I think what slow motion does is reveal the full violence of an action. Some commenters have mentioned that slow-motion tackles and punches look much worse than they do in real life. However, in real life, I think we underestimate the violence. Medical research into things like CTE has revealed that there is actually brain damage occurring during those plays.
Notice the research used a gunshot video. I think the average person underestimates the violence inflicted by a bullet because our human intuition fails us for small objects traveling that fast. I think what slow-motion does is help reveal the true violence inflicted on another person whether from a punch, tackle, or gunshot.
Update:
IANAL but also note that in this specific case, murder during commission of a felony ( armed robbery ) would be classed in many states as felony murder and would be first degree murder. See http://criminal.lawyers.com/criminal-law-basics/murder-durin...
So if this is a felony murder state, the slow motion would actually help the jury come to the correct conclusion.
How violent an action truly is is irrelevant when deciding whether a murder was premeditated(first degree) or not(second degree). If I swing a hammer at a wall and someone happens to be passing by, I hit them in the face and kill them, it's going to look very gruesome in slow motion. That doesn't mean I intended to kill the person. If a jury is more likely to think I had time to notice the person passing by because of slow motion and thus believe that I intended to kill the person, then that's an error.
The slow motion makes it look like actions were deliberate instead of spontaneous. So it makes it look like a planned action. If the defendant deliberately did it, they must be pretty terrible, right? Guilty of a worse crime.
How often does spontaneous violence occur? If it looks like actions were deliberate and planned, wouldn't you need some other reasoning to believe that they weren't?
the slow motion would actually help the jury come
to the correct conclusion.
For the wrong reason.
The whole point of the article is that it helps them come to the wrong conclusion in a number of cases and your argument is that they must be wrong, because they came to the 'correct', in your opinion, solution in this specific case. That kind of reasoning is awful and immoral.
How do you know which verdict is wrong or right in order to say that though? You can say that slow motion makes people convict more, or convict less, or whatever, but unless you have an oracle to tell you which was the correct verdict in each case, and we don't, this data tells us nothing.
Maybe people are systematically underestimating violence when they don't get to see it in slow motion, and the acquittals when they don't have slow motion are the wrong conclusion.
Or maybe people are systematically overestimating violence when they do have the slow motion and the convictions are the wrong conclusion.
Who knows? But it doesn't really give us anything to go on does it?
How do you know which verdict is wrong or right in order
to say that though?
For the same reason that other things that have unconscious influences are expressly forbidden. A verdict should be based on the facts of the case, not on emotions incited in the jurors. That's why we forbid irrelevant anecdotes that demonstrate what a bad person an accused is. It would lead to the wrong verdict.
After it's been pointed out, the point of the article is entirely obvious: if we see someone take a minute before committing murder, then we will think them of having had sufficient time to think. If it takes 5 seconds, he obviously didn't have time to consider. So if we stretch 5 seconds into a minute, a jury will conclude there was rational deliberation where there was only instinctive response.
What is entirely non-obvious is supposing that brain of the average juror could 'just' compensate for his impressions based on the knowledge that it was shown in slow motion. We know they aren't capable of that with many, many other cognitive weaknesses. Sources: Influence, Thinking Fast and Slow, Predictably Irrational, ...
But in sports, slow motion is often enlightening. After a tackle, we see a soccer player collapse to the ground, writhing in agony, clutching their shin. But then slow mo shows that the other player never even made contact with them, its a classic "dive". In that case, there's no doubt that the slow mo version is more informative.
" I think the average person underestimates the violence inflicted by a bullet because our human intuition fails us for small objects traveling that fast"
My opinion is that this is caused more by glamorization/trivialization of violence (in all its forms) by the US movie industry.
I tend to agree with this. One of the things which struck me about gang violence in LA is that if you have even one gunshot wound you really are out of action. Contrast that with pretty much every depiction on screen or television where people continue fighting.
There's two equal and opposite misrepresentations of reality. If you're not either the main bad/good guy then a single gun shot or punch will take you out completely. Often people fly backwards from a gun shot, which is just crazy. Conversely, if you are the main hero/villain, you can probably get shot 10 times and be beaten with a lead pipe across the head quite a few times and still be going along just fine.
