Delusions as exploitative deception--论文代写范文精选

51Due论文代写网精选essay代写范文：“Delusions as exploitative deception  ”错觉是假设心理适应性进化，减轻社会失败的后果。人类生活很渺小,如面对外部威胁,或疾病。这篇心理essay代写范文研究了这一问题。如果妄想是适应社会失败,那么他们当个体面临严重的社会威胁,他们应该获得社会好处，当社会威胁停止时,会出现许多妄想障碍，移民,监狱精神病和歧视都表明社会缺陷扮演了一个重要的病因。跨文化在传统社会中收集的数据表明,妄想可以引起社会效益。研究表明,积极的社会变量是最重要的预测因子。幻想是一种有效的适应社会失败的方式。

Abstract 
Non-bizarre delusions are hypothesized to be psychological adaptations which evolved to mitigate the dangerous consequences of social failure. When humans lived in small, kin-based groups, delusions would have functioned to combat social failure by closely mimicking conditions, such as possession of important information, external threats, or illness, where fellow group members were likely to cooperate and provide assistance. If delusions are adaptations to social failure, then they should onset when an individual faces a serious social threat, they should function (in ancestral type environments) to elicit social benefits—at least in the short term—and they should cease when the social threat ceases, an hypothesis which is examined in the context of numerous published studies of Delusional Disorder (DD). Studies of the relationship between DD and life events, immigrant status, prison psychoses, and discrimination all indicate that social deficits play a significant etiological role. Crosscultural data collected in traditional societies show that delusions can elicit social benefits. Finally, studies show that positive social variables are the most important predictors of remission of DD. A case can therefore be made that delusions are an effective adaptation to social failure. 
Keywords: delusions, psychosis, parasitism, cooperation, social failure

Introduction 
Thomas Szasz is well known both for his biting critique of the mental illness concept (e.g., Szasz 1961) and his vehement condemnation of what he views as the coercive nature of modern psychiatry (e.g., Szasz 1970). Less well known is that in addition to these philosophical and social critiques, Szasz has offered a positive theory of mental illness, namely that so-called mental illnesses are really strategies in the social games in which we are all engaged: 

[N]otions such as hysteria or mental illness can be properly understood only in the context of a specified social setting. In other words, while such diseases as syphilis and tuberculosis are in the nature of events or happenings, and hence can be described without taking cognizance of how men conduct themselves in their social affairs, hysteria, and all other phenomena now popularly called mental illnesses, are in the nature of actions. They are thus made to happen by sentient, intelligent human beings and can be understood best, in my opinion, in the framework of games. “Mental illnesses” thus differ fundamentally from ordinary diseases and are similar, rather, to certain moves or techniques in playing games. Suffering from hysteria is thus far from being sick and could more accurately be thought of a playing a game, correctly or incorrectly, skillfully or clumsily, successfully or unsuccessfully, as the case might be. (Szasz 1961, p. 225) 

According to Szasz, these strategies are incorrectly labeled illnesses because they often involve socially undesirable behaviors like lying, cheating, and deception. Psychiatry, however, is strictly prohibited from considering this view: 

For the contemporary psychiatrist to speak of lying in connection with so-called mental illness is anathema. Once a person is called a “patient” his psychiatrist is no longer even permitted to consider such a thing as lying. The prohibition placed on this term and all it connotes has been at least as strong as that on sex in Victorian society, and perhaps even greater. Anyone who speaks of lying in connection with psychiatric problems, tends ipso facto to be identified as “antipsychiatric” and “antihunanitarian,” meaning thereby that he is both wrong and bad. I believe this is most regrettable, and merely signifies the contemporary psychiatrist’s (and lay person’s) sentimentalizing attitude toward the so-called mentally ill. Such an attitude toward mental illness is harmful to science and has no place in it. (Ibid, p. 272) 

Here I will show that Szasz’ positive theory of mental illness as strategic deception can be framed as a testable hypothesis using theories from modern evolutionary biology. I will also show that given this framing, much evidence collected using the illness model actually supports Szasz. In important ways, however, my argument differs from Szasz’. First, I am not advancing a social critique of psychiatry; I am merely interested in whether the illness model is the correct scientific model of certain types of psychiatric symptoms or whether some other model fares equally well or better. Second, I am not proposing that Szasz is correct about all mental illnesses – I strongly suspect that he is not. I will only be investigating a single psychiatry symptom: nonbizarre delusions. In particular, I am explicitly excluding schizophrenia, which I believe to be the product of one or more genuine brain dysfunctions. Finally, unlike Szasz I will specify in detail the special social circumstances that should elicit deceptive strategies and the benefits such strategies can deliver in the types of social environments in which humans evolved.

