Video blinds us to the evidence, NYU, Yale study finds

PUBLIC RELEASE DATE: 23-Sep-2014

Contact: James Devitt
New York University
Video blinds us to the evidence, NYU, Yale study finds

Where people look when watching video evidence varies wildly and has profound consequences for bias in legal punishment decisions, a team of researchers at New York University and Yale Law School has found. This study raises questions about why people fail to be objective when confronted with video evidence.

In a series of three experiments, participants who viewed videotaped altercations formed biased punishment decisions about a defendant the more they looked at him. Participants punished a defendant more severely if they did not identify with his social group and punished him less severely if they felt connected to the group—but only when they looked at the defendant often.

"Our findings show that video evidence isn't evaluated objectively—in fact, it may even spur our existing biases," explains Emily Balcetis, an assistant professor in NYU's Department of Psychology and one of the study's authors. "With the proliferation of surveillance footage and other video evidence, coupled with the legal system's blind faith in information we can see with their own eyes, we need to proceed with caution. Video evidence is seductive, but it won't necessarily help our understanding of cases, especially when it's unclear who is at fault."

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"One might think that the more closely you look at videotape, the more likely you are to view its contents objectively," says Balcetis. "But that is not the case—in fact, the more you look, the more you find evidence that confirms your assumptions about a social group

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In order to rule out the possibility that these findings apply only to police, the researchers conducted another experiment with a new set of participants. This time, however, they watched a videotape of an orchestrated fight between two college-aged white men: one wearing a blue shirt and another wearing a green shirt. Prior to viewing the videotape, participants answered personality questions, and the experimenter told them their answers seemed more similar to either the blue group or the green group.

Consistent with the first two experiments, the results showed that close visual attention enhanced biased interpretations of what transpired and influenced punishment decisions. For instance, those who fixated more on the outgroup member (blue or green) were more likely to recommend stiffer punishment than those who looked elsewhere. Again, attention shifted punishment decisions by changing the accuracy of participants' memory of the behaviors that the outgroup member performed.

"We think video evidence is a silver bullet for getting at truth, but it's not," NYU doctoral candidate and lead author on the paper, Yael Granot, observes. "These results suggest that the way in which people view video evidence may exaggerate an already pervasive 'us versus them' divide in the American legal system."

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