Something that interests me, for some nerdly reason, is the links between cognitive dissonance and selective perception (which is a cognitive bias).

Sometimes, these things can be life or death.

What it boils down to is this: We tend to get into patterns of thought, and what we think about things influences how we see the world. We’ll actually actively ignore plain-as-day evidence of things that conflicts with our preconceived notions. We’ll also believe totally unbelievable things simply because they fit into our scheme of notions.

An example of the latter is if I told you that I was out fishing with my dad and he fell out of the boat, but didn’t go into the water- instead he just fell onto it, got up, walked back over to the boat, and got in, you wouldn’t believe me. But there are a ton of people who honestly believe (or at least SAY they honestly believe) that 2,000 years ago, Jesus walked on water.

An example of the former unfortunately happened here in the Seattle area the other day. I spent most of my life living in Enumclaw, which is at the end of what’s known as “the Maple Valley highway”. State Highway 169 is a two-lane road that runs from Renton to Enumclaw through Maple Valley. It’s narrow in spots; much of the way it’s only two lanes (one in each direction) and not a divided highway.

SR169 runs along the Cedar River in its northern section and winds through a lot of hills. The eastern portion of populated King County is up against the Cascade Foothills and there’s some spots along 169 where the road is above some pretty deep dropoffs and ravines.

A Maple Valley woman named Tanya Rider was driving home from work on September 19th, and for some reason her car veered off the road and smashed down one of those ravines. She laid there for over a week, trapped in her car and unable to call for help although her cell phone was on and had contact with the cell network. She had no water, no food.

When rescuers found her on September 27th, and she was rushed to the hospital, she was in kidney failure and had sores (I’m assuming like bedsores) among her injuries. They are afraid that as they rehydrate her, her sores will actually get much worse.

What I want to draw attention to is what I noticed while reading between the lines in this article from the Seattle Times about this story. Here’s the main bits that raised my antenna:

Tanya Rider disappeared Sept. 19 on her way home from work and wasn’t heard from until about 2 p.m. Thursday, when King County sheriff’s detectives traced her cellphone signal to a tower on Highway 169 near Renton.

…

Rider, 33, was on her way home from work at a Fred Meyer in Bellevue when she apparently drove off the highway and into the ravine.

…

Tom Rider, her husband, was at the Sheriff’s Office taking a polygraph test when he heard the news that his wife had been found…

…

Initially detectives in the Sheriff’s Office suspected Rider had run off or was the victim of a crime, Merrill said. After she was reported missing, detectives noticed activity on one of Rider’s bank accounts and assumed she was still alive.

Later detectives discovered that the activity was from one of her husband’s credit cards. When they realized Rider hadn’t been using the account, they looked for her cellphone signal, Merrill said.

When you take those snippets of information, you see the influence of the police’s preconceived notions. The majority of the time, if someone goes missing in the middle of the day, they either ran away… or they were victims of foul play. And the vast majority of the time, if there’s a crime, it was someone that the victim knew. In fact, a large percentage of the time, it’s the spouse.

The reason this all jumps out at me is you can imagine this poor guy. His wife doesn’t show up at home from work. He first wonders, then worries, then gets really scared. He calls the cops. They probably tell him he’s got to wait until she’s been gone 24 or 48 hours; the first times I noticed this story in the media was when she’d been gone for 5 days and the cops asked for help finding her, mentioning the color and model of her car.

Then he’s in the grinder. The cops see him as a suspect rather than an innocent victim. He’s voluntarily taking a polygraph test; he’s probably frantic, trying to get the cops to help him find his wife.

And the entire time- the ENTIRE time- she’s lying trapped, in her car, at the bottom of a ravine. And she’s easily findable through the cell phone. For a week.

The cops’ preconceived notions, though, have them thinking that he’s a suspect. Her bank account was used, so she must be okay or someone must have been using it, right? Only when they get around to doing the work, they discover that it’s normal use- he’s just using his own cards on the same account.

What really bugs me about this is that if they’d done the cell phone thing right in the beginning, this woman could have been found days earlier. Her kidneys wouldn’t have shut down, she wouldn’t be nearly as dehydrated, and her husband wouldn’t have been put through the wringer with worry and not-so-veiled accusations that he had done away with her.

If she dies, or if she has serious medical problems from this, I’d say that she and her husband have a pretty damn good lawsuit against the county police. The thing is that all they had to do to find her was look for the cellphone signal- and there was no reason they couldn’t have done this on the first day, immediately after she was reported missing.

Now, to some extent, I don’t blame the cops. I mean, I blame them; they screwed up. But they fell victim to preconceived notions. They saw what they are used to seeing, what they’ve been conditioned to see from multiple times in the past.

This is why we need to actively work to keep ourselves open to the possibilities. Way too often, we fall into the trap of assuming that things are like they were the last time. When things like this happen, though, they illustrate that maybe we need to set up new procedures.

In this instance, it’s obvious- the cops should continue to look at the spouse as possible suspects… but at the same time, early in the investigation, they should begin the cell phone search process. They shouldn’t wait until after they’ve investigated the husband and set him up on a polygraph test; they should be doing the processes in parallel. They must work to keep their eyes open to the possibility that their preconceived notions- the wife either ran away or was harmed by someone (likely the husband)- might be wrong.

Where the cops screwed up, I believe, isn’t in falling prey to their notions of what probably happened. That’s natural; it’s human behavior. What I think is a mistake is that we KNOW that we humans fall into those kinds of traps, and so we need to build in some kind of safety check into the system to try and catch when we’re falling into the known trap. For example, perhaps in these kinds of cases, while one cop or set of cops investigates the husband as a possible suspect, another cop or set of cops can investigate as though he’s telling the truth- and initiate the cellphone search immediately, so in those exceptions when the husband isn’t a bad guy, the woman isn’t stuck in the car for a friggin week.

I wrote about cognitive bias on another blog that I contribute to, about how it’s important in air traffic control to always re-examine the traffic situation. You might find it an interesting read. Then again, you might not.