This study employed an experiment to explore various types of perception gaps that exist between the government and people during the natural disaster in Chile. The author finds that there existed conspicuous situation gap and expectation gap. The author also finds that these gaps reverse the effects of the government's image repair efforts. Due to the fact that both the public reactions and the governmental decisions are based on perceptions of situations, expectation gap is produced when the perceptions of the public and the government diverge. We find that situation gap leads to expectation gap, which explains why the government's image collapsed.