Producer Scott Budnick meets with Barack Obama in Washington in 2019 after the former president screened an early cut of his legal drama just mercyJamie Foxx stars in the film as an Alabama man who was wrongly convicted and sentenced to death. At the time, Obama was building his production company, Higher Ground, and he mused to Budnik that maybe “a movie could actually change a person’s brain matter,” Budnik said.
A few months later, when the two were on a panel together, Budnik casually shared Obama’s comments about the brain with Stanford University psychologist Jennifer Eberhart, and the seeds for an intriguing new study emerged. So buried. “Scott told the story as if it were an unknowable thing,” said Eberhardt, who received a MacArthur Genius Grant for her research on racial bias. “I thought, ‘Well, you don’t have to wonder. You can actually look into it.’
Five years later, people climbed into an MRI machine in the basement of Stanford University’s psychology department to see how just mercy Literally, it changed their brains, part of the first academic study to use specific cultural artifacts to measure empathy.
Eberhart’s brain-imaging study with Stanford University psychology professor Jamil Zaki is still ongoing, but the first phase of the study relies on participants watching videos online, hinting at the potential of movies to change minds. According to an article published on October 21 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Scienceswatch just mercy Increased participants’ empathy for recently incarcerated people and decreased their enthusiasm for the death penalty.
The study was a test of what psychologists call “narrative transfer,” in which people’s attitudes change when they are immersed in a story. This is the academic version of the oft-shared quote from Roger Ebert, who called movies “a machine for empathy,” a sentiment that many people working in the entertainment industry believe to be true. , but no one has measured it in such a scientific way.
just mercyBased on attorney Bryan Stevenson’s 2014 memoir, the film stars Michael B. Jordan as Stevenson and Foxx as Walter “Johnny D.” McMillian, who was wrongfully convicted in 1988 Convicted of murder and sentenced to death. just mercy Researchers at Stanford University asked 749 participants to watch video interviews with incarcerated men and rate how they felt as they shared their life stories. Scores were then measured based on what incarcerated people told researchers they actually felt. After reading just mercypeople were more likely to detect the right emotions in formerly incarcerated people, a measure of what the researchers call “empathic accuracy.”
They are also 20 percent more likely to oppose the death penalty, which is a larger effect than political lobbying, which typically leads to a 10 percent increase in the likelihood of opposing the death penalty. (Movie concussion and Moneyball – whose common theme is a male protagonist fighting the system – was used as a control in the experiment to confirm that it was just mercySpecific storylines that influenced research participants’ perceptions of incarcerated people, not just the experience of watching a documentary about a loser.
These findings held regardless of the race of the incarcerated storytellers or the political party of the study subjects. “Liberals and conservatives came from different places,” Eberhardt said, “but the film had an impact on both sides, no matter where the bottom line was. It speaks to the power of story, and maybe that’s something we should be thinking about. We are a polarized country right now. I just wonder if narrative is a way to connect with each other again.
MRI scans start in the spring to check how the observations are just mercy Affecting areas of the brain associated with empathy, an exploration of Obama’s original theory. Eberhardt and Zaki have tested 60 people so far and are still analyzing their findings. Eberhart said she plans to conduct similar research on television shows, which she believes may have a more lasting impact on attitudes because viewers interact with the stories for months or even years.
The resulting data could join box office revenue, Rotten Tomatoes scores, awards and streaming numbers as another measure of the value of an entertainment show. just mercy Global box office revenue was $51 million, profitable but still relatively low. Since its theatrical release, the film has had an unusual cultural legacy – in the wake of George Floyd’s murder in 2020, Warner Bros. just mercy is free on a variety of digital platforms and airs on multiple channels as part of a series dedicated to racial justice.
Budnick points out that in order for a movie or TV show to influence a person’s attitude, people actually need to watch it first. “This is the entertainment industry,” Budnik said. “We need entertainment. We need to first evaluate, ‘Is this going to get the eyeballs we need?’ ” Then we can say, “Okay, now that we have this, here are the impacts. “”
This story first appeared in the Oct. 23 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.
