Welcome to brain Stuff from How Stuff Works. Hi There, brain Stuff, Lauren Vogel bomb here. Slow motion video can make the boring seem exciting and the extraordinary even more incredible. I'm thinking of everything from Wonder Woman's fight scenes to epic t Time here. But it turns out that slowing videos not only amps up the drama of a scene, it also creates bias in viewers, specifically when it comes
to jury members. In court cases, video footage of crimes often plays an important role in determining a perpetrator's punishment. In some trials, jurors may watch slow motion video of the criminal acting question, supposedly to better analyze the events that took place, But a group of researchers, writing that any benefit of video replay should be weighed against its potentially biasing effects, conducted a study that suggests slow mo
video doesn't always help jurors make well informed decisions. Instead, the elongated time of the video makes it seem like the crime took longer to unfold, so jurors are more likely to perceive the action as intentional. Whether a jury thinks the crime was premeditated can be the difference between the second and first degree murder charge, so it's literally
a matter of life and death. This was the case in the two thousand nine murder trial of John Lewis, which the researchers used as the basis for the study. In the trial, the prosecution showed a slow motion video of Lewis shooting a Philadelphia police officer, and the defense argued that the stretched time made the act seem premeditated. The prosecution rebutted by pointing out that the jurors also
saw the video at regular speed. To test whether sloma video actually increases perception of time and intent, the researchers conducted for studies. In the first, participants acting as jurors saw either the video of Lewis slowed down or at normal speed. In the second, the researchers tested perceived intention in another scenario an NFL video of a prohibited helmet to helmet tackle, as well as the effect of video duration by pausing the video instead of slowing it at
crucial moments. In the third, they tested whether displaying and mentioning the video's speed decreased bias, and in the fourth, they had participants watched either the SlowMo version or the regular video or both to test whether the group's perceptions
would be different. Confirming the researchers hypothesis, showing slowed down video quadruple to the odds that participants would believe the shooter guilty of intentional murder before deliberation, partially because of the increased amount of time that the jurors felt the dependant had to act. Also, viewers who watched the slow motion tackle the second study were more likely to think it was premeditated as well, and pausing the video didn't
change that. For the third study, even though viewers were repeatedly reminded that it was a slow motion video, that didn't change the results. They were the same as in the first study, and the final studies showed that the viewers who saw only the SloMo version of events were three point four times more likely to convict than viewers who only saw the regular version. Viewers who saw both speeds were one point five times more likely to convict.
This demonstrates that showing both speeds lessons bias, but doesn't
completely eliminate it. The authors admit that the study doesn't determine the effect of slowed video on the accuracy of viewers judgment but considering the fact that the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania ruled the slow MO in Lewis's case admissible and that Lewis is now on death row despite his appeals, the results of this study could change how we view the role of videos in determining criminal sentences, and with the explosion of police body cameras, surveillance cameras, and smartphone video,
the effective video replaced speed on jurors could have even more importance in the coming years. Today's episode was written by Eve's Jeffcote and produced by Tristan McNeil. For more on this end lots of other criminal topics, visit our home planet, how stuff Works dot com.