A new study has examined the probability of slow motion videos being more misleading than helpful when it comes to analyzing footage from incidents.
A surveillance camera and a personal recording device are very likely to capture a violent act or a crime being committed and can provide useful evidence when analyzing the case.
According to Slow Motion Increases Perceived Intent newspaper, the action seen in slow motion rather than at regular speed can cause the viewers to find the activity more intentional. The main reason for this impression when seeing a slow motion video of a crime is that the audience lives under the false sensation that the actor had more time to think before acting.
The professor of behavioral science at the University Of Chicago Booth School Of Business highlighted that, in a criminal attempt, seeing intention in a person’s activity can sometimes make the difference between life and death.
Multiple experiments involving real surveillance footage from a murder scene have been conducted to prove if slow motion videos made people see the crime as intentional. One analysis revealed that the juries that have watched the slow motion video of the murder were four times more likely to unanimously vote first-degree murder than those who watched the video at regular speed.
Moreover, in another experiment, participants were shown the same video in slow motion and in real-time, and the slow motion video still gave them the impression of intentional acts. Even when the members knew exactly how much time passed while the crime took place, they still lived under the false impression that things unfolded more slowly and tended to find the action more intentional.
Another experiment tried to see if this slow motion intentionality bias applies to more common actions. They conducted the same test on a sports video of a prohibited helmet-to-helmet tackle from an NFL game, and the result was the same. The participants that analyzed the slow motion video decided that the offending tackler was trying harder to hit the other member’s helmet.
Although slow motion can provide a better look at the real time events that instantly happen, the researchers admitted that it could distort perception.
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