A new study has found that after watching a docudrama about the efforts to free a wrongly convicted prisoner on death row, people were more empathetic toward formerly incarcerated people and supportive of criminal justice reform.

The research, led by a team of Stanford psychologists, published Oct. 21 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

“One of the hardest things for groups of people who face stigma, including previously incarcerated people, is that other Americans don’t perceive their experiences very accurately,” said Jamil Zaki, the paper’s senior author and a professor of psychology in the School of Humanities and Sciences (H&S). “One way to combat that lack of empathy for stigmatized groups of people is to get to know them. This is where media comes in, which has been used by psychologists for a long time as an intervention.”

Studying how narrative persuades 

The paper incorporates Zaki’s earlier research on empathy with the scholarship of his co-author, Stanford psychologist Jennifer Eberhardt, who has studied the pernicious role of racial bias and prejudice in society for over three decades.

The idea for the study emerged from a conversation Eberhardt had with one of the executive producers of the film Just Mercy, which is ​​based on the book by the lawyer and social justice activist Bryan Stevenson. Stevenson’s book focuses on his efforts at the Equal Justice Initiative to overturn the sentence of Walter McMillian, a Black man from Alabama who in 1987 was sentenced to death for the murder of an 18-year-old white girl, despite overwhelming evidence showing his innocence. The film vividly portrays the systemic racism within the criminal justice system and illustrates how racial bias tragically impacts the lives of marginalized individuals and their families, particularly Black Americans, as they navigate a flawed legal system.

It was around the time of the movie’s release that Eberhardt, who is a professor of psychology in H&S, the William R. Kimball Professor of Organizational Behavior in the Graduate School of Business, and a faculty director of Stanford SPARQ, published her book, Biased: Uncovering the Hidden Prejudice That Shapes What We See, Think, and Do (Viking, 2019), which grapples with many of the same issues as Just Mercy.

On her book tour, she met with many different people, including one of Just Mercy’s executive producers. He approached her with a question originally posed to him by former U.S. President Barack Obama, who had recently watched the film at a private screening. Obama wondered whether watching it could change the way neurons fired in people’s brains.

“I told this producer we don’t have to sit and wonder – this is a question that we can answer through rigorous research,” said Eberhardt. “This paper is a first step in that direction.”

Eberhardt connected with Zaki, and together they designed a study to examine how Just Mercy might change how people think about people who have been pushed to the margins of society.

To measure how watching the film might shape a person’s empathy toward formerly incarcerated people, the researchers asked participants before and after they watched the movie to also watch a set of one- to three-minute-long videos that featured men who had been incarcerated in real life. Participants were asked to rate what they thought these men were feeling as they shared their life stories. These ratings were then measured against 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 formerly incarcerated than those in the control condition.

Their attitudes toward criminal justice reform were also swayed.

The researchers asked participants whether they would sign and share a petition that supported a federal law to restore voting rights to people with a criminal record. They found that people who watched Just Mercy were 7.66% more likely than participants in the control condition to sign a petition.

The study underscores the power of storytelling, Eberhardt said. “Narratives move people in ways that numbers don’t.”

In an early study Eberhardt co-authored, she found that citing statistics on racial disparities is not enough to lead people to take a closer look at systems – in fact, she found that presenting numbers alone can possibly backfire. For example, highlighting racial disparities in the criminal justice system can lead people to be more punitive, not less, and to be more likely to support the punitive policies that help to create those disparities in the first place.

As Eberhardt and Zaki’s study has shown, what does change people’s minds are stories – a finding consistent with a previous study Zaki conducted that found how watching a live theater performance can impact how people perceive social and cultural issues in the U.S.

The psychologists also found that their intervention works regardless of the storyteller’s race, and it had the same effect regardless of people’s political orientation.

“When people experience detailed personal narratives it opens their mind and heart to the people telling those narratives and to the groups from which those people come from,” Zaki said.