Rumination is a form of perserverative cognition that focuses on negative content, generally past and present, and results in emotional distress. Initial studies of rumination emerged in the psychological literature, particularly with regard to studies examining specific facets of rumination (e.g., positive vs. negative rumination, brooding vs. self-reflection, relationships with catastrophic thinking, role of impaired disengagement, state vs. trait features) as well as the presence of rumination in various psychiatric syndromes (e.g., depression, alcohol misuse, generalized anxiety disorder, social anxiety disorder, obsessive compulsive disorder, posttraumatic stress disorder, bulimia nervosa).

Although impression management has been relatively free of controversy as a scholarly topic, some disagreements have formed around the ethics of managing impressions, how to best measure impression management, and whether impression management explains some of the more venerable topics in social science such as prosocial behavior, cognitive dissonance, and moral judgment.

Other work has investigated how easy it is to mismanage an impression, such as when “humble bragging” and giving “backhanded compliments.”

Here we argue that several—so far mostly unrelated—biases (e.g., bias blind spot, hostile media bias, egocentric/ethnocentric bias, outcome bias) can be traced back to the combination of a fundamental prior belief and humans’ tendency toward belief-consistent information processing. What varies between different biases is essentially the specific belief that guides information processing. More importantly, we propose that different biases even share the same underlying belief and differ only in the specific outcome of information processing that is assessed (i.e., the dependent variable), thus tapping into different manifestations of the same latent information processing.