The Rashomon Effect by Patricia H. Werhane from Environmental and Economic Sustainability
"The Academy Award-winning 1950 Japanese movie Rashomon depicts an incident involving an outlaw: a rape or seduction of a woman and a murder or suicide of her husband. A passerby, who is also the narrator, explains how the story is told to officials from four different perspectives: that of the outlaw, the woman, the husband, and himself.
The four narratives agree that the outlaw, wandering through the forest, came upon the woman on a horse being led by her husband, tied up the husband and had sex with the woman in front of the bound husband, and that the husband was found dead.
The narratives do not agree on how these events occurred or who killed the husband.
The outlaw contends that consensual sex occurred between him and the wife and he claims to have killed the husband.
The wife depicts the sex as rape, and claims that because of her disgrace, she killed her husband.
The husband through a medium, says that the sexual act began as rape and ended as consent, and that, in shame after being untied by the outlaw, he killed himself.
The passerby's story agrees with the husbands account of the sex and the bandit's account of the murder of the husband.
Interestingly, because the passerby is also the narrator of the film, recounting to friends the strange contradictory reportings of this event, we tend to believe his version. But, actually what took place is never resolved.
I begin by stating a commonly held and, I believe, true assumption. All experience is framed and interpreted through sets of conceptual schemes or mental models that function on the individual, institutional, societal, and cross-cultural levels. We can neither experience an event nor present a story except through mental models. Still, depending on which model or models is or are operative, interpretations of a situation or event by persons, groups, institutions, or societies may differ greatly from each other.
Because conceptual schemes are learned and incomplete, we can also create, evaluate, and change our mental models. Still, sometimes we become so embroiled in a particular set of mental models that shape our stories or narratives, whether or not of our own making, that we fail to compare a particular narrative with other accounts or evaluate its implications.
Thus, the way we present or re-present a story, the narrative we employ, and the conceptual framing of that story, affect its content, its moral analysis, and the subsequent evaluations. Sometimes, narratives clash or contradict each other. Other times, when one narrative becomes dominant we appeal to that one for reinforcement of facts, even though it may have distorting effects. The result in either case is a Rashomon Effect. Yet we seldom are aware of the "frame" or mental model at work or attempt to reframe the narratives we employ."
