The Rashomon Effect: An all-too-familiar problem of eyewitness unreliability
The Rashomon Effect: An all-too-familiar problem of eyewitness unreliability
Suppose you are trying an event, but witnesses are giving different but equally credible accounts of the same event. How do you tell which is true and which is false? In this case, a question may arise in your mind, does objective truth exist at all and is reality relative?
This is where the Rashomon effect arises where people give significantly different, but equally believable, accounts of the same event. It describes a situation where conflicting interpretations or accounts are given by people involved in the same event, yet all of the explanations seem plausible. This is also known as the 'Kurosawa effect'. The Rashomon effect is named after Akira Kurosawa's popular 1950 movie Rashomon. In the movie, a murder is described in four different ways by four different witnesses to the same crime. The term Rashomon is often used to illustrate that people's perceptions of an event can differ considerably based on their individual personal experiences. It is also possible that different people describe an event in different ways, without even knowing that they are lying.
The Rashomon Effect in Cinema and Literature
Inspired by Ryonosuke Akutagawa's 1920 short story 'In the Grove', the father of Japanese short stories, Akira Kurosawa adapted another story by Ryonosuke into the movie 'Rashomon' in 1950.
Three men standing under a Rashomon gate in Kyoto; Among them, a priest, a kathuria and a kamona take shelter from the storm and the story of the movie starts from there. Where Kathuria and the priest were discussing the story of how the body of a samurai was found three days ago in a silent, quiet bamboo grove in the forest. In which one by one, witnesses familiar with the crime describe their version of events. But as they each tell the story from their point of view, it turns out that each testimony is plausible but different and that each witness is tied to their own crime. “We all want to forget something, so we tell stories.” - Commoner
There, a bandit was accused of murdering a samurai and raping the samurai's wife. Kathuria, the priest (who saw the samurai and his wife before the murder), the samurai's wife, bandits, and even the samurai's ghost are summoned to the trial. But every account of each of them is different and contradictory.
“Commoner: Lying is human nature. Most of the time we cannot be honest with ourselves.
Priest: That may be. But that's because people are weak, so they lie, even to themselves."
The Rashomon effect usually occurs under two specific conditions. First, there is no hard evidence to verify what actually happened, and second, there is pressure to render a judgment of the event, often by an authoritative person or institution who tries to identify the definitive truth. But the concept of the Rashomon effect undermines the idea of a single, objective truth.
As there is no clear indication of who is giving the most accurate or truthful narration in the movie, the audience cannot distinguish between them, which makes them unable to trust any particular character. Instead, while each testimony seems equally true, the audience draws conclusions based on their own experiences as to who the real culprit is. And here then there is a huge difference in the audience's decision.
Kurosawa's films reflect the pessimistic aspects of human nature, and Rashomon is the first work in which he expresses that pessimism to its fullest. Despairing of people's tendency to lie and deceive, Kurosawa created a story in which the characters' egos, duplicity and arrogance make it difficult to find the truth. Whose crime description is reliable? Who is right? No one can say.
The movie was not only successful because of its interesting story, but also because of the different experiences of a common man's life; It also uncovers the relationship aspects of the search for truth involving deception, ego, pride, arrogance. This movie introduced the world to a new world that adds a new dimension to our perspective on truth, justice and human memory. Rashomon is set in 11th century Japan during the social crisis. In this case, Kurosawa uses the context of that critical time to reveal extreme aspects of human behavior. Some of the movies that use the Rashomon effect are The Usual Suspects (The Usual Suspects, 1995), Gone Girl (2014), Reservoir Dogs (Reservoir Dogs). Dogs, 1992), Elephant (2003), Vantage Point (2008) etc.
Rashomon style can be seen in one of Quentin Tarantino's best films, Reservoir Dogs. After the robbery a group of robbers start suspecting each other thinking that there is a spy among them. As a result, they go against each other. Mistrust builds up among everyone as everyone complains, and how the robbery goes awry comes up in everyone's context.
A notable use of the Rashomon effect in modern cinema is found in the 2014 film Gone Girl. In this mystery-thriller, a man begins as a suspect in his wife's disappearance. There the narrator of the story gradually begins to seem untrustworthy. As he becomes less reliable throughout the story, the audience becomes more engaged in finding out the truth.
Here are some examples of this effect in real life The term Rashomon effect is used in a variety of fields, from storytelling to psychology, cinema, science to law.
Neuroscientists have found that when we form a memory in the brain, the interpretation of the information before our eyes is influenced by our previous experiences and various internal biases. Some of these biases are unique to a particular person, while others are universal. For example, egocentric bias can cause people to subconsciously influence their memories in a way that creates a positive view of their actions. Even if we are able to accurately retain a memory in our brains, new information is incorporated into it while recalling it and alters the memory, and when we recall the event later, we usually remember the altered memory rather than the original experience. These underlying psychological phenomena suggest that the Rashomon effect can arise in any memory.
Again in biology, scientists start from the same dataset and apply the same analytical methods, but they often come up with different results. In the case of anthropologists, it is often the case that their personal context influences their expert conceptions. One such famous incident is that two anthropologists visited the village of Tepoztlan in Mexico. The first researcher describes life in the city as happy and contented, but the second describes the residents as depressed and unhappy.
If experts are considered in terms of the general public, the Rashomon effect can affect them as well, especially when it comes to understanding complex world events. For example, after the 2015 security summit between the United States and the leaders of the Arab countries, media reports about the summit varied widely. Some said the conference went very well, while others said it was a total failure.
Finally The Rashomon effect has real implications in a variety of disciplines, from philosophy and communication to sociology and anthropology. It also often comes up in determining politics and social justice. These situations illustrate how the Rashomon Effect can influence our internal biases, subconsciously or consciously, to influence our interpretation of what happened. Such conflicts of memory and perception occur in humans all the time. It can be tempting to seek out the exact reasons why we have such divergent, competing ideas. But perhaps the Rashomon effect raises a more important question, which is - what is truth? Are there any situations where there is not just one 'objective truth'? What can such different versions of the same event tell us about a particular time, place and people involved? And if we are dealing with such diverse facts, backgrounds and biases in one event, how can we reach a partisan conclusion? Like many questions, there is no single definitive answer.
