Being certain in an uncertain world: Social certainty, social accuracy, and their association with social connection and paranoia

The social world is fundamentally ambiguous making the certainty of our social judgments an important factor in determining one’s success in the social world. Alterations in certainty are also implicated as a core cognitive bias in the psychosis spectrum, particularly for individuals experiencing paranoia, whether at a subclinical or clinical level. Here, in two studies (Ns=305, 759), we test associations between social certainty and accuracy for different kinds of social information, and their association with social connection and paranoia. Undergraduate participants completed a mental state and demographics version of the original (Study 1) and multiracial (Study 2) Reading the Mind in the Eyes Task, assigning a probability to each response option, from which we calculated variability as the measure of certainty. Participants also completed measures of social connection (e.g., loneliness) and paranoia. Study 2 expanded upon this approach with the addition of another measure of certainty, testing whether participants chose to prune response options, and an assessment of delusion-like thinking. Two findings clearly replicated. First, certainty was positively associated with social connection only when one has the propensity to be accurate in their judgments of mental states. Second, increased paranoia was associated with increased certainty for judgments of personal characteristics. Findings that did not clearly replicate may be attributable to the different stimulus sets used. Together, these findings help to clarify the association between certainty and accuracy, their association with social connection, and how certainty may be altered in those experiencing paranoia.