Cognitive Distortions as Part of Promotional Discourse in the Blogosphere

The blogosphere began to develop at the end of the last century, and currently the main function of blogs is commercial. Since a blogger is a full-fledged profession, and his audience can reach millions of people, the social significance of the topic is determined by the need to analyze the promoting discourse of bloggers, because it plays an important guiding role in the functioning of modern society as a cognitive system. In order to sell his information products (courses, marathons, guides, checklists), the Internet author needs to choose special mechanisms that can suggestively influence the recipient’s decision in favor of purchasing the product. The object of the study is the Internet environment, and the subject is cognitive distortions and their use by bloggers to optimize promotional discourse. The purpose of the study is to identify fragments of the promotional discourse of Internet authors that contain cognitive distortions. The empirical material for the study was 110 posts by bloggers on social networks. Research methods: content analysis and cognitive interpretation method. The main result of the study is that cognitive distortions are one of the key tools bloggers use to create online discourse. The article presented examples of fragments of promotional discourse that contain the following cognitive distortions: the Barnum effect; limited offer; social proof; anchor effect; the pain of parting with money; zero risk preference; bias in favor of one's group; bait effect; spotlight effect; Cargo cult or expectation of divine reward; survivor error; hypersemiotization; distortion due to projection; Dunning-Kruger effect; framing effect.