Watching film increases empathic understanding of formerly incarcerated people

Rebecca Keegan, Can Watching Movies Rewire Your Brain? Hollywood Reporter, October 23, 2024.

Five years later, people are climbing into an MRI machine in the basement of Stanford’s psychology department to see how watching Just Mercy quite literally changes their brains, part of the first academic study using a specific cultural product to measure empathy.

The brain imaging research, which Eberhardt is conducting with fellow Stanford psychology professor Jamil Zaki, is still underway, but the first phase of the study, which relied on participants watching videos online, hints at the potential of a movie to change minds. According to findings published [PDF] Oct. 21 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, watching Just Mercy increased participants’ empathy for the recently incarcerated and decreased their enthusiasm for the death penalty.

The study is a test of what psychologists call “narrative transportation,” the idea that when people lose themselves in a story, their attitudes change. It’s the academic version of the frequently shared Roger Ebert quote in which he called movies “a machine that generates empathy,” and it’s a notion that many who work in the entertainment industry assume to be true but that no one has measured in such a scientifically rigorous way until now.

There's more at the link.