Uncertainty is uncomfortable. But don’t let speculation further harm U of I victims
When something terrible happens, like the recent killing of four students at the University of Idaho, and the public doesn’t immediately know why, you can pretty reliably predict what will happen.
A fundamental but flawed feature of human beings in situations like this is that we fear the unknown. In a rapidly developing situation, especially when there isn’t sufficient information being released, a familiar pattern repeats itself: a storm of speculation mixing the few known facts with gossip and assumptions.
I’ve seen some pretty bad recent examples of such speculation about the University of Idaho killings on social media that I won’t repeat. It suffices to say that much of the speculation is harmful.
This pattern repeats itself because humans are wired to be very uncomfortable with uncertainty. Uncertainty is a hole that we have an insatiable urge to fill. And if there aren’t facts readily available, we have a tendency to fill it with whatever is at hand — because we find it more comfortable to be wrong than to be uncertain.
That feeling of uncertainty is particularly acute when a suspect with an undisclosed identity may still be on the loose.
So in the aftermath of these deaths, and with scant information from official sources, there has been a predictable tendency for people to repeat the last rumor they heard or invent one of their own.
None of which helps those who are mourning the victims today. None of which will help catch whoever bears some responsibility for their deaths. None of which makes the people of Moscow any safer.
The mixed message from city officials hasn’t helped the situation. As our editorial board has written elsewhere, the easiest way to cure this problem is to release important information the public needs to know. You can’t cure speculation with silence.
But, in the absence of that information, people should remember their obligations to the victims, their families and friends. That obligation is to await the truth.
Until facts are known — and the Statesman’s reporters are trying very hard to get and verify all that they can — the responsible thing isn’t to spread rumors. It is to simply realize that there is a lot we don’t know.
So don’t speculate about a perpetrator or a motive or spread gossip you heard. The victims and their families deserve better than that. They deserve your willingness to suspend judgment and to live for a time with the deeply uncomfortable fact that you don’t yet know why these four students died.
This story was originally published November 15, 2022 at 2:08 PM.