In February 2007 the Supreme Court heard a case based on approximately 15 minutes of video evidence from two police vehicles. dashboard cameras: Footage shows the front of a police car that was chasing a driver in Georgia, before it collides with the back of the driver’s car, which then crashes. The driver, 19-year-old Victor Harris, was permanently disabled by the incident.
harris sued the officer Which hit his car. He alleged that Officer Timothy Scott had used excessive force. Before the Supreme Court considered the case, lower court judges had already reviewed the video footage and ruled in Harris’s favor, with one writing that Harris posed little danger to the public despite his high speed.
But the Supreme Court disagreed and ruled 8-1 in favor of the police officer. In the majority opinion, the judges determined that Harris posed a “real and imminent danger” to the public and wrote that “We are pleased to allow the videotape to speak for itself.”
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The courts had reviewed the same video. But they came to dramatically different conclusions about what it showed. Indeed, the nine Supreme Court justices did not all agree on what they saw in the footage; In a dissent, the late Justice John Paul Stevens wrote The video “confirms rather than refutes” the lower courts’ ruling in Harris’ favor. This episode raises the question: How can different people see so many different things while watching the same video?
“Seeing is not just what our eyes physically see, but also the experiences and thoughts that viewers bring to images,” says Sandra Ristowska, associate professor of media studies at the University of Colorado Boulder.
in the years that followed scott vs harris, the matter has become best example There is more to this incident studied by Legal scholars and psychologists alike. “Video is everywhere, from our phones to surveillance cameras on city streets. And it has become an important form of evidence in court,” says Ristowska. And understanding how it can be interpreted differently depending on who sees it is important to ensure justice is applied fairly, she says.
How your brain changes what you see
A complicating factor in how a person watches a video is what psychologists have dubbed the “slow motion bias.” In A 2016 studyResearchers showed that when viewers watched surveillance footage of a shooting in slow motion, they perceived the shooter as “more deliberate.”
Similarly, if a video is unstable, viewers may interpret events more intensely.
Then there’s “camera perspective bias,” says Neil Feigenson, a law professor at Quinnipiac University. one in series of studies At Ohio University, participants watched videos of people confessing to crimes. In some videos, the camera was focused on a suspect’s face, while in others, it was focused on the interrogators. Viewers who watched videos that focused on the suspects’ faces were more likely to rate their confessions as “more voluntary.”
Eyewitness accounts may also be corrupted after the fact. For example, if you and a friend witness a car accident and then talk about it, you may unconsciously adopt some of your friend’s memories as your own. This phenomenon is known as memory contamination, says Miko Wilford, an associate professor in the psychology department at Iowa State University.
A similar effect may occur if eyewitnesses are asked to recall an event that they also saw on video, she says.
“We are very bad at remembering the origin of information in our memory,” says Wilford.
When a person retrieves a memory, he or she is “not playing back the recording,” explains Elizabeth Loftus, a psychology professor at the University of California, Irvine. Rather, she says, “we are creating that memory”. In other words, the brain collects bits and pieces of information from sometimes different times and places, and commits them to memory. “Once that happens, it’s not easy to distinguish which piece came from where,” says Loftus.
Loftus and his colleagues in 2016 published a paper Arguing that police officers should write down the details of an incident before viewing body camera footage: If officers watch such a video first, it may strengthen their memories of the details shown in it – but weaken their ability to recall other information that was not captured in the recording.
Humans are particularly attuned to visual information. Ristowska says that more processing power of the brain’s prefrontal cortex is devoted to visual information than to audio information.
This helps explain why people generally trust video evidence – even when they know it is false. In a landmark 2008 study on this effect, researchers asked the students To perform gambling operations on computers. When students were falsely accused of cheating and shown a fake video of the alleged violation, researchers found that the “vast majority” of students confessed “without any resistance.”
“People intuitively tend to believe that the video gives them the objective reality of what it shows,” Feigenson says. “it is naive realism“
How bias can affect an audience
Cognitive biases can also influence our interpretations of a video. Take “selective attention,” for example: If asked to focus on a specific aspect of a video, viewers may miss other important details, Ristowska says. People can also be conditioned to see what others want. in 2024 Research by Feigenson and colleagues showed that a lawyer’s description of a video could alter jurors’ perceptions of the actual footage.
A person’s beliefs can also shape his or her visual perception. For example, people who identify with law enforcement are more likely to see police officers acting lawfully in video evidence than people who do not identify with law enforcement, Ristowska says. A person’s opinion on other potentially divisive topics such as abortionarmy or death penalty It may also affect how they view video evidence.
In 2009, when researchers surveyed 1,350 Americans about the videos in the center scott vs harris, Most agree with the majority view of the Supreme Court. But researchers identified “sharp differences” along cultural and ideological lines, including a person’s views on race, income and social hierarchy. To Ristowska research shows That “seeing is believing” ultimately depends on who is seeing.
Loftus, who has studied human memory and law for decades, says that ideology may help explain why different people might view the video evidence of the recent killing of a woman, Renee Good, by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officer in Minnesota in such different ways. “People already have this bias that either ICE is good or ICE is bad,” she says, “and that can affect how they understand the behavior they’re seeing.”
Should we change the way we view videos?
To help address the problems that can arise when different people interpret video evidence differently, Ristowska says viewers should slow down and “engage more thoughtfully with this content.”
And Feigenson advises viewers to recognize that “other reasonable people may reasonably see things differently,” adding that “this can help reduce the overconfidence in video evidence that naive realism produces.”
Adding artificially generated videos into the mix makes things even more complicated. In 2025, Loftus, in collaboration with his colleagues at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab, published a paper This showed how artificial intelligence can alter people’s image memory.
Participants were shown different images, including a photo of a man and a woman who were not smiling. The participants were shown the images again, except this time the photos were slightly manipulated using AI. In the case of one depicting a man and a woman, the researchers altered the image to paste smiles on them. When shown the original image with the woman’s face obscured, people later misremembered her smile.
The idea of AI-initiated false memories is “concerning,” says Pat Pataranutporn, an assistant professor at the MIT Media Lab and co-author of the study. But he hopes the findings could also have positive implications. If people have traumatic memories, for example, “AI can help them remember the misremembering in a more positive way,” he says.
