"Being suspicious keeps me safe"

Underneath the habit is a belief about safety. If you assume the worst, you can't be blindsided. People who take things at face value get used, and you'd rather be the one who saw it coming. Trust is what naive people do.

There's research on what habitual suspicion actually does, and it isn't protective. Psychologists call it hostile attribution bias, the tendency to read hostile intent into ambiguous behaviour, and it's been studied mostly because of what it's linked to. A 2019 systematic review of 25 studies by Klein Tuente, Bogaerts and Veling found that in adults the bias goes with more aggression, with small to medium associations, across samples ranging from students to psychiatric patients. The studies were mostly one-off snapshots, so they can't say which causes which. But the direction of the link is clear enough. People who read hostility into ambiguous acts don't end up safer. They end up in more conflict, because they respond to the hostility they've read, and the other person responds to that.

Think about what the response looks like from outside. You decided the colleague talked over you on purpose, so in the next meeting you're clipped with them, or you don't back their idea, or you say something dry. They didn't know they'd interrupted you, so from where they sit, you've turned cold for no reason. They get wary. Now their next slip has a bit of real edge in it, and your charge has come true, and you take that as proof you were right the first time. You weren't. You manufactured the evidence.

And the safety the suspicion promised never turns up, because the actual dangers, the person who genuinely means you harm, aren't found by reading every ambiguous act as hostile. They're found by watching what someone does over time in situations that don't excuse it, which is the pattern test from the last chapter. Suspicion of everyone is noise, and noise hides signal. The person who charges everyone has no way of spotting the one who deserves it.