Paranoid Personality Disorder as Threat-Surveillance Wrong Attractor: The Malevolence Attribution Loop, Trust Foreclosure, and the Return to Calibrated Suspicion

Paranoid personality disorder is here formally reconceptualized as a wrong attractor W_PPD in the landscape of social cognition. The healthy ground state S^0 is defined as calibrated suspicion: trust proportionate to evidence, appropriate wariness without global attribution of malevolence, and the capacity to update threat assessments when evidence changes. W_PPD arises when a malevolence attribution default becomes self-reinforcing: hostile interpretation provokes defensive-hostile behavior from others, which is read as confirmation of the threat.

The attribution asymmetry is the key mechanism: ambiguous signals are interpreted as hostile, hostile behavior is confirmed as hostile, and friendly behavior is interpreted as deceptive. Nine formal propositions characterize the malevolence attribution loop, trust foreclosure, Freudian projection as mechanism, Bentall's threat-anticipation model, betrayal trauma as predisposing factor, and return paths through CBT for paranoia and graduated trust-building.