Films can shape somebody's worldview.
Films can transform viewpoints
A new study has found that people who watched the 2019 movie 'Just Mercy' – which stars Jamie Foxx as a prisoner on death row after being wrongly convicted of murder – were more empathetic towards those who had been imprisoned and supported criminal reform.
Professor Jamil Zaki, of Stanford University, was approached to conduct the research after former US president Barack Obama quizzed the movie's producers on whether they thought it could change the way in which neurons fired in a person's brain.
He established that those who saw 'Just Mercy' – which is based on the true story of Walter McMillan, who was wrongly convicted of murder and sentenced to death in 1988 – were more empathetic to those in jail and were 7.66 per cent more likely to support restoring voting rights to former inmates.
Professor Zaki said: "When people experience detailed personal narratives it opens their mind and heart to the people telling those narratives."
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