By Stephen Beech via SWNS
Movies really do have the power to change views and attitudes, reveals a new study.
Researchers found that after watching a true crime drama about the efforts to free a wrongly convicted prisoner on Death Row, people were more empathetic towards those who have been jailed and more supportive of criminal justice reform.
The 2019 film "Just Mercy" - starring Jamie Foxx, Michael B. Jordan and Brie Larson - is ââbased on a book by the lawyer and social justice activist Bryan Stevenson.
Stevenson's book focuses on his campaign to overturn the sentence of Walter McMillian, a black man from Alabama who in 1987 was sentenced to death for the murder of an 18-year-old white girl, despite "overwhelming" evidence showing his innocence.
Study senior author Professor Jamil Zaki, of Stanford University, said: "One of the hardest things for groups of people who face stigma, including previously incarcerated people, is that other Americans don't perceive their experiences very accurately.
"One way to combat that lack of empathy for stigmatized groups of people is to get to know them.
"This is where media comes in, which has been used by psychologists for a long time as an intervention."
The paper, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), incorporates Zaki's earlier research on empathy with his co-author, Stanford psychologist Professor Jennifer Eberhardt, who has studied the role of racial bias and prejudice in society for over three decades.
The idea for the study emerged from a conversation Eberhardt had with one of the executive producers of the film "Just Mercy".
Around the time of the movie's release, Eberhardt published a book, called Biased: Uncovering the Hidden Prejudice That Shapes What We See, Think, and Do, which tackles some of the same issues as "Just Mercy."
During her book tour, she met one of the film's executive producers.
He approached her with a question originally posed to him by former U.S. President Barack Obama, who had recently watched the film at a private screening.
Obama wondered whether watching it could change the way neurons fired in people's brains.
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Eberhardt said: "I told this producer we don't have to sit and wonder - this is a question that we can answer through rigorous research.
"This paper is a first step in that direction."
Eberhardt and Zaki designed a study to examine how "Just Mercy" might change how people think about people who have been pushed to the margins of society.
To measure how watching the film might shape a person's empathy toward formerly incarcerated people, the research team asked participants before and after they watched the film to also watch a set of one- to three-minute-long videos that featured men who had been incarcerated in real life.
Participants were asked to rate what they thought the men were feeling as they shared their life stories.
The ratings were then measured against what the men actually told the researchers they felt when recounting their experiences.
The study found that after watching "Just Mercy", participants were more empathetic toward those who were formerly incarcerated than those in the control condition.
Their attitudes toward criminal justice reform were also swayed.
Participants were asked whether they would sign and share a petition that supported a federal law to restore voting rights to people with a criminal record.
They found that people who watched "Just Mercy" were 7.66% more likely than participants in the control condition to sign a petition.
Eberhardt said the study underscores the power of storytelling, adding: "Narratives move people in ways that numbers don't."
In an early study, Eberhardt found that citing statistics on racial disparities is not enough to lead people to take a closer look at systems.
Instead, she discovered that presenting numbers alone can possibly backfire. For example, highlighting racial disparities in the criminal justice system can lead people to be more punitive, not less.
But the new study shows that what does change people's minds are stories - a finding consistent with a previous study Zaki conducted that found how watching a live theatre performance can impact how people perceive social and cultural issues.
The psychologists also found that their intervention works regardless of the storyteller's race, and it had the same effect regardless of people's political orientation.
Zaki added: "When people experience detailed personal narratives it opens their mind and heart to the people telling those narratives and to the groups from which those people come from."