A Good Movie May Change Our Minds

Stanford researchers are studying how movies can literally rewire our brains to feel more empathy for subjects or individuals — the first academic study of its kind — starting with the 2019 drama Just Mercy.

The Big Thought: It’s always been known that art has the power to shift our perspective and make us feel… but analyzing the science behind that could give filmmakers the data to make their stories as impactful as possible.

Between The Gray Matter: After producer Scott Budnick screened his movie Just Mercy for Barack Obama, the former president wondered if “a film could literally change somebody’s brain matter.” That led to more screenings of the movie… but now at Stanford under an MRI machine.

• The study, conducted by psychologist Jennifer Eberhardt and professor Jamil Zaki, had 749 people watch videos of incarcerated people talking about their experiences and then rate what they thought those men were feeling.
• Those rates were then measured against what the incarcerated men rated they were actually feeling — those two rates were far from alignment.
• But after watching Just Mercy, the test subjects more accurately pinpointed what the incarcerated people felt — a phenomenon dubbed “empathic accuracy.”
• MRI tests started in the spring, measuring how empathy regions in the brain have been changed after watching the movie. The data is still being analyzed.

Final Perspective: The study is focusing on the power of “narrative transportation,” or how losing ourselves in a story can change our attitudes. For example, subjects became 20% more likely to oppose the death penalty after watching the movie — double the effect of political canvassing. And that power is reported to transcend political leanings and race.

If movies are scientifically proven to be the “great empathy machine” (as critic Roger Ebert once put it), then popular entertainment could be considered a treatment for societal fracturing by governments, non-profits, and mental health experts.