Gary Condit was a Congressperson who had an affair with his 23-year-old intern. He was about to break off the affair. The intern was upset, and was considering going public with the affair. Later, Ms. Levy disappeared.
Gary Condit must have done it, right? How could he have not? The narrative makes perfect sense.
There are reports that D.C. police have submitted evidence to the U.S. Attorney's Office in an effort to get an arrest warrant for a man identified as Ingmar Guandique.
He's behind bars, convicted of assaulting two women jogging in Washington's Rock Creek Park.
How many narratives make perfect sense? How often do we see patterns that do not exist? How often are we fooled by randomness?
Also, might the police have found Ms. Levy's killer earlier if they hadn't concluded that Gary Condit was somehow involved? What evidence do we overlook once our minds have already been made up, once we've already reached a conclusion?
I don't pimp books on cognitive bias because I think those books are fun and games. Some are a collection of graduate-school level articles. It ain't pop corn for the mind. An ignorance of the biases that blind our thinking can have devastating effects. People lose their jobs and go to prison based on simple thinking errors.
If someone had said, "Hey, maybe we should look at the evidence as if Gary Condit was not involved in Levy's death," maybe they would have found her killer sooner? How much more damage did Levy's killer cause while investigators focused on Condit?