Having recently sat on a Jury in the UK, deliberating on a triple assault case, the CCTV was the most crucial piece of evidence - eye witness reports were patchy and in some cases contradictory, and watching the events on CCTV was important in deciding what actually happened.
If we had not had access to the CCTV - both in real time and slowed down (which was actually produced by the defence, not the prosecution), then I strongly believe the outcome would have been different; indeed if another angle had been present then one count may well have been judged differently.
It is easy to view something slowly and decide that intent was more severe than may have been planned by the people involved, but in my experience it's also invaluable in seeing what actually happened, as the camera can be the most reliable witness to the facts of the matter.
My view is that the aim of a using juries is to bring the things humans are good at* to the judgment process, i.e. deciding who's lying under cross-examination.
Humans might be good at detecting 'intent' in the real world and calibrated for reality. Their calibration might be completely wrong for slow-motion. So maybe slow-mo does give a better view of what happened to establish the facts of the matter but may drastically skew other, more important factors.
It's more about bringing independence to the judgement. It's a check against the system, or an overly powerful state.
A judge may know the law more precisely than a layperson, but is no less fallible. But they are of the system.
Juries work remarkably well on that basis. That's not to say they're likely to be better at deciding truth, guilt or innocence. They'll undoubtedly bring some of their prejudices in from the street.
Juries have the ability to acquit a defendant despite the evidence and facts (jury nullification), which is very rarely if ever pointed out to juries. Only case I can think of was Clive Ponting, a UK civil servant, prosecuted for leaking Falklands war documents. He claimed to have done so in the public interest. The governement position was public interest is whatever we think it is. The judge directed them to convict. The jury acquitted. The govt was not happy. They later changed the Official Secrets Act such that this defence was no longer possible and since then public interest is now whatever the UK Govt says it is.
There are a lot of examples of jury nullification in the US.
- The famous Zenger trial was a jury nullification. It did influence the development of US law -- later, but it was overtly contrary to the very well-established law of the time.
- Jury nullification was common for alcohol-related crimes in Prohibition.
I googled a little after yours and the sibling comment. Seems it's been much more actively used in the US than the UK. Fascinating that US law refers all the way back to a 1670 English case[1], even though there's no legal binding.
Were I not old enough to remember the Falklands case I doubt I'd ever have heard of it here in the UK. There was no reference to it in the information sent when I was called for jury duty, or any mention by the judges.
The Falklands case, the documents it brought to light, and the implications were in the media regularly for weeks afterwards, possibly months, so it was impossible to miss. I can't remember a more recent case (though I'm sure there must have been). All Google turfs up for the UK recently is a couple of media articles expressing the belief it should be more widely known.
Fun fact: Judges in the UK do not use gavels. However, judges in UK police procedurals and legal dramas use gavels. Why? Because the judges in American police procedurals and legal dramas do, and it's become an expected trope.
This has always been a pet-peeve of mine, watching sports replays. When re-run in slow motion, some tackles seem more aggressive, mostly because of the body motion of the "victim" being exaggerated, while others look benign. The commentators then make judgement calls on the validity of the umpire calls, which is made in real-time, based on their opinion that was formed using the slow-mo replay.
Wait until you get into watching cricket umpiring decisions that are referred to a TV umpire (by players or umpires) - slow motion replay (with a separate camera to normal tv coverage), hotspot cameras, microphones, ball tracking...
With cricket the player's intent is not considered unlike many other sports and in courtroom trials. So looking at the most minute detail (e.g. the snickometer, the checks if the ball made a "snick" sound passing the bat, indicating contact) makes sense to the sport.
I think there's something in the LBW rules about intent, not to mention the whole concept of "where would've the ball gone has it not been etc. etc." I personally dislike the whole fixation over minutiae in Cricket today. The Laws should, I think, be updated for the new technology, for instance the front-foot no-ball which now is preposterous when they keep trying to see whether a millimetre of the foot crossed the line or not, or the run-out with whether the bat was firmly touching the ground on the other side of the crease or not. Those laws were fine when the umpiring wasn't technology assisted, but they are turning the whole game to a circus these days.
