Cognitive distortions are associated with increasing political polarization

Political polarization has increased over the past decade to the point of endangering our self-governance and democratic institutions. The thought patterns that characterize political polarization bear a striking similarity to cognitive distortions, a pattern of thought associated with internalizing disorders such as depression and anxiety. Individuals with such disorders tend to think about themselves and others in exaggerated, absolutist, and black-and-white terms, matching the psychosocial features of political polarization. Here, we compare the prevalence of language patterns that have shown to be indicative of cognitive distortions among a cohort of Twitter users discussing the 2016 and 2020 elections. The full dataset comprises 37292720 tweets by 1558934 users in 2016 and 47532985 tweets by 3005657 users in 2020. We find a sharp increase of such markers between these two elections, indicating a profound change in political thinking aligned with cognitive distortions. We further investigate differences in the relationship between political thinking and cognitive distortions according to users' ideological leaning. We find that users on the political left exhibit a stronger relationship between the level of extremism and distortion prevalence, while users on the right exhibit a higher baseline prevalence of cognitive distortion use. Our findings suggest a psychosocial connection between the cognitive mechanisms involved in cognitive distortions and the rise of political polarization, offering avenues for addressing its adverse societal impacts.