, you certainly can speak to your GP or to your local mental health trust. The screening questioner that we have is called the revised Green etal Paranoid Thought Scale,

and we have it on a website at the University of Oxford, for example, here. But I think often people around you may have an inkling or whether things are getting too much. You're great at protecting your data, but lots of places could still expose you to identity theft.

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Visit focal powered by name.com for more information. Do you say someone is a paranoid person if they are just having sort of paranoid thoughts in one arena, in a social arena like we've sort of spoken about? Or does a paranoid person tend to have paranoid thoughts about a lot of different things? Are they more likely to be into conspiracy theories, for instance? Yes, so conspiracy theories are a form of mistrust, like paranoia is a form of mistrust,

and they are associated but distinct. So it's certainly true that if you have one, you're perhaps more like to have the other, but it's not necessarily the case in an individual instance, so they are different but connected. in the presentations, you get a wide variety, basically. Some people it is only the neighbours, but for some people, some people it might be just men or for some people it's everyone in all situations.

So there's a great range in it, really, as perhaps you would expect, because again, always comes down to the fact that there's a whole range of judgments about trust and mistrust that we have to do, and that can go misaligned in various different ways. So what if someone's done this question now, sort of been diagnosed with sort of carrying quite a lot of paranoid thoughts. How can somebody overcome those? Yeah, that's the key question, really. What we do in therapy is we help people relearn safety. And that's through direct experience. So actually, if you fear that actually walking down to your local shop during the day that you might get attacked, then naturally we test that out gently. So it might be that actually

you go with someone else the first time or then go part of the way on your own. So you gently get these experiences actually that it's okay. You fear something bad might happen to go to the social event. Well, let's go and find out directly. But it's more complicated than that, because you can go to these situations or not make this new learning. So if, for example, you still go into these situations and for your defence is up, you go into the social situation, you hide in the corner or you leave early, then you think, well, I just about save myself because I made myself inconspicuous. So you've also got to gently lower your defences to fully learn how things are. And then also what we do is get people in the right psychological state to make this learning.

So we help people, for example, sleep better. We actually help people constrain the amount of time they spend worrying. And we also build up people's self-esteem, for example, so that actually they feel less vulnerable to harm in the first place. So it's really about enabling a person to learn that the world is safe, to form new memories of being in the world and being safe. And these memories will only be tagged as memories of safety if the person is in that position, in those situations,

in a state where they can see the safety. Because often, if you get very paranoid, you can only see the potential threat. And actually we refocus on the safety in the world. And then, most crucially, what we want people to do, certainly in our therapy, but for all of us for good mental health, what we want to be doing is activities that is meaningful to us.

And when we do that, we often focus less on ourselves and less on the intentions of other people because we're so engaged in that activity that gives us purpose and meaning in the world. So in the end, we want certainly the patients. I see, for example, we want to identify the things that want to be doing and get them back doing it. It's okay to ask about some specific techniques. So when you're talking there about constraining the amount of time that people worry, I imagine a lot of people listening to this will be quite interested in that and some of the techniques to use.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the way we think about it is that although people can sometimes feel their worries too much and they would like to reduce worrying, they also have what we call a positive belief that worry. They worry because they believe it serves a function so that it might be, for example, keeping you safe or preparing you or anticipating danger, those sorts of things. We actually engage in a worry because we think it's doing something. We may think it's even a way of solving problems. And that's often why people do it. So the first thing, we we do is help people realize actually it's not a very good strategy for any of those things, really, because all worried is skew your thinking to the most unlikely events and exaggerates the likelihood of that occurring for you. We do a range of things to show that actually, if you worry about something, you know, if you worry about winning the lottery, you can think of a whole range of very bad things that are going to follow from that, for example. So if you then, you know, worry about something which is a bit more based in concerns in my life, it's going to take you to even worse places. So it gives you a very skewed of the way of the world, and it's not a

good way of problem solving. So we help people realize that actually there's a reason they gauge it, but actually it probably isn't the best way of dealing with whatever concern you have. So then what we do is help people constrain their worrying to a worry period, once or twice a day, 15, 20 minutes, something like that. Although for people who are really severe paranoia, we might have a worry-free period. And what we're doing when we're implementing worry periods is constraining a certain amount of time and then the rest of the time we're helping people learn to detect when they're starting to worry and letting it go. I can write it down. If I worry at that time, they can then say, well, I'm going to worry about it later. People don't have to stop worrying.

We're just saying let's keep it to a much more smaller period. And typically we might get people to do a worry period at sort of six o'clock in the day at the end of the day or something, but not right at the end of the day because that would actually make the chances of falling asleep with us. So earlier in the evening. So going back to the first technique you were talking about there, and sort of asking whether the worrying is beneficial in any way. So I think it might be a good technique if someone is worrying just to be asking in that moment, is this useful? Yeah, or the best thing generally is to write down what the fear is and problem solve around it,

which is typically thinking, well, what are the different solutions, what are the advantages and disadvantages of each solution, trying one out, and then seeing whether that's worked or not or move on to a different way. So a much more problem solving approach. So you spend less time in your head, going through things, and actually more planning ahead and thinking how you're going to deal with something. And what about self-esteem as well? You sort of mentioned a lot of this therapy is about sort of building up someone's self-esteem.

