As we are immersed in a flow of news at once overwhelming and incomplete, inevitably guessing at explanations and drawing conclusions that just as inevitably are premature, it is worth reminding ourselves just how easy it is for people -- including journalists -- to impose their own narratives on a story, and how imperfectly we now understand yesterday's events and the 23-year-old student at their center.
We see, to a great extent, what we expect to see. This tendency emerges in a variety of interrelated ways, each of which has a technical name and explanation: attribution bias, regulatory fit, cognitive dissonance, conceptual and rhetorical framing, priming. At the heart of these phenomena is a simple reality: we ignore that which is unexpected or inconsistent with our preconceptions; we search for and emphasize facts that fit an already-held narrative, and perceive other facts through this lens.
These are basic human tendencies, artifacts of a mind wired to take fragmentary information and make sense of a complicated and changing world. They are also exacerbated during media frenzies. The public tries to understand characters who are still painfully incomplete;
journalists do the same thing, only under business pressures that demand more and more information, produced ever faster.
In the thrall of a voraciously continous news cycle, scrambling to produce some content, any content, before someone else beats us to it, knowing that the moment's blockbuster will need to be replaced in six hours, it's easy to make journalistic mistakes. It's easy to rush. It's easy to grasp at explanations and then cling to them, reinforce them, creating misconceptions that become public reality.
After the Columbine massacre, the press rushed to explain Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. As
Brian Montropoli wrote two years ago in the Columbia Journalism Review, the press
And as Dave Cullen, in the article cited by Montropoli, wrote, "We can't understand why they did it until we understand what they were doing."
Was Cho Seung-Hui a troubled kid who couldn't get antipsychotic drugs when he needed them? Was he, as a friend suggested this morning, strained to breaking by cultural expectations of academic success, the pursuit of which had left him friendless and bitter? Or, in the narrative to which I instinctively turned, was he a perpetually insulted outsider who avenged his humiliations upon the innocent?
It's impossible to say. Perhaps he was one of these people, or all.
More likely he was none of them. But in the days and weeks to come, as all-too-human journalists working under all-too-inhuman pressures uncover and invent and explain his story, Cho Seung-Hui will become somebody. That somebody will be part reality, part myth, just like Eric
Harris and Dylan Klebold, the Columbine killers.
So as we contemplate what happened on the morning of April 16 on the campus of Virginia Tech, wondering who Cho Seung-Hui was and what could have driven him to such madness, explaining his actions as that of a madman, a victim, of someone in control or out of control, an aberration or a symptom of some deep social fault, remember how little we know and how imperfectly we know it. The less we are certain of our own understanding, the more likely we are, eventually, to understand.
Image: Hobvias Sudoneighm
