Going to the Movies? Watch Out Who You Take Along
Feb. 9, 2011— -- Movies can recreate history in a convincing way, leaving us with vivid memories of events that helped shape our lives. Even if they never really happened.
"For millions of people the way Jesse Eisenberg played the role of Mark Zuckerberg became Mark Zuckerberg," according to cognitive psychologist Richard Harris. "Whether that happens to be true, or not true," the image portrayed by Eisenberg in the Oscar contender Social Network will for many people always be Zuckerberg, the cofounder of Facebook, Harris said.
Harris, a psychology professor at Kansas State University in Manhattan, has been studying how movies affect us for more than a decade, but he began experiencing the lingering impact of a good drama many years earlier.
"I saw 'The Ten Commandments' as a kid, and to this day, and for the rest of my life, every time something comes up about Moses I think of Charlton Heston," he said.
Harris's latest study, involving more than 400 college students on his campus, found that a movie's impact doesn't just depend on the content, although that's by far the most important element. It also makes a difference who you see the movie with.
The bottom line is this: Don't see a porno flick with your parents. Do take your lover to see a romantic story. You're more likely to feel disgust than sadness over violence or raunchy sex, but being sad might be more useful, even if the dog dies in the end.
Harris's latest research, to be published in an upcoming issue of the journal Applied Cognitive Psychology, concedes some of his findings are preliminary, and they result from an imperfect world where even a research scientist has to make mild compromises.
For part of the study, he had to be satisfied with what his participants thought would happen, not with an actual real-life experiment.
For example, in his Midwestern community, he couldn't sit down his students with their parents to watch a movie with bits of explicit sex. If he had tried that he probably couldn't have stopped running until he reached California.
