about, suspiciousness about others’ intentions, and assumptions of ill-will or hostility (i.e. people may feel as if everything is going against them). according to kramer (1998), these milder forms of paranoid cognition may be considered as an adaptive response to cope with or make sense of a disturbing and threatening social environment. paranoid cognition captures the idea that dysphoric self-consciousness may be related with the position that people occupy within a social system. this self-consciousness conduces to a hypervigilant and ruminative mode to process social information that finally will stimulate a variety of paranoid-like forms of social misperception and misjudgment. this model identifies four components that are essential to understanding paranoid social cognition: situational antecedents, dysphoric self-consciousness, hypervigilance and rumination, and judgmental biases. situational antecedents perceived social distinctiveness, perceived evaluative scrutiny and uncertainty about the social standing. perceived social distinctiveness: according to the social identity theory, people categorize themselves in terms of characteristics that made them unique or different from others under certain circumstances. gender, ethnicity, age, or experience may become extremely relevant to explain people's behavior when these attributes make them unique in a social group. this distinctive attribute may have influence not only in how people are perceived, but may also affect the way they perceive themselves. perceived evaluative scrutiny: according to this model, dysphoric self-consciousness may increase when people feel under moderate or intensive evaluative social scrutiny such as when an asymmetric relationship is analyzed. for example, when asked about their relationships, doctoral students remembered events that they interpreted as significant to their degree of trust in their advisors when compared with their advisors. this suggests that students are more willing to pay more attention to their advisor than their advisor is motivated to pay attention to them. also students spent more time ruminating about the behaviors, events, and their relationship in general. uncertainty about social standing: the knowledge about the social standing is another factor that may induce paranoid social cognition. many researchers have argued that experiencing uncertainty about a social position in a social system constitutes an adverse psychological state, one which people are highly motivated to reduce. dysphoric self-consciousness refers to an aversive form of heightened 'public self-consciousness' characterized by the feelings that one is under intensive evaluation or scrutiny. becoming self-tormenting will increase the odds of interpreting others' behaviors in a self-referential way. hypervigilance and rumination self-consciousness was characterized as an aversive psychological state. according to this model, people experiencing self-consciousness will be highly motivated to reduce it, trying to make sense of what they are experiencing. these attempts promote hypervigilance and rumination in a circular relationship: more hypervigilance generates more rumination, whereupon more rumination generates more hypervigilance. hypervigilance can be thought of as a way to appraise threatening social information, but in contrast to adaptive vigilance, hypervigilance will produce elevated levels of arousal, fear, anxiety, and threat perception. rumination is another possible response to threatening social information. rumination can be related to the paranoid social cognition because it can increase negative thinking about negative events, and evoke a pessimistic explanatory style. judgmental and cognitive biases three main judgmental consequences have been identified: the sinister attribution error: this bias captures the tendency that social perceivers have to overattribute lack of trustworthiness to others. the overly personalistic construal of social interaction: refers to the inclination that paranoid perceiver has to interpret others’ action in a disproportional self-referential way, increasing the belief that they are the target of others’ thoughts and actions. a special kind of bias in the biased punctuation of social interaction, which entail an overperception of causal linking among independent events. the exaggerated perception of conspiracy: refers to the disposition that the paranoid perceiver has to overattribute social coherence and coordination to others’ actions. meta-analyses have confirmed that individuals with paranoia tend to jump to conclusions and are incorrigible in their judgements, even for delusion-neutral scenarios. research a study suggests that combining cognitive behavioral therapy (cbt) with slowmo, an app that helps notice their "unhelpful fast-thinking", might be more effective for treating paranoia in people with psychosis than cbt alone.