
The Contagion of Concern: Game theory of how anxiety spreads - goldfish
https://www.adamjuliangoldstein.com/blog/contagion-of-concern/
======
goldfish
Hi all, this is a follow-up to two essays:

1) The parallels between anxious ideas and immune system threat prediction
(discussed at
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22475370](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22475370))

2) The game theory of determining which imagined threats are worth our
attention (discussed at
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22760540](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22760540)).

Thoughts and feedback welcome as always :)

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bb123
I wonder if the model here is missing something important - it assumes there
is no survival penalty for a false positive attack. In real life this isn’t
true. Activating a fight or flight response in humans and animals has an
energy (survival) penalty.

~~~
goldfish
It does include a survival penalty for a false attack. I laid out the assumed
payoff matrix here: [https://www.adamjuliangoldstein.com/blog/paranoia-
parameter/...](https://www.adamjuliangoldstein.com/blog/paranoia-
parameter/#responding-under-uncertainty). The penalty for false positives is
also baked into the simulations (see first few lines of code here:
[https://github.com/adamjuliangoldstein/anxiety_algorithms/bl...](https://github.com/adamjuliangoldstein/anxiety_algorithms/blob/master/reaper.py)).

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abellerose
I’ve always thought anxiety is simply from different patterns of thought than
people without anxiety. We can all share thoughts and fears but people with
anxiety have a pattern that results in an unpleasant experience. Maybe one
suffering anxiety should analyze different approaches to how one arrives at an
outlook and compare to their own for maybe adapting. I’m writing with
ignorance because I’ve never had bad anxiety.

~~~
renjimen
From what I've read, and from my personal experience, is that anxiety comes
from negative, inward-looking and expansive understanding of events. That is,
anxious people tend to assume the worst, make things more personal (maybe it
happened because of me or some innate human characteristic) and let the
negativity leak over into other parts of their lives (I failed at this, I'll
probably fail at something unrelated).

Conversely, people who remain positive and can isolate negative news to
external, transient events are less anxious and end up healthier and happier.
That might be contrary to what is actually happening; evidence shows realists
tend to be pessimists.

~~~
abellerose
Well, it's alright to be a pessimist. Not everyone has to be an optimist and
wrong to be happy. I consider myself a pessimist and I don't suffer from
anxiety. So maybe the assumption is somewhat true.

~~~
renjimen
Yeah, I suppose you can be a realist or pessimist to a degree and live without
anxiety. I think a lot comes down to how you attribute negativity. Take the
riots going on at the moment.

An extreme optimist might say they're just another bad-luck event from 2020
(transience) that'll be sure to cause societal reform (positive outlook) and
it doesn't have anything to do with their behaviour (externalising).

A realist on the other hand would recognise that the riots are a sign of a
deep rooted problem with American society, that the riots may not lead to
immediate reform but have the possibility to act as catalyst for changing some
things that are wrong with society. Depending on who the person is, they may
recognise they could be doing something to help with the problem.

An anxious person would take the negative aspects of a realist's position and
make them personal, important and extrapolate out in time and domain. They
might think the riots highlight how deeply racist humans are by nature
(personalising & extrapolating), that the riots will cause economic
instability or violence that will affect the person's life (extrapolating and
importance), or that there's really nothing this person can do to change
anything (generally feeling helpless).

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austincheney
This an excellent short explanation for group decision dynamics. If this
subject is of interest to you I strongly recommend: _How We Decide_
[https://www.amazon.com/How-We-Decide-Jonah-
Lehrer/dp/0547247...](https://www.amazon.com/How-We-Decide-Jonah-
Lehrer/dp/0547247990/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=how+we+decide+by+jonah+lehrer&qid=1591225544&sprefix=how+we+de&sr=8-1)

This subject, at least to me, calls into question the behavior associated with
recent events. The subjects of police brutality, civil rights, systemic
racism, and so forth are much older than two weeks. I appreciate there are
people and groups who have been actively working for years to raise awareness
of these concerns, and then there is everybody else. Many people in that
second category are crazy impassioned about these subjects as seen in both HN
activity as well as the protesting and riots seen in the media. If this
segment of people are honestly _that_ concerned and these subjects were
clearly concerns for more than two weeks ago then were these peoples’ level of
concern then? I suspect this sudden call to concern is more the result of
contagious group behavior dynamics and social psychology than a premeditated
cognitive concern of independent consideration.

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cjhanks
I am glad someone has at least fake-formalized the infectious nature of
anxiety.

~~~
LudwigNagasena
That's called modeling.

