Tammy Lenski on mediate.com has a great story illustrating the congnitive distortions that happen all the time in divorce negotiation and litigation, in communications between lawyers as well as between divorce clients. (Judges, too, are very prone to these cognitive errors.) For the entertaining story that'll help you remember it far better than this summary, go to her post. The point of the story is:
We make guesses to fill in blanks about things we don’t understand in the situation or the other person. We take prior conclusions about them and use those conclusions to feed our guesses and judgments, forgetting that conclusions are just opinion, not fact. If we already have a poor history with them, our stories tend to be tinged with darker tones. We tell our stories to ourselves and to others, forgetting after a while that only some part of what is relayed is what happened and that the rest is stuff we made up by way of explanation and self-protection. Our conflict stories can get us into trouble because we treat them like The Truth.
Less of this happens in collaborative divorces that are done by-the-book, with as much communication as possible happening in meetings where everyone in the case is together. Even in collaborative cases, once people start e-mailing between meetings, and communicating one-on-one, the "game of telephone" starts up and people fill in the blanks with guesses and assumptions.
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