Bias: The Same Story, Told Differently

Imagine two kids playing UNO.

One of them throws a card down quickly and says, “Red,” like he’s already decided what happens next.

The other one doesn’t pick it up. He just looks at it and says, “You can’t change the colour.”

“Why not?”

“Because that’s not a nine.”

“It is.”

“It’s a six.”

Now they’re both looking at the same card, except they’re not really seeing the same thing because they’re sitting on opposite sides of the table, and from where each of them is sitting, the number makes complete sense.

The second kid points to the card and says, “See this line? It’s under the six. That’s how you know which way to hold it.”

That settles it, and the game just carries on.

It helps when something comes with a marker like that, something that tells you what it is regardless of where you’re standing.

Most things don’t.

There’s a way people explain this.

That there are always three versions of every story. Mine, yours, and the truth.

It sounds neat when you say it like that. Like if you just listen long enough, you’ll get to something objective.

But the more you sit with it, the less neat it feels, because it assumes that what happened exists separately from how it was seen, and if you think about most situations you’ve been in, that separation doesn’t really hold.

I remember reading Rashomon, a Japanese short story by Ryunosuke Akutagawa, and thinking that if the same event is told by different people in completely different ways, then at least one of them has to be wrong.

But that’s not how it reads when you’re actually in it. Each version feels complete. Like nothing is missing from it. And yet when you step back, you know they can’t all be true at the same time.

The easy explanation is that someone must be lying.

That explanation doesn’t hold for long, because what it starts to feel like instead is something more uncomfortable.

Each person is telling the story in a way that allows them to live with it.

They’re describing what happened, but they’re also holding on to something while they’re doing it. How they saw themselves in that moment. What they needed to believe about it. What they couldn’t afford to admit.

And once you start looking at it like that, it becomes harder to call one version true and the other false, because what you’re really looking at is not just the event, but the person inside it.

And this isn’t limited to something as dramatic as a crime or a story being retold from different perspectives. It shows up in much smaller, more ordinary ways.

In the way you recount a conversation to a friend, where you don’t realise you’ve already decided what that conversation meant before you even start telling it.

In the way you write something as simple as a social media post, where what you include and what you leave out quietly shapes how the whole thing will be read.

In the way you go back to a memory in your own head and replay it, sometimes years later, and it feels clearer each time, even though it’s actually moving further away from what it might have been.

Because every time you tell something, even casually, even when you’re not thinking of it as a story, you’re still making choices. What to include. What to leave out. What to emphasise. What to soften. And those choices are rarely neutral.

That’s bias.

And it does more than just tilt a story slightly. It shapes how you see things to begin with, long before you put them into words. It decides what stands out and what fades, what feels important and what doesn’t, and over time it becomes harder to separate what actually happened from what it meant to you.

So when you tell a story from that place, you’re not really a neutral relayer of what happened, even though it feels like you are. You’re shaping it in a way that fits, and because it fits, it feels right.

You become something closer to a bard, someone who is not just recounting but interpreting, shaping, deciding what deserves to be remembered in a certain way.

The ones who would sing about the king, building him up, making him larger than he was, and quietly leaving out the parts that didn’t fit the story they wanted to tell, and doing the same in reverse for the opponent.

And this carries into the stories we grow up with as well.

Take the Ramayan.

Ravan was a scholar. A wise king. A learned man. He prayed.

His kingdom was prosperous, Sone ki Lanka.

And yet when we see him on Dussehra, when his effigy is set up to be burned, he looks like a monster.

The other parts were always there.

They just didn’t fit the story we kept telling.

And that’s how the same story starts to change over time, not in big, obvious ways, but in small shifts that don’t feel significant when they happen. A word added here. A detail left out there. A tone that changes depending on who is listening.

And after a point, those shifts settle. They start to feel stable. And once they feel stable, they start to feel true.

That’s the tricky part.

Because it doesn’t feel like bias when it’s happening.

It feels like clarity. Like you’ve finally understood what something meant, like the story has revealed itself properly this time.

But what has actually happened is something quieter.

The story has moved closer to what you can accept.

The card looked like a six from one side and a nine from the other, and both of them were certain because from where they were sitting, that’s what they saw.

The difference was never in the card.

It was always in where they were sitting.

And most of the time, there is no small line underneath to settle it for us.

Which means the stories we hold on to are not just shaped by what happened.

They are shaped by how we needed to see it.

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This post is a part of Blogchatter A2Z Challenge 2026 .

This is a series about storytelling beyond a craft. As something we live inside. In memory, in conversation, and in the way we understand what happens to us. Read all posts here.

I’ve done A2ZChallenge in 2017, where I collected 26 quotes by people whose names started with the letter of the day. In 2015, the theme was professional life.