It’s easy to get paranoid when you’re writing about news stories on April 1st. However this one seems legitimate: scientists have discovered that we’re far more paranoid than generally believed.

They know because they’re watching you. Not really. What researchers led by Daniel Freeman did was monitor subjects sent on a virtual reality tube ride (some of you may call that a subway or a metro journey).

Freeman, a psychiatry researcher at the King’s College London, found most people found their virtual fellow commuters either friendly or neutral. But a significant proportion, going on for 40%, were a little paranoid.

You can watch a video of the journey on the BBC’s version of this story. I’d be pretty paranoid if I was on this tube – the passengers are freaky.

“In the past, only those with a severe mental illness were thought to experience paranoid thoughts, but now we know that this is simply not the case,” says Freeman (press release). “About one-third of the general population regularly experience persecutory thoughts.”

One commenter on the Times version of this story notes: “I would think 100% of normal human beings would feel paranoia travelling on the London underground. It’s hardly a place to relax!”

Some of the comments from those of the 200 subjects exhibiting paranoia include:

“There was a guy spooking me out – tried to get away from him. Didn’t like his face.”

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“A girl kept moving her hand. Looked like she was a pickpocket and would pass it to the person standing opposite her.”

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“Didn’t like the close proximity of the men. The guy opposite may have had sexual intent, manipulation or whatever.”

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“There’s something dodgy about one guy. Like he was about to do something – assault someone, plant a bomb, say something not nice to me, be aggressive.”

The results should appear today in the British Journal of Psychiatry.

Meanwhile, for a truly fulfilling virtual tube train experience, try Geoff Ryman’s novel 253 – in which passenger 43 is indeed feeling paranoid…

Images: Department of Computer Sciences, University College London