Jumping to conclusions and the continuum of delusional beliefs

The present study examined the jumping to conclusions reasoning bias across the continuum of delusional ideation by investigating individuals with active delusions, delusion prone individuals, and non-delusion prone individuals. Neutral and highly self-referent probabilistic reasoning tasks were employed. Results indicated that individuals with delusions gathered significantly less information than delusion prone and non-delusion prone participants on both the neutral and self-referent tasks, (p<.001). Individuals with delusions made less accurate decisions than the delusion prone and non-delusion prone participants on both tasks (p<.001), yet were more confident about their decisions than were delusion prone and non-delusion prone participants on the self-referent task (p=.002). Those with delusions and those who were delusion prone reported higher confidence in their performance on the self-referent task than they did the neutral task (p=.02), indicating that high self-reference impacted information processing for individuals in both of these groups. The results are discussed in relation to previous research in the area of probabilistic reasoning and delusions.