Rashomon effect

The Rashomon effect is the effect of the subjectivity of perception on recollection, by which observers of an event are able to produce substantially different but equally plausible accounts of it. A useful demonstration of the use of this principal in scientific understanding can be found in the article The Rashomon Effect: When Ethnographers Disagree by Karl Heider (American Anthropologist March 1988, Vol. 90, No. 1, pp. 73-81).

It is named for Akira Kurosawa's film Rashomon, in which a crime witnessed by four individuals is described in four mutually contradictory ways.