#100 What is Pronoia?

Today’s newsletter is about a psychological concept called Pronoia.

Pronoia is the opposite of Paranoia. 

Paranoia is the belief that other people are conspiring to hurt you or that the world is “out to get you.” (See the pyramid below showing the different ways that people experience paranoia)

Pronoia is the idea that other people and the world at large want to benefit or help you. 

The term pronoia was coined by Professor Fred Goldner in a 1982 paper.

According to Goldner, pronoia has a negative component as it involves delusional beliefs about our place in the world.

Another paper about pronoia published the following year provides an even more negative assessment of pronoia, describing it as:

Ouch.

According to this view, the world that we live in is so complex and difficult to understand that people unconsciously look for simplifying frameworks to make sense of the world.

From this perspective, both the paranoid person and the pronoid person use these kinds of frameworks to help them navigate and find meaning (whether it’s good or bad) in this highly complicated and often meaningless world.

Both of these people hold inaccurate beliefs, but one of them hurts the person’s self-esteem while the other boosts it.

Not everyone agrees that pronoia is a bad thing, though.

Psychology professor Richard Wiseman, who wrote a book about luck, said that he found in his research that there are lucky and unlucky people in life.

The lucky people “are always in the right place at the right time,” whereas unlucky people find themselves in the opposite situation.

According to (the aptly named) Professor Wiseman:

According to Wiseman, research shows that people who believe lucky things happen to them typically do better in life than people who believe they're unlucky.

Ancient philosophers like Seneca the Younger reflected on this issue nearly two thousand years ago, offering a similar conclusion:

I also like the phrase “fortune favors the bold” to illustrate the principle that what we often think of as luck is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

If you put yourself out there and into situations where good things can happen, they will eventually happen.

In my opinion, our personal perception of our own luckiness is tied to self-esteem.

Especially for people who have a tendency toward self-criticism, it’s important to remind ourselves that we can often make our own luck in life.

We can’t choose or change the circumstances we’re born into, but we can change the way that we respond to new circumstances.

And thinking that we’re lucky can help with that by serving to remind us that good things happen for a reason.

LEARN MORE:

This is a fantastic video about pronoia. The speaker, Lena Köninger, tells the story of how she consciously tried to cultivate pronoia.

She starts by saying that when she asked her friends what her greatest weakness is, they all said that she cares too much about what other people think about her.

She would lay in bed replaying a negative comment someone made while ignoring all the positive comments she received.

After beginning to consciously practice pronoia, she would actively try to replay the positive comments in her head when she was laying in bed at night.

She also imagined people saying nice things about her behind her back.

She said it felt weird at first, but over time it has helped her to stop worrying about what other people think and to become more engaged and proactive in the world.

ART OF THE DAY

"La roue de la Fortune" ("Wheel of Fortune") by Alfred Agache. 1885.