In 2019, producer Scott Budnick said after the former president screened an early cut of Just Mercy, a legal drama in which Jamie Foxx plays an Alabama man wrongly convicted and sentenced to death. He was meeting with Barack Obama in Washington. At the time, President Obama was in the midst of founding his production company, Higher Ground, and it occurred to him that perhaps “movies could literally change the chemistry in someone’s brain,” Budnick says.
A few months later, while attending a panel with Stanford University psychologist Jennifer Everhart, Budnick casually shared comments about Obama’s brain problems, and the seeds of an interesting new study were sown. “Scott told the story as if it were unknown,” says Everhart, who received a MacArthur genius grant for his research on racial bias. “I’m like, ‘Well, you don’t have to wonder.’ You could actually study it.”
Five years later, people are climbing into MRI machines in the basement of Stanford University’s psychology department to see how watching Just Mercy literally changes their brains. This is part of the first academic study to use a specific cultural product to measure empathy.
The brain-imaging study Eberhart is conducting with Stanford University psychology professor Jamil Zaki is still ongoing, but the first phase of the study relies on participants watching videos online, and the first phase of the study relies on participants watching videos online. suggests the possibility of changing consciousness. The study, published Oct. 21 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that watching “Just Mercy” increased participants’ empathy for recently incarcerated people and decreased their enthusiasm for the death penalty.
The study tests what psychologists call “narrative transport,” the idea that people’s attitudes change when they lose themselves in a story. This is an academic version of the oft-shared Roger Ebert quote, in which he calls movies “empathy machines,” which many people working in the entertainment industry assume to be true. The idea is that no one has ever scientifically measured such ideas. The harsh way we have been doing it so far.
Just Mercy is based on attorney Bryan Stevenson’s 2014 memoir and stars Michael B. Jordan as Stevenson and Foxx as Walter “Johnny D.” Mr. McMillian was wrongly convicted of murder in 1988 and sentenced to death. To assess how watching Just Mercy shapes people’s attitudes, researchers at Stanford University asked 749 participants to conduct video interviews with incarcerated men. We asked them to take a look and rate what they thought. This is how they felt as they shared their life stories. Those ratings were then measured against what the incarcerated men actually told researchers how they felt. After watching Just Mercy, people were more likely to detect the right sentiment among formerly incarcerated people. This is a measure researchers call “empathic accuracy.”
They are also 20% more likely to oppose the death penalty, which is a bigger effect than political activity, which typically increases by 10%. (While the films Concussion and Moneyball share the broader theme of a male protagonist rebelling against the system, they are used as a contrast for the experiment, which is the unique storyline of Just Mercy. The experience of watching documentary dramas about vulnerable people was found to influence research participants’ views of incarcerated people.
These findings persisted regardless of the race of the incarcerated storytellers or the political affiliation of the study subjects. “Liberals and conservatives had different starting points,” Eberhard says. “But no matter where the standards were, this film influenced both. It speaks to the power of storytelling, and maybe that’s something we should consider. , it’s a very polarized country, but I think stories are a way to reconnect with each other.”
The MRI scans began in the spring to investigate how watching Just Mercy affects brain regions associated with empathy, exploring President Obama’s own theory. So far, Eberhardt and Zaki have tested 60 people, and the results are still being analyzed. Eberhard said he plans to conduct similar research on television shows, which can have a long-term impact on attitudes because viewers become engrossed in the story for months or years. It is theorized that there is a sex.
The resulting data, along with box office receipts, Rotten Tomatoes scores, awards, streaming numbers, and more, can serve as another metric for evaluating the value of an entertainment production. Just Mercy was profitable, with a relatively modest worldwide box office gross of $51 million. Since its theatrical release, the film has left an unusual cultural legacy. Following the killing of George Floyd in 2020, Warner Bros. made Just Mercy available for free on various digital platforms and aired on multiple channels as part of a series of programming dedicated to racial justice. .
Budnick points out that for a movie or TV show to influence people’s attitudes, they first have to actually see it. “It’s the entertainment industry,” Budnick says. Budnick founded his production company, 1Community, based on the idea of creating content that inspires positive change in society. “We need to entertain. First we need to assess: ‘Will this get us the eyeballs we need?’ And you can say, “Okay, this works.” ”
This article first appeared in the October 23 issue of The Hollywood Reporter. Click here to subscribe to receive the magazine.
