Iseo Yun

Many say that we are now living in a ‘post-truth’ world, denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief. As a person who has always been exposed to and interested in the media, I had also been noticing the trend of extreme polarization peeking its head through various corners. To understand this phenomenon in which we were voluntarily trapping ourselves in an echo chamber of reinforcement through self-incurred tutelage, I researched ways in which we could effectively, and remotely combat cognitive distortions.

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) is a form of psychological treatment that has been demonstrated to be effective for a range of problems including depression, anxiety disorders, alcohol, and drug use problems, marital problems, eating disorders, and severe mental illness. CBT is based on several core principles, including the idea that psychological problems are based, in part, on faulty or unhelpful ways of thinking and on learned patterns of unhelpful behavior. CBT treatment usually involves efforts to change thinking patterns and create cognitive habits. It is important to emphasize that CBT, based on ample scientific evidence, has been demonstrated to be as effective as, or more effective than, other forms of psychological therapy or psychiatric medications. In CBT, some of the strategies employed are learning to recognize one’s distortions in thinking that are creating problems, and then to reevaluate them in light of reality, and gaining a better understanding of the behavior and motivation of others.

In order to make a change myself, I decided to create a virtual CBT form in which people could write about an event that happened to them and choose between several options to self-diagnose which of the cognitive distortions they were leaning to. In the post-covid and post-truth world, a way to understand how your thoughts are being influenced by external forces had become more important than ever, and this form accomplishes just that.