An Open University academic is behind a short film on the BBC’s Morning Live programme that featured a fascinating experiment before the General Election on ‘changing your mind’.
Dr Jim Turner, Senior Lecturer in Forensic Psychology at the OU, is one of a team of OU academics who has inspired one of six short films made in a partnership between OU and the BBC.
This film features a concept known as “confirmation bias” to see how easy people find it to change their mind.
As Dr Turner explains in the film, confirmation bias “is a bias that causes you to look for information that confirms things that you already believe”.
The BBC brought together a small panel of volunteers from across the UK’s political spectrum to take part in a small-scale test of confirmation bias.
Jim worked with the BBC team to design the test, in which the volunteers were asked to assign political policy statements to the party they thought they came from. Find out the results of the experiment here.
After filming Jim said:
“I found working with the BBC team on this to be both fascinating and reassuring. Fascinating, because I got to see the kind of planning and practical film-making stuff that, as TV viewers, we normally don’t know about.
“Reassuring, because the BBC team at every stage were really committed to accuracy, fairness, and an overall ethical treatment of the topic. They didn’t come in with a predetermined ‘story’ that they wanted to tell, and look for things to support it, they really wanted to find out – which was particularly appropriate for the piece on confirmation bias, of course.”
The films were commissioned by Broadcast and Partnerships and are supported by the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences with particular relevance to Psychology and Counselling
- Commissioned by Dr Caroline Ogilvie, Director, Broadcast and Partnerships
- Academic Consultants:
Dr Trudi Macagnino – Eco Wins
Professor Gemma Briggs – Distracted Driving
Dr Jim Turner – Changing Your Mind
Dr Sinead Eccles – Brain Health Hacks
Professor Kesi Mahendran – Are You Extreme?
Professor Lara Frumkin – Courtroom Accents
- Media Fellow: Professor Zoe Walkington
- Broadcast Project Manager: Clair Robinson
- Supporting Online Content: Patrick Kearney, Xinmiao Zhang, Matthew Ray and Steff Easom
Supporting Online content:
Visit our Broadcast website OU Connect where you can watch each of the films and find content exploring the films’ themes further.
ENDS
