ArchiveOctober 17, 2026Sleuth
Case File · Distortion · No. 085
Daily Casefile · Distortion
The Unknown Number
≈ 6 min
Below is a short first-person account. Your job is to identify (a) which cognitive distortion, if any, drives the speaker's reasoning, and (b) the exact phrase in the text that best signals it. This is a logic puzzle — the speaker is a fictional, invented person. Nothing here is therapy or clinical advice.
The scene
A home living room after a missed call from an unrecognised number appears on a mobile phone.
In the differential
- Mind-reading
- Fortune-telling
- Emotional reasoning
- Catastrophising
- Personalisation
- No distortion — a reasonable reaction
Play today’s Distortion.
This case first aired on October 17, 2026. A fresh distortion runs every morning — same rules, five minutes, one solution.








