Filling In the Gaps

Have you thought about how often we fill in the gaps? And by doing so how wrong we can be, or how easy it is to change the truth of an event?

What do I mean? Take the example of seeing a woman crying on the side of the road as a man hovers over here, looking angry and he then speeds off in his car. You might assume any number of scenarios, for example, they have had an argument and he has dumped her on the side of the road and left her there to make her own way back home. What if truth was very different, for example, perhaps she made a reckless dash across the road directly in front of his path and he swerved to avoid her, almost hitting a child in the process, and he then stopped to shout at her for endangering people's lives?

I have realised we often may also fill in the gaps when we speak about everyday occurrences. An example might be if you have an accident in your car and realise you have narrowly avoided slamming into a cyclist and you watch in relief as she walks away wheeling her bicycle. When you talk about the incident, you might say she walked down the road and you didn't see her and you collided with her bicycle as you turned the corner. Yet, did you actually see her walk down the road wheeling her bicycle? Might she have been standing stationary on the island in the middle of the road? Or did she perhaps come flying down the road on her bicycle going in the opposite direction to traffic? The better truth might in fact be more along the lines of, you turned a corner and heard a crash and got a fright as you realised you hit something and you stopped your car and only then did you see a women next to your car looking at you with a shocked expression and you thought you must have hit her bicycle which she was standing next to. And of course, it is entirely possible that you did not even hit her bicycle and instead you hit a sign post next to her on the traffic island. You don't know because you didn't see what actually happened. Yet you filled in the gaps and may have inadvertently changed the truth.

This point is key to eye witness testimony! The tendency to fill in the gaps ourselves is also key to many assumptions we make without even realising we are doing so. Stick with what you know are the facts in relating an event and avoid the tendency to fill in the gaps. The more aware you are that this can happen, the more you will avoid doing so.

Link to related blog article:
The Veracity of Eye Witness Testimony