Yep, if the ball pitches outside the line of the stumps it's not out unless the batsman made no attempt to play a shot.
> The Laws should, I think, be updated for the new technology,
I disagree (although being young I've only ever watched cricket with this sort of technology). Given the other aspects of the game rely so much on precision, I can't see letting the umpiring become more subjective and/or allowing for more human error would improve the game.
This is no real surprise. It's apparent when they show the replays during a boxing match, the punches look much much worse than they do in real-time. Not to mention all the punches that you miss due to the speed of the action.
Perhaps. It seems like the issue is with slowmo is it looks like you have more time to decide and react, then you actually do. In real time it's more clear that an action was reactive, and that there was no time to make a calculated decision.
Confounding the issue: evidence that some reactions happen before the actor is consciously aware that there is a decision to be made (let alone actually making a choice and deliberately initiating a response). It goes beyond recoiling your hand from a hot stove before you're aware of the pain. Tests w/ next-gen helicopter gunship HUD trigger controls showed pilots opening fire microseconds _before_ their neural pathways for "friend/foe" recognition were leveraged. Need to dig up my sources... but the TLDR: a lot of neuroscience brings "free will" into question. Maybe consciousness is an epiphenomenon, and free will a story we tell ourselves, and "decisions" mere post-hoc rationalizations for actions we take before any awareness? Fascinating stuff.
Someone please correct me if I mangle the results in question; I know they've shown up here on HN before.
The ones I recall involve a participant in an fMRI machine watching a screen. The instructions are, when something occurs on the screen, decide whether or not to push a button, push the button (or don't) and then report when the conscious decision was made. The studies determined that with the assistance of the fMRI, they could predict the button push before the conscious decision:
1. Screen flash.
2. fMRI prediction.
3. Conscious decision.
4. Button push.
The usual interpretation is that consciousness and free will are illusions; the decision is made without conscious participation.
But I think there's a problem with that interpretation: specifically that its alternative is a strawman: dualism.
My argument: How, exactly, do you expect a conscious decision to be made before the neural machinery goes through whatever convolutions are necessary to make that decision?
Here's my alternative interpretation of the experiment:
1. Screen flash.
2. "Conscious" decision (although the awareness of the decision, as a conscious event itself, does not bubble up until later).
3. fMRI prediction.
4. Awareness (and reporting) of conscious decision.
5. Button push.
Consciousness and free will are not epiphenomena, but the event in the movie in your head has to appear after actual decision. The fMRI prediction is simply seeing the mechanism in progress.
Have you heard more about this? The article you link to does not specifically mention the studies in question:
""This calls into question the validity of countless published fMRI studies based on parametric clusterwise inference." It's not clear how many of those there are, but they're likely to be a notable fraction of the total number of studies that use fMRI, which the authors estimate at 40,000."
Different people think at different speeds[1], so if we really want to judge someone based on what we see as a reactive action, we'd need to measure their "thinking speed" first to get a full picture.
A slow-motion replay is just 1 way of "looking closer".
The thing is, in order to not be hypocritical, we'd need to look as closely as possible.
Once we do that, we'll be looking at the molecular structure of not only the brain of the perpetrator but also the whole body (as there is of course infinite interaction). We'll be asking for the causes that led to the body being as it was at the moment of the thing will currently call "crime".
We'll end up understanding that there is no free will, which will force us to rethink what we call "punishment".
The judiciary process is not just focused on punishment, but protection of society from violent individuals, rehabilitation, and creating disincentives for other perpetrators.
The rate of people who go back to prison is far less than 67%. The odds that someone goes back is 67% when looking at people who have already gone back and counting them once for each trip.
AKA (A, B, C, A, D, A, E) = 1 person out of 4 went back (25%). But, A went back 3 times so out of 7 stays 3 of them repeated (43%).
Yet another way of counting is to look at people at one point in time (C, A, D, A,). But, someone in prison regularly is much more likely to be in prison while your studying. This is mitigated by very long studies, but 10 or even 20 years is not enough.
PS: When you consider some homeless people use prison as a way to get free medical care it's easy for someone to be in and out a lot for minor reasons. Another group that's likely to come back are people who go to prison for failure to pay fines because prison tends to make you even more poor.
