Can Watching Movies Rewire Your Brain?

In 2019, producer Scott Budnick was meeting with Barack Obama in Washington after the former president screened an early cut of his legal drama Just Mercy, in which Jamie Foxx plays an Alabama man who is wrongfully convicted and sentenced to death. At the time, Obama was in the midst of setting up his production company, Higher Ground, and he mused to Budnick that perhaps “a film could literally change somebody’s brain matter,” Budnick says.

Months later, Budnick casually shared Obama’s brain matter comment with Stanford psychologist Jennifer Eberhardt when the two were on a panel together, and the seeds of an intriguing new piece of research were planted. “Scott relayed the story as though it was this unknowable thing,” says Eberhardt, who has received a MacArthur genius grant for her research on racial bias. “I’m like, ‘Well, you don’t have to wonder. You could actually study that.’ ”

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 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. 

Just Mercy, based on attorney Bryan Stevenson’s 2014 memoir, stars Michael B. Jordan as Stevenson and Foxx as Walter “Johnny D.” McMillian, who was wrongfully convicted of murder and sentenced to death in 1988. To evaluate how watching Just Mercy might shape a person’s attitudes, the Stanford researchers asked 749 participants to watch video interviews with men who had been incarcerated, and to rate what they thought these men were feeling as they shared stories from their lives. The ratings were then measured against what the incarcerated men told the researchers they actually felt. After watching Just Mercy, people were more likely to detect the correct emotion among the formerly incarcerated, a measure of what researchers call “empathic accuracy.”

They were also 20 percent more likely to oppose the death penalty, a greater effect than political canvassing, which typically results in a 10 percent increase. (The movies Concussion and Moneyball — which share the broad theme of a male protagonist who goes up against the system — were used as controls in the experiment to confirm that it is Just Mercy’s specific storyline affecting study participants’ views on incarcerated people, not just the experience of watching a docudrama about an underdog.)

These findings persisted regardless of the race of the incarcerated storyteller or the political party of the research subject. “Liberals and conservatives started in a different place,” Eberhardt says, “but the movie had an impact on both regardless of where the baseline was. It speaks to the power of the story, and maybe that’s something that we should consider. We’re such a polarized country right now. I just wonder if narrative is a way to reach each other again.”

The MRI scans began in the spring with the intention of examining how watching Just Mercy affects empathy-related brain regions, an exploration of Obama’s original theory. So far, Eberhardt and Zaki have tested 60 people, and they are still analyzing their findings. Eberhardt says she is planning to conduct similar research on television shows, which she theorizes may have a longer-lasting impact on attitudes, because audiences engage with the stories over months and years. 

The resulting data may become another metric, along with box office receipts, Rotten Tomatoes scores, awards and streaming numbers, to assess the value of a piece of entertainment. Just Mercy grossed a profitable but still relatively modest $51 million at the worldwide box office. Since its theatrical release, the movie has had an unusual cultural legacy — after the 2020 murder of George Floyd, Warner Bros. made Just Mercy free on various digital platforms and aired it on multiple channels as part of a slate of programming devoted to racial justice.

In order for a movie or TV show to affect a person’s attitudes, Budnick notes, people actually need to see it first. “It’s the entertainment industry,” says Budnick, who built his production company, 1Community, upon the idea of creating content that spurs positive social change. “We need to entertain. We need to first assess, ‘Will this get the eyeballs we need?’ And then we can say, ‘OK, now that we have this, here are the impacts.’ ” 

This story first appeared in the Oct. 23 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.