Shankar Vedantam

Yeah, so one of the greatest sports rivalries in the country is between the New York Yankees and the Boston Red Sox.

And we've been able to run some studies up at Yankee Stadium with Red Sox and Yankees fans.

And what we found is that Yankees fans had distorted judgments of how close Fenway Park in Boston was.

So we gave them a map and asked them to draw where they thought Boston was.

And they thought it was much closer to New York than it actually was.

If you asked non-fans, they were pretty accurate in estimating how far away Fenway Park was.

But they're not threatened by this group in the same way that Yankees fans are.

And so they're not distorting their perceptions in the same way.

And so this is something that is adaptive to people is if there's a threat in the environment, you got to get ready to act.

And seeing it as closer can sometimes trigger that reaction.

But we see it with groups as well.

We've run a number of studies in New York and around the rest of the country.

And what we find is that people who are threatened by illegal immigration from Mexico see Mexico City as much closer to the border than it is.

But also how many people they think are coming over the border.

They tend to overestimate the size of the group.

The body cams operate under the assumption that if we just capture it all in the cameras, that it's going to dramatically reduce police violence because it's going to keep people honest.

And the problem with that is that people, when they look at these videos in a court, the jury, for example, is biased in how they interpret them.

So there's research from NYU showing that if you identify with the police and you watch one of these videos of a conflict between a police officer and a suspect, you see the suspect at fault.

and you're looking more at the suspect and therefore you're getting the information they're doing something wrong.

If you actually don't identify the police, you are looking at the police officer to see what they're doing wrong and coming to a very different conclusion.