What specific psychological condition did Kenneth Colby's PARRY program aim to simulate starting in 1967?

Answer

Paranoid schizophrenia

Kenneth Colby developed PARRY at Stanford starting in 1967 as a contrasting conversational agent to ELIZA. While ELIZA aimed for passive, reflective, therapeutic mirroring, PARRY was engineered with the specific goal of simulating the conversational patterns, defensiveness, and suspicion associated with a person diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. This simulation required a more active conversational style than ELIZA employed. PARRY was notable because its rudimentary psychological model was, in some tests involving psychiatrists, convincing enough to demonstrate the potential power of goal-oriented conversational simulation, even when based on relatively limited underlying mechanisms compared to modern systems.

What specific psychological condition did Kenneth Colby's PARRY program aim to simulate starting in 1967?
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