Incidentally, the same problematic interpretation of numbers shows up when looking at divorce rates. If you just look at the number of marriages which end in divorce (which is the commonly quoted statistic) then you'll assign too much weight to people who get married and divorced many times.
>Is there any way for your statement (which has many bold assertions) to lead anywhere but "We're all just victims of our genes"?
Maybe that we are influenced far more by uncontrollable environmental factors than by our "freely* willed" decisions.
>Free will: the power of acting without the constraint of necessity or fate;
When you are hungry, you need to eat. But if you don't have any money and take an apple from the market you will be punished. So technically in this situation, the person acted out of necessity and therefore did not act out of free will.
The "crime by necessity" argument is well known and well accepted in moral philosophy (even if not always in jurisprudence). The real question is unnecessary crimes: You choose to steal cars and ride around. Can we convince you not to do that (and other, worse, things), or are you simply broken?
It goes further. His statement (which I agree with) implies that we have no individual responsibility because our actions are entirely beyond our control.
In that case the perpetrator is just as much victim, which alters the entire balance of justice, and creates all kinds of ugly rabbit holes to deal with with respect to societal effects and morality.
Providing a strong disincentive to the perpetrator (and in the mean time, locking them up) improves society, whereas doing so to the victim does not. That makes all the necessary difference.
Victims or not, people need incentives to not harm other people, and when these incentives fail society needs to be protected from the offenders. Once retribution is out of the picture (as it should be), free will doesn't matter with respect to justice.
On the one hand, if the perpetrator is not "responsible", then it seems inhumane to punish them.
On the other, if the perpetrator has demonstrated that they cannot or will not abide by society's rules and we have no way of reprogramming them to do so, then the only rational response is to remove them from society. Permanently. And as early as possible in their career.
And fortunately, questions of "inhumanity" do not arise---we don't have any free will to worry about, either.
Not saying it's not causal, but since we can't prove it is, yet, we can't state for sure there is no free will. Which would bother the hell out of many people :)
Careful with that train of thought, teaching unconditional love and forgiveness is what has led many mystics to be punished to the max: i.e. crucified, burned at the stake, etc.
>The researchers believe that the slow motion version is giving observers the sense that those carrying out the violent acts on tape have more time to think and deliberate - and the observers therefore believe there is more intent in the violent actions.
Premeditation makes the difference between first- and second-degree murder, and being convicted of the former tends to bring much harsher sentences. The article describes the paper as finding that people who view (e.g. store CCTV) recordings of a murder only in slow motion and without a timecode, thus lacking any clear reference to the real speed of events, are much more likely to impute premeditation than those who don't. That's what "distortion" means here.
It's a distortion because it didn't happen at slow motion. Not to say slow motion can't be useful, but it's not how it happened.
Think of the ultimate slow motion, a photograph. Emotions and muscle movements sweep across a face, but depending on the photographer's or editor's choice of moment, the same person can look scary or beatific.
Let's say that A punches B, causing B to fall backwards onto a hard surface, resulting in death.
If A intended to kill B, that's murder.
If A did not intend to kill B, it's manslaughter, a lesser crime with lesser punishment.
You are sitting on the jury, with the prosecution flashing between two frames of a video of the punch and arguing that A altered the trajectory of the punch to cause B to fall onto the hard surface.
Two frames is, say, 33 milliseconds, or somewhere between 2cm and 4m (I admit, I was surprised by that speed) of neural pathway, taking the lowest and highest nerve conduction velocities I can find. How many intentions and motor changes can you perform in 33ms?
Notice the research used a gunshot video. I think the average person underestimates the violence inflicted by a bullet because our human intuition fails us for small objects traveling that fast. I think what slow-motion does is help reveal the true violence inflicted on another person whether from a punch, tackle, or gunshot.
Update:
IANAL but also note that in this specific case, murder during commission of a felony ( armed robbery ) would be classed in many states as felony murder and would be first degree murder. See http://criminal.lawyers.com/criminal-law-basics/murder-durin...
So if this is a felony murder state, the slow motion would actually help the jury come to the correct conclusion.