ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests that social uncertainty can contribute to the development of irrational forms of distrust and suspicion that impede activities critical to the processes creating and sustaining the social self. The links between social uncertainty and the development of social paranoia bring us back, full circle, to a consideration of the inherently relational nature of the social self. The model of the vigilant social auditor that we advanced earlier helps explain this pattern. From a social information-processing perspective, those in low-status groups in a social hierarchy are likely to be more hypervigilant and ruminative information processors compared to their higher status counterparts, especially members of groups on whom they are evaluatively dependent. Tokens feel the social pressure of imagined audience scrutiny, and may do so even when the audience of majority group members treats them no differently from nontokens.
