Towards a computational account of egodystonia

Egodystonia refers to thoughts and behaviors that conflict with one's values or beliefs, which is often observed in psychiatric conditions like obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). While prior work has demonstrated dissociations between beliefs and actions (Vaghi et al., 2017, 2019), we lack a computational framework to explain the mechanisms underlying this mismatch. In a novel experiment combining behavior and subjective report, we induced egodystonic feelings in a healthy population with a range of obsessive-compulsive traits. Individuals scoring higher on the Obsessive-Compulsive Inventory (OCI-R) reported greater egodystonic experiences. Egodystonicity was not influenced by reward availability or action rate, but was driven by perceived consequences of inaction, as captured by a computational model of the task. This study provides the first experimental evidence of induced egodystonia and offers a foundation for theoretical advances in understanding this phenomenon.