The Truth About Truth: A Matter of Perspective

by Liz Franklin

Imagine standing in a museum with your friend, both of you staring at the same mysterious sculpture. It's a clever piece of art—a metal tube mounted on a pedestal. You're standing on the left side, and you confidently declare, "It's projecting a perfect circle on the wall!" Your friend, viewing from the right, shakes her head. "No, it's definitely casting a square shadow."

You both move to each other's positions, and suddenly it hits you: you were both right. The artist had created something remarkable—a sculpture that, through careful engineering, casts different shadows depending on your viewing angle. Neither of you was wrong; you were simply witnessing different facets of the same truth.

This isn't just about art. Take a simple number drawn on the floor of a playground. Two children stand on opposite sides, locked in a friendly argument. "It's a 6!" insists one. "No, it's a 9!" declares the other. Neither child is mistaken; they're both describing exactly what they see from where they stand. The number exists in a sort of quantum state, being both 6 and 9 simultaneously, its true identity determined only by perspective.

This phenomenon plays out in courtrooms and police stations every day. Two witnesses to the same event often tell drastically different stories, not because either is lying, but because human perception is intimately tied to our position—both physical and mental.

Take a bank robbery, for instance. The teller behind the counter focuses intently on the robber's hands, watching for weapons, tracking their movements toward the cash drawer. Meanwhile, a customer by the door notices the robber's height against the security camera height marker, their distinctive walk, the getaway car's color. When interviewed later, the teller gives a detailed description of the robber's hands, sleeve color, and voice, but can't recall their face. The customer remembers height, build, and gait perfectly, but has no recollection of the robber's hands or what was said.

These aren't just academic examples. The stakes of perspective differences can be devastatingly real. According to the Innocence Project, eyewitness misidentification has played a role in about 69% of DNA-based exonerations in the United States. Two witnesses to the same crime can provide completely different descriptions of the perpetrator—and both can be recounting their experience with absolute honesty and accuracy.

Consider a robbery at dusk. One witness sees the perpetrator in shadow and describes them as tall and slender. Another witness, viewing from a different angle under a streetlight, remembers someone of average height but muscular build. A third witness, focused on escaping danger, mainly remembers the color of their jacket. Under the stress of the moment, each witness's brain captured different details, filtered through their unique position, lighting conditions, and what they were focusing on at that crucial moment.

But the complexity of eyewitness accounts goes far deeper than just different physical viewpoints. Our brains don't work like video cameras, faithfully recording and playing back events exactly as they happened. Instead, memory is more like a constantly evolving story, shaped by multiple psychological factors.

Consider how our minds naturally fill in gaps and alter details over time—a process psychologists call memory distortion. Then there's suggestibility—the way our brains can unconsciously incorporate outside information into our memories. A witness might hear another person's account or read a news report, and those details can become woven into their own memory of events, feeling just as real as what they actually saw.

Even more fascinating is inferential reconstruction—where our brains actively rebuild memories using a mix of remembered fragments, existing knowledge, and logical deduction. Imagine a witness sees someone rushing from a store, then later learns there was a robbery. Their brain might "fill in" the memory of seeing a weapon, even if none was visible at the time. The witness isn't lying; they're recounting the truth as they've come to remember it, even if that "truth" was partially constructed rather than directly experienced.

The human mind's remarkable susceptibility to suggestion becomes especially crucial in high-stakes situations. Police questioning, media coverage, conversations with other witnesses, and even our own personal biases can all reshape our memories. When combined with the fact that jurors tend to find eyewitness testimony particularly compelling, these psychological factors create a perfect storm that can lead to wrongful convictions.

Modern legal experts have revolutionized how we think about eyewitness testimony. What once might have been dismissed as witnesses "changing their story" or "lying" is now understood as a natural result of how human perception works. Just like the tube casting different shadows or the number that reads as both 6 and 9, the truth of what happened exists in multiple perspectives simultaneously.

Such insights have profound implications for how we communicate and relate to each other. When someone describes a situation differently than we experienced it, our first instinct might be to assume they're wrong, or worse, being dishonest. But often, they're simply sharing their view from where they stand—a perspective that might be just as valid as our own.

The key isn't to determine who's right and who's wrong, but to recognize that multiple, seemingly contradictory observations can coexist as parts of a larger truth. By combining different perspectives, we often get closer to understanding the complete picture than we ever could from a single vantage point.

So the next time you find yourself certain that your view is the only possible truth, remember the tube that casts both circular and square shadows. Remember the number that reads differently depending on where you stand. Remember that in our vast network of human experience, perspective isn't just about seeing differently—it's about understanding that truth itself can be multifaceted, complex, and beautifully dependent on where we stand when we look at it.