Delusions with other symptoms 
Delusions commonly occur with other psychiatric symptoms like depression, auditory hallucinations, the negative symptoms of schizophrenia, brain injury, and substance use (Manschreck 1989). One population survey found, for example, that 4.1% of individuals suffering depressive symptoms also had delusions (Ohayon and Schatzberg 2002). Another found an approximately 0.7% prevalence of delusions with auditory hallucinations in the general population (Robins and Regier 1991). The association of depressive symptoms and delusions is clearly consistent with the hypothesis explored here. Individuals suffering a loss of social standing sufficient to trigger delusions would obviously be vulnerable to depression as well. The association of brain injury with delusions is also consistent. If a brain injury or other neurological deficit causes individuals to lose social value and thus their social relationships, then delusions would, under the hypothesis, be an adaptive response to the loss of social relationships, not to the brain injury per se. 

Interestingly, two studies found extremely high rates of delusions following brain injury (Achte et al. 1969; Koponen et al. 2002), but in 42% and 66% of the cases the delusions onset more than 10 years after the injury. This long delay suggests that delusions might have been caused by the social consequences of the injury rather than the brain injury itself. If auditory hallucinations are an indication of neurological deficits that would cause a loss of social value then, again, delusions could be seen as an adaptive response to the loss of social value, explaining the association of delusions with auditory hallucinations. Speculatively, given that a large fraction of individuals in most societies, particularly small scale societies, believe in supernatural agents or powers (Boyer 1994; Brown 1991), auditory hallucinations may not have interfered significantly with the deceptive function proposed for delusions, and could simply be a neutral byproduct of the putative delusional adaptation. 

Conclusion 
Social systems that rely on cheap signals for the exchange of substantial benefits are very susceptible to exploitation by individuals willing to use deception. For humans, exploitative deceivers should often be individuals facing severe social failure because the costs of cheating are small to non-existent for these individuals, and the potential benefits are large. The pervasive conception of delusions as some kind of dysfunction is perfectly compatible with evolutionary theory, and a number of cognitive differences between delusional and nondelusional individuals have been discovered. Yet cognitive differences are predicted by both dysfunctional and functional hypotheses, and so, in and of themselves, are not proof of an 22 underlying pathology. Most of the cognitive differences that have been found suggest that individuals with paranoid delusions are especially sensitive to threats and are particularly likely to attribute successes to themselves and failures and mal-intent to others, consistent with the functional hypothesis explored here. The exploitative deception hypothesis unifies many of the symptomatological, epidemiological and demographic aspects of Delusional Disorder under one theoretical umbrella. During our evolutionary history, individuals facing social failure, e.g., those receiving meager to non-existent fitness benefits from their relationships, would have had to monitor their social and physical environment very carefully, and may have had no choice but to unconsciously deceive others in order to obtain badly needed benefits. 

Of the entire universe of conceivable false beliefs, delusions comprise only a tiny set of themes, themes that appear designed to generate precisely those cues that would have elicited cooperation from the group: possession of important information and abilities, fears of external threat, illness, and intimate relations with high status individuals. Each of these situations would have been difficult for other group members to verify, at least in the short term, making them ideal candidates for exploitative deception. Many lines of evidence indicate that social deficits cause delusions – it appears there may be some truth to the quip that even paranoids have real enemies, or at least very few friends – and the available data indicate that delusions deliver social benefits to individuals in small, kinbased societies. Szasz’ argument that lies and deception are important aspects of what is usually termed mental illness, reframed here as an adaptationist account of delusions, is reasonably wellsupported by the available evidence. This evidence, however, does not rule out traditional dysfunction theories. In particular, considerably more evidence is needed that delusions garner benefits in small, kin-based societies that outweigh their obvious costs. Given that powerful drugs are regularly used to suppress delusions, however, drugs that often fail to improve patients’ lives yet cause dangerous side-effects, including sometimes irreversible brain damage in a significant minority of patients (Bagnall et al. 2003), it is a scientific and ethical imperative to investigate possible functions for these deeply mysterious cognitive processes. If the hypothesis explored here were eventually to be confirmed, interventions aimed at ameliorating social failure should be an efficacious treatment.（essay代写)

51Due网站原创范文除特殊说明外一切图文著作权归51Due所有；未经51Due官方授权谢绝任何用途转载或刊发于媒体。如发生侵犯著作权现象，51Due保留一切法律追诉权。（essay代写)
更多essay代写范文欢迎访问我们主页 www.51due.com 当然有essay代写需求可以和我们24小时在线客服 QQ:800020041 联系交流。-X（essay代写)