What are some techniques which someone could use to build that? Yeah, it's interesting. So a lot of people we see in certainly paranoia can feel very vulnerable, have very negative views themselves and have got a negative critical voice themselves. It can be amazingly kind and compassionate about others, but gives themselves much less kindness and sympathy. There's a range of things one can do with that. One of the things we do a lot actually is try and counterbalance the negative side

by building up positive beliefs about themselves, the sense that person has control, can persist and achieve things, can enjoy themselves, beliefs like that. And building on the strengths and values of the person. So we might run through, well, what is important? There's a strength and a value for you, which do you think you have, kindness, honesty, caring, all those sorts of things, help the person actually see the positive side themselves and then use it more during the week.

Again, typically through some kind of meaningful activity, maybe helping others as well. So a lot of change through direct action in the world, really. And I think a lot of overcoming mental problems actually in the end involves being in the world and doing different things or doing things differently. So it's not just all talking in the clinic room. So the work I do, do a lot of getting out and about with people. What sort of getting out about practices do you think someone could do without necessarily help of a therapist? Oh, lots.

I mean, so we may start this in therapy, but of course, in the end, the person is going to be doing it outside the sessions because you've got to repeatedly do things. You know, it's like if you have fear of heights, you can't just go to height once and know it's okay. You've got to keep doing that sort of practice, for example. And it's the same with social anxiety or with paranoia. You've got to put a lot of practice in to really embed these memories. Because in these sorts of conditions, what you're dealing with is a lot of threat-based memories, lots of associations of everyday situations and places with threat.

And they're quite embedded. And what you would do is have a competing strong memory. And the only way of doing that is by getting lots of experience of things being okay. So that becomes your go-to response for your body. brain to draw upon. I really have to ask about the virtual reality treatments you've been developing. So if you type in your name into YouTube or another video hosting service, you see these amazing videos of sort of virtual reality London Underground situations. How do they work and how effectively do they work? Yeah, so I'm a clinical psychologist and I'm devoted basically developing

treatments that have really large effects, but also trying to get them to more and more people. and virtual reality works both in terms of a powerful treatment but also in terms of potentially getting it to many more people. So I think it's a very therapeutic medium because the person knows what's presented in VR isn't real and that enables them to moderate the level of anxiety so they don't feel overwhelmed if, for example, they have to go back into a simulation of a situation they feel difficult. So I talked earlier about the need to learn safety in paranoia but sometimes when people go out in the real world, their body is reacting in such an anxiety way that it's very hard to make this new learning, but in VR, the edge is taken off by the fact that people know it's

not real. So it's very therapeutic. And of course, what we're also doing is using VR to create situations and environments that people don't experience in the real world, but could be therapeutically healthy. So it's potentially really therapeutic medium. And in terms of getting it to people, what we've been pioneering here in Oxford is developing automated psychological therapies in VR. So if you could automate it, then it removes a reliance on finding a right therapy is doing the right things. And that's one of the journeys we're on. So with game change for people with psychosis, we've just had the first VR treatment approved for use with people with psychosis, which we're very pleased about. So we're beginning to get that into services for a group that

often there is a shortage of therapists for to provide psychological therapy. But it isn't, yeah, just about getting access is also because we think this could be a really good way of helping people make change in their lives. I understand with the VR as well, you use it to be changing people's height in the environment that they're in. Is it okay if you can explain that about? Yes, that was a study that's got a lot of attention at the time. It was a study that's really trying to test the cause of paranoia. And as we talked about actually low self-esteem can be a cause of paranoia because people feel vulnerable. So we wanted to actually show this an experiment Now, you may or not know this, but if you look across the population, there is a small correlation

between height and self-esteem. And in general, there is a bit of bias towards height. So even if you control for, say, cognitive abilities, people are taller and more like to get to university and more likely to have job and relationship success. There is a bit of a bias towards height, presumably, because it's seen as a marker of dominance. And if you think about it, it pervades language. We look down on people, we look up for people, for example. So what we did is we thought, well, if we could lower the height that people are used to, that might actually make them feel a bit more negative about themselves. And if we did that, then we predict that they might also have some more paranoid thoughts.

So obviously changing someone's height is pretty difficult in the real world, but in virtual reality, we could present people in situations either at the normal height or about head height lower. and we showed that when people's height was lowered in VR, that they felt more negative about themselves, and that caused a increase in paranoia. So it was a causal test really showing the effects of how you think about yourself and the effects it has on your perceptions of other's intentions.

