The Social Roots of Delusions

Why do humans adopt beliefs that defy reality? The Social Roots of Delusions moves beyond the traditional focus on the individual brain to explore the social origins of misbelief. Drawing on our nature as "ultra-social" animals, it argues that collective and clinical delusions are shaped by the unique ways humans interact, trust, and cooperate. The Social Roots of Delusions argues that human sociality is essential for understanding what delusions are and how they form. Humans are cooperative and cultural animals, radically dependent on others for survival and for the knowledge we use to navigate our world. That world includes complex systems of norms, reputation, gossip, surveillance, and partner choice, along with high-stakes competition for prestige and power among individuals and shifting coalitions. Against this background, Williams, Wilkinson, and Miyazono offer a social account of delusions in two senses. First, they rethink what it means to be delusional by situating delusion attribution within norm-governed practices of epistemic gatekeeping. In this context, calling a belief delusional expresses bafflement and marks its adherents as "rational lost causes", people who seem unreachable by ordinary communication, persuasion, and argument. Second, they show how social forces help produce and sustain delusions, including both clinical delusions and collective delusions. Popular delusions arise from socially motivated cognition interacting with complex social practices that reward conformity, supply rationalisations, and shield groups from counterevidence. Clinical delusions, by contrast, are often maintained when isolation and mistrust cut people off from the shared knowledge and corrective testimony that ordinarily stabilise belief. Drawing on philosophy, cognitive science, and psychiatry, the book connects individual psychopathology with collective irrationality through a single social lens.