There was a
story in The Washington Post a while back about how auto accidents happen, and
it began with the experience of a nurse in the D.C. area who went to work the
same way every day. Her shift started at 5:30 a.m., so she’d get up, shower,
dress, and groom, then leave for the hospital, about five miles away, a little
before 5. A mile from her home she’d stop at a 24-hour gas station/store to get
a large coffee and sweet roll for the road.
One day, on
a morning just like any other, she made the left turn into the gas station and
creamed a kid who had been skateboarding on the sidewalk and was crossing the
gas station entryway. He was hospitalized, but survived and recovered.
When the
police interviewed the nurse, she said she never saw him. She had been driving
to work this way for years and always looked to see if there was a car coming
the other way before making the left turn. But she never checked the sidewalk
because she knew, after all that time, that there’s never anyone on the
sidewalk at that time of the morning.
We All Make Assumptions
We can
probably all relate to that story; I certainly can. There’s one road I drive on
from time to time where I always slow down at a particular point because one
night I almost ran over someone who was crossing the street there — jaywalking
in dark clothes on a street with no lights. It’s on my radar now to look for
pedestrians there, even though there’s no crosswalk.
One of the
ways the human mind deals with the complexity of modern life is by weeding out information
that seems irrelevant, often with tragic consequences. The tragedy can be
amplified when that normal practice turns into a prejudice.
For
instance, police officers tend to develop a set of beliefs based on experience,
one of them being that when a married woman is murdered, the husband is a
likely suspect. That makes sense because so many husbands do, indeed, kill
their wives, but the trap is that a couple of scraps of corroborating evidence
can lead detectives to zero in on that possibility and not see — like the nurse
who didn’t look at the sidewalk — the other evidence that points elsewhere.
Observation and the Crime Novel
As a mystery writer and reader I have more than the usual interest in the phenomenon
of not seeing. To begin at almost the beginning, Sherlock Holmes became famous
for seeing what others didn’t, and doing it because he had trained himself to
observe.
One of the
standard lines in crime fiction — a cliché, in fact — is when a detective asks
a witness to go over everything, leaving nothing out because the witness may
not realize what’s important. In a well constructed crime novel, some small
detail that comes out in that way eventually leads to the solution of the
crime. Typically, it does so only after being merged with some other seemingly
random fact in a way that required an imaginative leap to make that connection.
Of course
it’s also possible to be too observant. People sometimes say, after a serial
killer is arrested, didn’t the neighbors suspect anything? No doubt they
noticed some weird behavior, but most of the time that just indicates
weirdness, not pathological criminality. They didn’t see a serial killer next
door because they weren’t looking for it, and that’s probably a sign of
normality on their part. We pay the police to be suspicious; the rest of us
have to live and let live.