What it did not show, but what I was sort of caught a lot of attention is that people thought that it showed that short man syndrome exists, but it did, or short people are more paranoid. It does not show that. But I still got a lot of emails, and sometimes a phone call from people saying that actually, despite their height, they are not more mistrust of other people. So talking about sort of trust on a wider scale, then.

What do you think the pandemic taught us about paranoia? Well, it certainly taught us about trust and mistrust. Really, the way I think about it actually is that trust is a vital but invisible national infrastructure. We rely on it for our lives. If we want to get out the house, walk down the street and go to work and work, we were relying on trust, we are relying trust in our society. And the pandemic was a particular moment we had to trust in our institutions and in science because we all need to take collective action and we needed advice to be told what to do.

So it was a crucial example of how important trust is. If we were going to get over the pandemic, we needed to trust vaccines, for example, and to take them. So there was a key moment. And I think that shows, you know, most of the time it's hard to show the effects of trust in society. but on the whole, the less trust we have in a society, the less healthy it is. But in the pandemic, there's a very clear instance where we could see there's a crucial moment where we're going to have to trust. On the flip side of that, I think it was all for a time that certain forms of mistrust became

mainstream conspiracy beliefs being the most obvious. And of course, there's an interesting connection with vaccinations there where we had all the false information about MRI vaccine, for example, on its risk. So those sort of conspiracy vaccine beliefs have been there for a while. but kind of has still been around, but also those sorts of beliefs in the pandemic, I think started to transfer to beliefs about vaccines about COVID as well. I think that at that time, also there was a spread of various mistrustful ideas

on the internet as well on social media. And of course, you know, people were coping with really difficult events that were happening all from a virus, which of course is invisible. So it's kind of hard to see. So it was a kind of situation where you can see why conspiracy ideas would flourish, but I think it also led to a conspiracy belief spreading more widely than they ever have before. Yeah, in your book, you cite one study about the high levels of people who believed in COVID-19 conspiracy theories, and half of people in England

endorse at least one conspiracy theory. Are you quite surprised? There's certainly be entertaining, yeah, no, I have to say, obviously I'm a paranormal researcher, I'm very used to it, and I vividly remember the evening I got said the data from the National Service. movie that we did. And, you know, it was grim, actually looking at a degree to which their extreme beliefs would be endorsed. Most people are not endorsing them, you know, it's only 5% who might be endorsing them very strongly, but other entertaining ideas that are rather extreme and worrying. And, you know, I think you can see a number of things pushing in that direction. Of course, the more social disunion or fragmentation there is,

I think there's more of this. We've also got, of course, we've had post-truth age where There's doubts about what, you know, whether we can have facts and shared explanations, things which I think could be terribly undermining for trust. Actually, often people just go with their gut feelings and the evidence that lies just with their beliefs only. And then, of course, we've got all this huge spread of conspiracy ideas and misinformation and some of it, you know, stoked. And I think that has led to some really negative effects.

But how seriously do you think people actually take all this? You know, what would you say to so many who argues that if, if, if, over 90% of the people in the UK and 80% in the US got vaccinated against COVID. That mistrust and paranoia isn't actually that high. I mean, so it is good. I mean, it's really good that we actually got, certainly in the UK. But of course, what you've seen is vaccination, certainly the US, become a political issue, largely, which is very concerning. And you can see difficulties now with measles of vaccines in the UK, where actually it is a contributor. It's not the only thing. And for example, we saw that the work we did that also just the fear of need,

was a contributor to, but it was part of the story, I think, of why some people didn't want to, or it took a lot of work to persuade. But actually, you know, people did come together. There was a lot of collective action, and that's fantastic. So that is definitely a good news story from it. But I suppose what we don't want to know is what the other effects are these sorts of beliefs that are out there. And this is one of the points of the book is to argue, actually, we need to treasure our trust, and we need to pay more attention to it. So we need to keep monitoring it. And I identifying the forces that damage it and always try to help build it up in our society. I take it you also believe this about climate change as well. Do you believe that people believing

in conspiracy theories is a big barrier to taking action? Yeah, that's not huge in my area, but yes, I think it is. I mean, I think what we found certain in the COVID conspiracy beliefs, that the people who are endorsing those were saying they were less likely to be following the rules. So, you know, there is consequences. Belief drives action. And of course, people often will go and do what others are doing too. So I think that probably helped with vaccinations too and also the sense that actually you're only allowed to do certain things if you're vaccine. So that was helpful too in making more of a social norm. But beliefs are incredibly important in driving human behavior. So I'm not saying they're everything, but they are important. And I think that's why considerably beliefs were ignored in the vast. They thought that perhaps it was just a few rather eccentric people who held them and they've there's no effects from them, but I think the data we have just does not bear that out anymore. That was Daniel Freeman, Professor of Psychology at Oxford University, and author of new book Paranoia, a psychologist journey into extreme mistrust and anxiety. Thank you for listening to this episode of Instant Genius,

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