Abstract

The Rashomon effect – a phenomenon studied in the arts and social sciences – occurs when the same event is given contradictory interpretations by different individuals involved. The effect was named after Akira Kurosawa's 1950 film Rashomon, in which a murder is described in four contradictory ways by four witnesses. In the film, a samurai has been killed under mysterious circumstances. Four people give contradictory reports about the crime. In particular, the samurai's wife claims that she was sexually abused by a bandit, fainted, and then awoke to find her husband dead; the bandit claims that he seduced the wife and challenged the samurai in a battle to victory or at least to an honorable death; the woodcutter (who may have been an onlooker) claims that he witnessed the rape and murder but was not involved; and the dead samurai's spirit claims that he committed suicide. The Rashomon effect is not only about constructing different versions of the world based on differences in perspective; it occurs when such differences appear together with the absence of evidence to assess any version of the truth, plus “the social pressure for closure on the question.” In this commentary, we describe the relevance of the Rashomon effect beyond the arts and social sciences, namely in the field of biology. We use examples from redox biology, which is full of contradictions, thus making it fertile ground on which to apply reasoning derived from the Rashomon effect.