Red-Tinted Glasses: An Experiment on Perspective

       In the “Kant” chapter, Alberto tells Sophie to put on these glasses with red-tinted lenses and when she does she notices that everything she sees now appears red, although she is fully aware that is not how it actually is. Sophie learns that everything she looks at through the glasses will have the same appearance as before, but the color is wrong. This is because the glasses only absorb the red lights and not other colors, which is similar to a person seeing only one perspective of an event.
       For example, if you put five people in a room and had them all watch the same video of a robbery then question each of them about it, they will all remember seeing different details and some versions of the story may contradict each other. One person might have thought the thief they saw was a short woman with brown hair, while another person might have thought it was a woman of average height with blonde hair and a brown cap; its all about perspective.
      The red-tinted glasses and the robbery video are just two examples of how sometimes, what you think you see isn’t what really is. For example, when Sophie puts on the glasses, she sees everything red and she knows its wrong because she knows what everything really looks like from her personal experience. This shows how we need more than just one perspective to get to the right answer and see what really happened.
      Part of what makes everyone perceive an event or an idea in a certain way comes from their upbringing and past experiences. Since no one has had exactly the same experiences throughout their lives, no two perspectives will be exactly the same, although they may be similar. The red-tinted glasses experiment is all about learning to take in as many perspectives as possible and use all of them to complete the picture. It also teaches us that no one view is 100% correct, because no one sees and understands everything.