The defense loves spinning the narrative that the injured person is blaming everything on the collision. Even problems they clearly had before the wreck.

It’s true that all sorts of psychological factors that affect the way we remember.

Attribution Bias

Car wrecks are memorable and they provide a simple explanation for symptoms.

People gravitate toward simple explanations.

Heightened Awareness

Before a wreck people may have symptoms that they ignored or minimized. Maybe they didn’t treat for those symptoms and never really discussed them.

Let’s say someone has limited range of motion in their shoulder. They get into a wreck and really hurt their neck. During a doctor’s visit the doctor has the person go through range of motion testing.

The range of motion testing gets the attention of both the person with the neck injury and the doctor.

This heightened awareness can create the shoulder perception that the symptoms were caused by the event.

Worsened Symptoms

Under Washington law there’s no distinction between a “new” injury and a pre-existing symptom that’s made worse by a collision.

We know that a collision doesn’t help overall health. And, like any traumatic event, car wrecks tend to prey on the weakest parts of the body.

I think the most common variation (where injuries aren’t 100% “new”) is that people have pre-existing conditions that are made worse and, as a result, they accurately attribute them to the collision.

Recency Effect

This is similar to Heightened Awareness.

Symptoms from an older condition may not have been top of mind until the collision occurred.

After the collision, current pain is more immediately noticeable and tends to overshadow memory of prior pain. This creates the perception that the accident "caused" the pain.

Retrospective Bias

People often struggle to accurately recall the details of the symptoms they had before an event (like a collision). Over time their memory may change and minimize the severity of pre-existing conditions. This is sometimes referred to as “retrospective bias.”

Synthesis

These psychological factors cut both ways. But body parts that weren’t working very well before the wreck aren’t going to work better after it. And the opportunity to adapt or work around a limitation is frequently compromised when other parts of the body are injured.

I think there’s not only a psychological basis but also significant factual support for injured people to connect symptoms (new or worsened) to a wreck.