Before the Facts Arrive: On the power of the first frame
22-September-2026
DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.22883874
In her novel ‘First Lie Wins’,
Ashley Elston writes that the lie that matters is not the little white kind. It
is the deliberate one that sets the stage for everything after it, and once
told, it becomes what most people believe to be true. Her narrator is a
professional con artist. Most public misjudgments have no such author. They
come from haste and from an institution protecting itself, and the audience
receives them the same way.
I thought of that line in recent
days, when IIT Bombay issued a notice about the death of a student, Sahil
Wakode. The notice announced his death and, in the same statement, said he had
been found using a phone and ChatGPT during an exam. Protests followed, and
then an apology from the institute, which called its earlier statements
inappropriate because the circumstances were still under investigation. Some
voices online then declared that he had been falsely accused, which is also a
verdict, delivered before the investigation has finished. The family has
alleged caste-based harassment. I leave that entirely to the investigation.
I am writing about the order in which things were said. The first frame brought in the accusations. It was challenged within days, but it took protests and a police complaint for the withdrawal of the accusations and subsequently a public apology.
The psychology
In 1946 Solomon Asch gave two groups
of people a list of traits describing an imaginary person and asked them to
describe him. One list read: intelligent, industrious, impulsive, critical,
stubborn and envious. The other held the same six words in reverse order,
beginning with envious and ending with intelligent. The two groups formed two
different men. The first saw an able person whose shortcomings did not
overshadow his merits. The second saw a problem, a man whose abilities were
hampered by serious difficulties.
Asch did not think the early words
simply weighed more. He argued that we form a whole impression at once, and
that the first traits set its direction, so later traits are reinterpreted to
fit. Impulsive grew out of imaginativeness for the first group and became
hastiness for the second. Critical, likewise, took a positive colour for one
group and a negative one for the other. Asch studied an imagined person, not an
institution, but a first public account works the same way. It gives the
audience a story into which later facts have to be fitted.
Hollyn Johnson and Colleen Seifert
(1994) tested this with a story about a warehouse fire. Readers were told the
fire was caused by volatile materials, and were then told this was wrong. Many
still used the discredited cause when asked why the fire spread. They kept the
explanation because it gave the fire a cause, and the correction left a gap.
Their work also showed that a correction supplying an alternative cause reduced
this effect, though it did not eliminate it.
The philosophy
Augustine, in Contra mendacium,
defines a lie as a false statement uttered with the intent to deceive. Aquinas
takes this up in the Summa (II-II, q. 110, a. 1) and sharpens it:
what makes a lie is speaking against one's own mind, saying what one believes
to be false. The intent to deceive completes the lie but does not define it. A
person who states something false while believing it true is mistaken, but he
is not lying in the strict sense. The Catechism of the Catholic Church follows
the same line (CCC 2482). By that standard an institution that speaks in haste
may be wrong without lying. The hearer receives the same thing either way, and
the effect does not wait for us to settle intent.
Hannah Arendt asks, in ‘Truth
and Politics’ (1967), why truth loses so often to falsehood in public
life. She wrote about organised political lying, a far larger thing than a
press notice, but her account of why facts are fragile scales down well.
Rational truths, like those of mathematics, compel assent. Factual truths,
about who did what, when and to whom, depend on witnesses and records, and they
could have been otherwise. Because they are contingent, they can be denied.
The liar, she says, knows in advance
what his audience wishes or expects to hear, and he can build a story to fit.
Reality is under no such obligation. It arrives unprepared, awkward and often
disappointing, so a falsehood can be more plausible than the truth, and ready
sooner. She adds that the greatest danger of organised lying is a loss of
orientation. When lies and facts trade places often enough, people lose the
sense by which they find their bearings in the real world.
She also names where truth can be
defended: in institutions meant to stand apart from power, such as the
judiciary and the university. She tells a story about Clemenceau, who was asked
in the 1920s by a representative of the Weimar Republic what future historians
would say about who caused the First World War. He said he did not know, but he
knew they would not say Belgium invaded Germany. Some facts, once established,
hold. But establishing them takes time, and the first story does not wait. A
police inquiry is the slow, unglamorous work of factual truth, and patience
with it is a form of respect for the truth.
René Girard begins with imitation.
We desire what others desire and communities under stress drift into rivalry
and mutual suspicion. His claim, developed in Violence and the Sacred and
The Scapegoat, is that such communities restore peace by uniting against
one victim. Everyone who joins the accusation is relieved of the tension, so
the crowd's unity comes to depend on the victim's guilt. This is why
persecutors are usually sincere. They believe what they say, because they need
to. His theory is a claim about origins that cannot be tested, and a divided
public is not the unanimous crowd he describes. The pull toward a culprit is
still recognisable in any public dispute. His reading of the Gospels places him
beside the Church. In the Passion, the crowd's certainty is exposed as a lie,
and the victim is shown innocent. When John calls the devil a liar and a
murderer from the beginning (Jn 8:44), Girard hears the two words as one: the
lie is the accusation that makes the killing possible. It can fall on anyone.
