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Notes -
With apologies to @Capital_Room (not really) I'm reposting his hypothetical:
Disregarding that this is a metaphor for the Jews or whatever, it's how I model people. What is the best explanation?
All of these are plausible depending on surrounding factors absent from the example. As written and inferring from base rates, and assuming some degree of mental illness on John's part, I'd think 1 is most likely, but 2 is fairly plausible, if we assume the mental illness is something along the lines of "pathological liar" that keeps him exaggerating even as it starts to fail to gain sympathy.
It could also be a more steelmanned version of 1, what if people do keep trying to kill him? Like, not these specific people at his work, he's still exaggerating about them, but what if it's other people? Maybe John lives in a really bad neighborhood and gets mugged once a week, barely escaping by throwing his wallet and running the other way. Maybe he has to fight tooth and nail and ends up in the hospital regularly badly wounded. Maybe it's not about John at all, it's just a really bad neighborhood and everyone who lives there gets mugged regularly, or maybe John looks like an easy target. But the repeated trauma makes him think it's a conspiracy and he's not smart enough to pick out the pattern: person in dark alley = mugger, person in office = friendly, and he just thinks all people have a 50-50 chance to attack him.
If we reduce his pattern-matching abilities even further, maybe he never actually gets mugged, but he keeps doing something stupid like climbing rusty fences and scratching himself, or drunk driving and getting in accidents that almost kill him, and generalizes that to people trying to kill him.
Or maybe he just watches too much TV and movies and people are trying to kill each other all the time (especially trying to kill the protagonist) and he thinks of himself as the protagonist, therefore people must be trying to kill him.
If instead, we increase his pattern-matching abilities, maybe he does regularly get mugged, or his friends and family members do, and he notices that most of the muggers in his bad neighborhood have a certain ethnicity, and so he becomes a racist. Or maybe he goes to the police to fix the issue but they don't take him seriously because he sounds like a paranoid nutjob (when he accuses the actual mugger and Alice from work in the middle of the same rant the police can't tell which one is real and which is exaggerated), then he becomes anti-cop, or anti-government, or anti-whoever is in charge of making the cops be so lax on crime and oh hey have you read this article about how such and such group is secretly controlling the government to be soft on crime or whatever?
Stepping out of the metaphor, which I think is somewhat of a weakman for this phenomenon, I think this simultaneously explains a large chunk of racists (in all directions), anti-religion, anti-capitalists, etc etc etc. Bad thing happens to person or to people that person knows, or hears from (sometimes signal boosted and exaggerated by the media, sometimes by word of mouth). There is a real pattern causing it to happen repeatedly, though sometimes it's a pattern as complicated as "The Entire Economy", it gets oversimplified, exaggerated, and then attributed to a particular group, and the people who believe this explanation become radical anti-that-group. It's a combination of paranoia and actual pattern recognition, because there usually is an actual legitimate instigating factor that is genuine Bayesian evidence against that group, it's just much weaker than would be needed to draw the exaggerated conclusions they come to. There ARE evil racist white men trying to keep minorities poor. There ARE worthless degenerate minorities who live on crime and welfare and contribute nothing to society. There ARE corrupt police officers abusing their authority. There ARE pedophiles in government jobs. There ARE Zionist supremacist Jews who want to control all of America and manipulate it into being pro-Israel. All you need is for someone to encounter some of these in real life, or evidence of them existing, and then the pattern matching can begin until it spirals out of control.
And some of these people will have genuinely convincing evidence on their side, by sheer random chance. 1% of people will be in the top 1% for people who have been mugged. 1% of people will be in the top 1% for people who have been unfairly harassed by police. 1% of people will be in the top 1% for people who have been stared at suspiciously by shopkeepers despite doing nothing wrong. 1% of people will be in the top 1% for people who have been laid off by a Jewish boss. They're going to look at the evidence they've seen with their own eyes and be unconvinced that it might be a coincidence. It doesn't seem like a coincidence, it seems super unlikely. If their life were admissible as a scientific paper it would reject the null hypothesis. p < 0.05. They're Jellybean people!
I think that's what a lot of this is. People who perceive patterns where there are none, people who pick out genuine patterns and misattribute them, and people who have coincidences happen to them that are rational evidence when viewed from their individual perspective but don't stand out when you adjust for multiple comparison tests.
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