Recent research investigates the overlap, finding the two experiences are, in many ways, “closely intertwined”.
29 October 2026
By Emma Young
Paranoia (the belief that others have malevolent intentions) and social anxiety (which often entails feelings of inadequacy around others and a fear of rejection) both involve thoughts, emotions, and behaviours that can make someone so uncomfortable in social settings that they struggle to cope.
What is much less well understood is the extent to which the daily experiences of people with relatively high levels of traits of one or the other may overlap. In a recent paper in Personality Disorders: Theory, Research and Treatment, Yunlai Gui at the University of Urbana-Champaign, US, and colleagues set out to explore this. Their results suggest that while there are some key differences, paranoia and social anxiety are "closely intertwined" in daily life.
The researchers studied data on 184 women and 53 men gathered as part of a bigger research study run in 2008 and 2009. These participants were psychology students with a broad range of scores on scales that measured paranoia and social anxiety.
Eight times a day for a week, they were prompted to complete a two-minute questionnaire that asked about their emotional state, their thoughts and perceptions, their social behaviours, their activities and any suspicious thoughts.
When the team analysed the data, they found "substantial" overlaps in experiences. Over the week, participants who'd scored higher for either social anxiety or paranoia had more negative emotions and had a poorer view of both themselves and other people. They also experienced more feelings of suspiciousness (about other people and their intentions, for example), and were more likely to feel that they'd been the victim of mistreatment and criticism. "This indicates that paranoia and social anxiety share similar presentations of distress and negative social appraisals in daily life," the team writes.
However, only paranoia was linked to feeling more anger, having more intense emotions overall, and being suspicious that other people were threatening. Only social anxiety, meanwhile, was linked to feeling uncared for; a desire to be alone while with other people; and, when these participants were alone, a perception that this was because they were disliked.
Overall, the findings suggest that despite some similarities in the everyday experience of people with everyday levels of social anxiety or paranoia, there is "partially distinct interpersonal processing: paranoia involving heightened threat detection and suspiciousness, and social anxiety involving heightened sensitivity to rejection and unease," the researchers conclude.
They acknowledge some limitations to their work. For example, the participants were predominantly women and they were all students at a US university, so the results may not reflect broader society. Also, the data was collected more than 15 years ago. The Covid-19 pandemic, along with changes in the US political environment and patterns of social media use may have affected how social anxiety and paranoia present in young adults, the team notes. They add, though, that they have recruited a fresh group of participants and they are now attempting to replicate these findings.
Read the paper in full:
Gui, Y., Horton, L. E., Berglund, A. M., Hernández, L. M., Walsh, M. A., Silvia, P. J., Barrantes-Vidal, N., & Kwapil, T. R. (2026). Disentangling paranoia and social anxiety: Overlap and differentiation in daily life. Personality Disorders: Theory, Research, and Treatment. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1037/per0000781
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