An institution can become a crowd's victim, and so can a professor, and so can
a dead student's memory. Where a public gathers around a single explanation and
finds relief in it, Girard's question applies: who is being made to carry
this and what would the crowd lose if the accusation failed?
Aquinas supplies the moral
principle. In Summa II-II, q. 60, he treats judgment as an act of
justice, which requires certainty about the matter judged (a. 2). Judging on
suspicion wrongs the person judged (a. 3), and where doubt remains we should
interpret for the best, unless there are evident signs of wickedness (a. 4). It
is better, he says, to err often in thinking well of a wicked man than to err
seldom in thinking ill of a good one, because only the second does an injury.
The Scriptures
and the Church
The Book of Proverbs saw the problem
long before us: the one who states his case first seems right, until the other
comes and examines him (Prov. 18:17). The proverb says he seems right.
It does not say he is wrong, and that is the difficulty. The Catechism names
the sins that follow from ignoring it. Rash judgment assumes a moral fault in a
neighbour without sufficient foundation. Detraction discloses a fault to
someone with no right to know it. Calumny asserts what is false and harms
another's reputation (CCC 2477). Against these, the Catechism asks us to
interpret a neighbour's thoughts, words and deeds in a favourable way, and to
be readier to give a favourable reading than to condemn. Where we cannot, we
should ask how the other understands it (CCC 2478). This is the Presupposition
of Ignatius (Spiritual Exercises 22), whose wording the Catechism
follows closely. Ignatius wrote it for the director and the person making the
Exercises, and the tradition has applied it more widely.
The Church asks this of institutions
as well. Inter Mirifica (no. 5) recognises the public's right to
information and says the news must be true and complete, within the bounds of
justice and charity. The Catechism repeats this (CCC 2494). The same
paragraph adds that not all knowledge is helpful, and that charity builds up.
Those limits bind a press office. A student's file is not the public's
property, and a man who has died cannot answer. Silence does not solve it either,
because rumour fills a vacuum quickly. An institution can say what is known:
that a student has died, that a family is grieving, that an inquiry has begun.
The rest waits for the facts.
The Church has been on both sides of
this. For decades, institutional first responses to allegations of abuse
defended reputations before listening to those who had been harmed, and the
frame those responses set took years and great suffering to break.
Pope Francis's 2018 message for
World Communications Day, "The truth will set you free,"
traces disinformation to Genesis 3. The serpent created the first fake news, he
writes, and its method is mimicry. It opens with something only partly true,
asking whether God had forbidden every tree when he had named only one. Francis
notes that false stories spread so fast that denials, even authoritative ones,
often cannot contain the damage. He proposes no technique. The best antidotes,
he says, are people ready to listen, and he asks for a journalism of peace that
is truthful and refuses sensational headlines.
A discipline for
the rest of us
Most of us do not run press offices,
but we all forward, post and repeat. Before I share a claim about someone, I
now ask four questions:
1. What was the first complete explanation offered, and
by whom?
2. Who would be
seen as cruel or disloyal for asking more?
3. Does the correction replace that explanation, or only
regret its tone?
4. And if this turns out to be false, can I make
reparation?
The Catechism is exact about the
last one: every offence against justice and truth creates a duty of reparation,
even after forgiveness, and it is measured by the extent of the damage (CCC
2487). If I share a claim and it collapses, deleting the post is not enough,
because the frame I helped fix in other people's minds is still there.
Reparation begins with saying, as publicly as I said the first thing, that I
spoke too soon.
For institutions, the discipline is
older and simpler. Say what is established. Say that the rest is under
investigation. Leave the character of the dead and the accused to those whose
task it is to find the facts. IIT Bombay's apology says nearly that, but it
came after the first notice had set the frame.
Conclusion
Asch and the continued-influence
studies describe how a first account takes hold. Arendt explains why the truth
is always late. Girard explains why a gathered crowd defends what it gathered
around. None of them tells us what to do about it, and that is where Proverbs,
Aquinas and Ignatius come in. They give the reason to resist: the person being
judged is owed a hearing, and that debt does not lapse because the audience is
large or the story is tidy.
What we say first, and what we
repeat, acts on people who cannot answer back. Sahil cannot. His family is
grieving, and whatever the investigation finds, they live inside the story that
was told first. The professor, the institute and the students are also waiting
for a truth that has not arrived. The Presupposition asks each of us to hold
our judgment for all of them until it does.
Let us pray for Sahil, for his
family and friends, for those investigating his death, and for everyone who has
been quick to speak about it, myself included. Let us pray that kindness, love and humanity prevail, that justice prevails.
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