Cognitive Distortions I

To write realistic characters, it can be beneficial to understand how real people think and behave. As such, I’d like to provide some valuable information from the science of psychology, starting with something fairly simple: cognitive distortions. Cognitive distortions are automatic, irrational, and negatively biased patterns of thought (Rnic et al., 2016; Shickel et al., 2020). They are often associated with depression (Rnic et al., 2016), but they can also be associated with anxiety disorders and loneliness (Floyd et al., 2025; Özdemir & Kuru, 2023). In stories, they can be used as character flaws and/ or drive conflict. By understanding and utilizing a variety of cognitive distortions within a story, characters can respond differently from one another and thus feel like unique individuals.

Today, we’re going to address four cognitive distortions: mind reading, disqualifying the positives, should statements, and over generalization.

Mind Reading

Mind reading involves making assumptions about other people’s beliefs in regards to the self (Floyd et al., 2025; Rnic et al., 2016). Obviously, this won’t apply to characters who can actually read minds. This only applies to characters who are confidently assuming another person’s thoughts/ feelings without sufficient evidence. For example, there is a stark difference between “My friend cancelled our plans today because she hates going to the mall with me.” and “My friend cancelled our plans today. I wonder if she hates going to the mall with me.” These differing thoughts may lead to different emotional or behavioral responses.

As the author, you know what the characters are thinking. You know their intentions, but it can be beneficial to remember that the other characters don’t share that knowledge. How would these characters interpret specific dialogue or actions? What assumptions would they make, and why?

Disqualifying the Positives

Disqualifying the positives is exactly as it sounds: positive things are (at best) downplayed and (at worst) ignored (Floyd et al., 2025; Rnic et al., 2016). This can lead to a focus on negative things, too (Floyd et al., 2025). For example, a person may receive a stellar job review but focus on the single, small criticism because the praise “barely matters” or “isn’t worth much.”

Characters who disqualify the positives may do so in every aspect of their lives or only for specific things. This can reveal a lot about the character, too. What achievements do they de-value? Why? For example, you could write two characters who excel in most types of magic but complain because of their incompetence with one specific type, and the reasons behind their feelings could be entirely different. One character may feel like a failure because that specific type is the only one they care about. The other may view themselves as incompetent because that’s supposed to be the easiest type of magic and yet they can’t use it. Or maybe they feel incompetent because they think that’s the only difficult type of magic, and the others are so easy to master that it hardly counts as an achievement to use them. Regardless, be careful. Other readers may get annoyed if this occurs too much. It can also be frustrating for characters who struggle to achieve something to listen to someone discount the achievement.

Should Statements

Should statements sound nice. “I should exercise more” or “I should eat properly” seem like great advice. However, when should statements become “should always” or “must,” then they can become problematic (Rnic et al., 2016; Shickel et al., 2020). People may feel stress or guilt for being unable to do what they “should” do, which is why it can be beneficial to stop and consider how important these things you “should” do really are.

When writing, should statements can provide a lot of information about the characters and the culture around them. What do they feel they should do? Why? Is there pressure from family or society? How do they handle falling short of what they should do? What if they feel they should do two contradictory things and must choose only one? This can lead to great conflicts between characters and within characters.

Overgeneralization

This one is quite simple. Overgeneralization involves taking a single instance and making broad assumptions about similar occurrences, which is why it is associated with words like “always” or “never” (Rnic et al., 2016; Shickel et al., 2020). A person may feel like things never go their way or that life is always unfair to them after one particular circumstance goes poorly. For example, they may fail an exam and decide they’ll never be good at the subject.

This is also quite simple to write. When characters face a negative event, what assumptions (if any) do they make about future negative events. How pessimistic are their expectations, and why do they feel that way? Is there a reason they assume bad things will happen? Maybe they overgeneralize only in regards to their own ability (I’ll never succeed), or maybe they view the world as a broken, dark place, so they always assume the worst will happen. As the author, you get to decide all of this and how correct the characters’ assumptions are.

References

Floyd, K., Ray, C. D., & Boumis, J. K. (2025). Cognitive distortions associated with loneliness: An exploratory study. Behavioral Sciences, 15(8), 1061. https://doi.org/10.3390/bs15081061

Özdemir, İ., & Kuru, E. (2023). Investigation of cognitive distortions in panic disorder, generalized anxiety disorder and social anxiety disorder. Journal of Clinical Medicine, 12(19), 6351. https://doi.org/10.3390/jcm12196351

Rnic, K., Dozois, D. J., & Martin, R. A. (2016). Cognitive distortions, humor styles, and depression. Europe’s Journal of Psychology, 12(3), 348–362. https://doi.org/10.5964/ejop.v12i3.1118

Shickel, B., Siegel, S., Heesacker, M., Benton, S., & Rashidi, P. (2020) Automatic detection and classification of cognitive distortions in mental health text, 2020 IEEE 20th International Conference on Bioinformatics and Bioengineering (BIBE), Cincinnati, OH, USA, 275-280, https://doi.org/10.1109/BIBE50027.2020.00052