A new study has found that after watching a docudrama about efforts to free a wrongly convicted prisoner on death row, people were more empathetic toward formerly incarcerated people and supported criminal justice reform.
The research, led by a team of Stanford psychologists, published October 21 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
“One of the most difficult things for groups of people who face stigma, including formerly incarcerated people, is that other Americans don’t perceive their experiences very accurately,” said Jamil Zaki, lead author of the paper and professor of psychology at the School of Humanities and Sciences (H&S). “One way to combat this lack of empathy towards stigmatized groups of people is to get to know them. This is where the media comes in, which psychologists have long used as an intervention.”
Study how narrative persuades
The article incorporates Zaki’s previous research on empathy with the scholarship of her co-author, Stanford psychologist Jennifer Eberhardt, who has studied the pernicious role of racial bias and bias in society for more than three decades.
The idea for the study came from a conversation Eberhardt had with one of the executive producers of the film Just Mercy, based on the book by lawyer and social justice activist Bryan Stevenson. Stevenson’s book focuses on his efforts at the Equal Justice Initiative to overturn the conviction of Walter McMillian, a black Alabama man who in 1987 was sentenced to death for the murder of an 18-year-old white girl, despite the overwhelming evidence proving his innocence. . The film vividly portrays systemic racism within the criminal justice system and illustrates how racial bias tragically impacts the lives of marginalized people and their families, particularly African Americans, as they navigate a flawed legal system.
It was around the time of the film’s release that Eberhardt, professor of psychology at H&S, William R. Kimball Professor of Organizational Behavior at the Graduate School of Business, and faculty director of Stanford SPARQ, published her book, Biased. : Uncovering the Hidden Bias That Shapes What We See, Think, and Do (Viking, 2019), which addresses many of the same issues as Just Mercy.
On her book tour, she met many different people, including one of the executive producers of Just Mercy. He approached her with a question that had originally been posed to her by former US President Barack Obama, who had recently seen the film at a private screening. Obama wondered if watching it could change the way neurons fire in people’s brains.
“I told this producer that we don’t have to sit down and ask ourselves: This is a question we can answer through rigorous research,” Eberhardt said. “This document is a first step in that direction.”
Eberhardt connected with Zaki and together they designed a study to examine how Just Mercy could change the way people think about people who have been pushed to the margins of society.
To measure how watching the film might influence a person’s empathy toward formerly incarcerated people, the researchers asked participants, before and after watching the film, to also watch a series of one- to three-minute videos. in which men who had been imprisoned in real life appeared. Participants were asked to rate what they thought these men felt as they shared their life stories. These ratings were then compared to what the men actually told the researchers they felt when recounting their experiences.
Opening minds and hearts
The study found that after watching Just Mercy, participants were more empathetic toward those who were previously incarcerated than those in the control condition.
Their attitudes toward criminal justice reform were also influenced.
Researchers asked participants if they would sign and share a petition supporting a federal law to restore the right to vote to people with criminal records. They found that people who watched Just Mercy were 7.66% more likely to sign a petition than participants in the control condition.
The study underscores the power of storytelling, Eberhardt said. “Narratives move people in a way that numbers don’t.”
In one of the first studies Eberhardt co-authored, she found that citing statistics about racial disparities is not enough to lead people to take a closer look at systems; in fact, he found that presenting numbers alone can be counterproductive. For example, highlighting racial disparities in the criminal justice system may lead people to be more punitive, not less, and more likely to support the punitive policies that help create those disparities in the first place.
As Eberhardt and Zaki’s study has shown, what changes people’s minds are stories, a finding consistent with a previous study by Zaki that found how watching a live theatrical performance can affect how people perceive social and cultural problems in the US
The psychologists also found that their intervention worked regardless of the narrator’s race and had the same effect regardless of people’s political orientation.
“When people experience detailed personal narratives, they open their minds and hearts to the people telling those narratives and the groups those people come from,” Zaki said.