I know why you voted for Trump: (Over)inferring motives based on choice

Historical language records reveal a surge of cognitive distortions in recent decades

Can entire societies become more or less depressed over time? Here, we look for the historical traces of cognitive distortions, thinking patterns that are strongly associated with internalizing disorders such as depression and anxiety, in millions of books published over the course of the last two centuries in English, Spanish, and German. We find a pronounced “hockey stick” pattern: Over the past two decades the textual analogs of cognitive distortions surged well above historical levels, including those of World War I and II, after declining or stabilizing for most of the 20th century. Our results point to the possibility that recent socioeconomic changes, new technology, and social media are associated with a surge of cognitive distortions.

Individuals with depression are prone to maladaptive patterns of thinking, known as cognitive distortions, whereby they think about themselves, the world, and the future in overly negative and inaccurate ways. These distortions are associated with marked changes in an individual’s mood, behavior, and language. We hypothesize that societies can undergo similar changes in their collective psychology that are reflected in historical records of language use. Here, we investigate the prevalence of textual markers of cognitive distortions in over 14 million books for the past 125 y and observe a surge of their prevalence since the 1980s, to levels exceeding those of the Great Depression and both World Wars. This pattern does not seem to be driven by changes in word meaning, publishing and writing standards, or the Google Books sample. Our results suggest a recent societal shift toward language associated with cognitive distortions and internalizing disorders.

Choice perception: Making sense (and nonsense) of others' decisions

People constantly and effortlessly acquire information about one another's decisions and use this information to form impressions (and judgments) of others. We review research on this process of choice perception - how people come to make sense of others' choices. We suggest that choice perception consists of observers' inferences about (a) what was chosen, (b) why it was chosen, (c) how (or through what process) it was chosen, and (d) broader impressions about who chose it. These inferences can affect observers in multiple ways, such as prompting erroneous beliefs about the actor due to interpersonal errors (i.e., mistakes in how observers perceive actors) and cue-perception errors (i.e., mistakes in how observers perceive chosen options), as well as changes in one's own behavior.