Simple Jury Persuasion: Should you consider 3-D for your courtroom videos?

Originally published by Douglas Keene .

Evidence admissibility issues aside, the answer is, “only if you can do it as well as they did in the 3D movie Polar Express”. As it turns out, 3D isn’t that much more impactful than 2D unless it’s done really, really well.

Psychologists and neuroscientists studying emotion often use film clips for their research. So when these researchers from the University of Utah thought about the influx of 3D films, they wondered if those films would have more emotional impact than the older 2D films–especially for younger viewers (whom we might consider potential jurors). Theoretically, 3D movies heighten the emotional experience (since you really don’t know what to expect or when the character will suddenly reach out from the screen and take a swipe at you). These researchers looked at a few movies that came in both 2D and 3D versions (My Bloody Valentine, Despicable Me, Tangled, and The Polar Express).

Rather than asking their 408 undergraduate participants (between 18 and 64 years of age; 62.75% female; 80% Caucasian, 9.8% Asian, 7% Hispanic, 1.23% Black or African-American, 1.23% Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander, and .98% as American Indian or Alaska Native) for their emotional reactions to the 2D and 3D movies, they hooked them up with electrodes and measured heart rate, skin conductance (how much they were sweating), and other physiological responses to film scenes during the duration of the five-minute clips they were shown.

What they found, in brief, was that whether a film was 2D or 3D didn’t really matter in terms of the participants reactions. While they reacted emotionally, there were no real differences in how they reacted to the 2D versions of the films versus the 3D versions–with the exception of small differences in “electrodermal responses” between the 2D and 3D versions of The Polar Express. (They reacted more strongly to the 3D version.)

The researchers underscore the fact that the clip was far and away the best example of the 3D technology in the study, and the differences measured were small. But, they say, overall, there were no real differences between the emotional impact of 2D and 3D films.

This is good news for litigation advocacy as the cost of creating a 3D film and animation is high compared to 2D, and the road would likely be fraught with legal wrangling before any 3D film (sanitized of undue influence) made it to the jurors. (You may be interested in reading a Canadian author’s perspective on forensic 3D animation in The Jury Expert .)

Bride DL, Crowell SE, Baucom BR, Kaufman EA, O’Connor CG, Skidmore CR, & Yaptangco M (2014). Testing the Effectiveness of 3D Film for Laboratory-Based Studies of Emotion. PLoS ONE, 9 (8) PMID: 25170878

Image

Related posts:

1. Simple Jury Persuasion: When videos are too persuasive…


2. Simple Jury Persuasion: Be Powerful in the Courtroom


3. Simple Jury Persuasion: Is that foreigner lying up there on the witness stand?

Curated by Texas Bar Today. Follow us on Twitter @texasbartoday.

from Texas Bar Today http://ift.tt/YFnfCH

via Abogado Aly Website