The #1 Blunder of True-Crime Sleuths

Source: Art by K. Ramsland

I recently watched the Netflix series, Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel. Several episodes featured websleuths who grew obsessed with an incident that occurred there in 2013. Canadian college student Elisa Lam had checked in as part of an excursion to Los Angeles. Then she vanished. No surveillance film showed her leaving the hotel, but she couldn’t be located inside.

Lam was on several medications. She’d written a blog that documented her struggles with despondency and bipolar disorder. Bizarre footage of her alone on the hotel elevator made the social media rounds. She acted as if she’d seen something or someone that scared her. Some sleuths said they watched this video thousands of times, looking for something that would “solve the crime.” (Please note: As yet, there’s just a missing person. There’s no actual crime.) Amateur detectives visited the hotel multiple times to look for Lam or for evidence of what had happened to her. Some believed the hotel staff and police were colluding to hide things. Others identified a suspect in a Death Metal musician who’d once stayed at the Cecil. Some endlessly harassed him, making him suicidal.

Each person who formed a theory was certain that he or she was right. For them, the facts all added up. But they can’t all be right, as some contradicted others. And this case is just one of many like it that attract people who seek to solve true crime puzzles. Podcasting them increases the pressure to be first to crack it.

I won’t reveal how the Lam incident got resolved (no spoilers). I’m concerned, instead, with a type of cognitive vulnerability in people who grow so enthralled with such incidents. Some think the facts they've learned are all there ever will be. Then they apply logic to make a story and believe they've found “the truth.”

In Thinking, Fast and Slow, psychologist Daniel Kahneman offers a phrase for it: What You See Is All There Is (WYSIATI). After he describes the two systems along which we think – an automatic quick intuitive mode (System 1) and a slower analytic mode (System 2) – he discusses errors to which System 1 is prone. WYSIATI is one of them. It focuses on information that’s readily available. Period.

System 1 thinking seeks coherence and consistency. From the facts it has, it constructs the best possible story – not necessarily the most accurate one. If there’s an emotional investment, that story tends to remain the primary narrative, even if future facts contradict it. Some research finds that people who acquire one-sided information are more confident in their judgments than those who hear both sides. This is partly due to greater coherence in the account. If all you have are facts that support a one-sided story, the story sounds right. And the fewer facts one has, the easier it is to construct such a tale. “System 1 is designed to jump to conclusions from little evidence,” Kahneman says, “and it is not designed to know the size of its jumps.”

So, if websleuths can construct a logical, coherent case that fits the facts they know, it feels right. If it feels right, they think, it must be right. Thus, they “know” what happened. “A mind that follows WYSIATI,” Kahneman adds, “will achieve high confidence much too easily by ignoring what it does not know.”

So, Lam saw a ghost. Or feared a stalker. Or found a hole in the surveillance system and got away. Or was murdered and stashed in a room. Or…none of the above.

Genuine truth-seekers understand that logic does not equal truth and that having some facts is not the same as having the full story. They tread carefully. They know that no matter how coherent a story seems, it might be incomplete. New facts could revise it entirely. That was certainly the case with Lam. Even the police analysis was flawed because they failed to fully investigate.

Now let’s add a personality quirk: During the 1990s, Arie Kruglanski and Donna Webster published a scale for assessing one’s need for closure (NFCS). Five subscales organized the items into specific areas: preference for structure, decisiveness, preference for predictability, discomfort with ambiguity, and being closed-minded. The researchers believed that a high need for closure (HNC) derives from tendencies toward urgency (attaining closure at once) and permanence (keeping it for as long as possible).

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People with a HNC prefer System 1 thinking, where quick decisions are made. Their thinking tends to be superficial, producing fewer options. They anchor in early judgments and seek facts that support their position. In contrast, people with a low need for closure (LNC) tend to appreciate System 2: they enjoy complex and reflective thinking and they’re willing to reexamine initial notions in light of new information. They understand the danger to truth from a WYSIATI analysis.

We can see how such tendencies might influence decision-making during investigations, whether amateur or professional. A strong need for closure can encourage shortcuts, including viewing the currently known facts as the full story. When cases like Lam’s attract the attention of websleuths with an obsession to solve it, we see Kahneman’s WYSIATI in play. Add some HNC personalities and we’ll get a surfeit of rapid theories, some of which can obstruct justice and/or harm someone.