Rashomon effect

The Rashomon effect is a term used to describe the circumstance when the same event is given contradictory interpretations by different individuals involved. The term derives from Akira Kurosawa's 1950 film Rashomon, in which a murder is described in four mutually contradictory ways by its four witnesses. More broadly, the term addresses the motivations, mechanism, and occurrences of the reporting on the circumstance, and so addresses contested interpretations of events, the existence of disagreements regarding the evidence of events, and the subjects of subjectivity versus objectivity in human perception, memory, and reporting.

The title term is named for Akira Kurosawa's 1950 film Rashomon, in which a murder involving four individuals (suspects, witnesses, and surviving victims) is described in four mutually contradictory ways.

The Rashomon effect has been defined in a modern academic context (from Robert Anderson, in 2016), as "the naming of an epistemological framework—or ways of thinking, knowing, and remembering—required for understanding complex and ambiguous situations." The term for the effect is derived from the eponymous film, Kurosawa's Rashomon, in which a number of factors are at play, simultaneously, leading the same academic to comment:

[T]he Rashomon effect is not only about differences in perspective. It occurs particularly where such differences arise in combination with the absence of evidence to elevate or disqualify any version of the truth, plus the social pressure for closure on the question.

There are varying claims made regarding the coining of this term, but a reliable statement of the earliest use of the term "Rashomon effect" comes from 2015 testimony of Robert Anderson, professor of communication at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada, who states that,

My own understanding of its origins arises much earlier, upon hearing my respected teacher, Nur Yalman [as of 2016, an emeritus professor at Harvard University], say to us in a class in early 1966 at the University of Chicago that 'anthropology's main problem is to deal with the Rashomon effect'. Unlike some graduate students in that room in Chicago, I had seen the film [Rashomon] in 1961 or 1962, so this remark crystalized something… in my memory… I suspect the Rashomon effect has shown up in many historic intellectual undertakings that deal with the contested interpretation of events or with disagreements and evidence for them, or with subjectivity/objectivity, memory and perception. A pertinent example is the long poem called The Ring and the Book by Robert Browning… published in 1868-9…

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