Documentary Film as Interreligious Dialogue: A Cognitive Perspective

Abstract

Research and personal experience affirm that watching a movie can change the way someone lives their life. Documentary storytelling is a multidimensional change agent, a digital media artifact that is rooted in real communities, real lives, and real stories. Because documentary is rooted in the human social world, watching it is a cognitively, psychologically, emotionally, socially, and politically complicated act. Thus, it is a potent medium for stimulating discourse, reflection, and behavioral change. This article explores the power of visual storytelling and positive media representation as a Parasocial-Relational form of interreligious dialogue and delves into practical application as it contemplates best practices for how filmmakers might harness that power, reviewing literature on the possible social, cognitive, and neurobiological impact of documentary. This interdisciplinary cognitive-sociological theory of change posits documentary film as a lever for increased interreligious competence because of its unique ability to disarm with visual storytelling and engaging characters, leading to a potentially reflexive experience of humanization and perceptual shift.

1. Introduction

In the field of interreligious dialogue, conversations abound about effective methodologies and impact measurement. Interreligious dialogue enjoys robust visibility on the international stage, with a broad range of state support, intergovernmental agencies, and prominent participants such as Pope Francis and the Dalai Lama. The primary modality of discursive dialogue—chiefly high-profile religious leaders giving speeches or participating in panels—remains at the forefront of dialogue agendas. This is problematic because discursive dialogue is, of all the various forms of dialogue, one of the least interpersonally engaging, by dint of its privileging of preselected speakers and little room for informal socializing. However, dialogue events at the nimbler nonprofit and grassroots levels are able to adopt methodologies of interaction that go beyond formal, discursive dialogue events with featured speakers. But the reach and potential impact of these events are lessened through lack of visibility and lack of resources. That is, without the wide-ranging (and often well-funded) reach of religious institutions and governments, smaller dialogue groups tend only to attract people from similar outlooks who already believe in dialogue, who are willing to participate, and who believe in its inherent worth. Interreligious dialogue is often a “circle of the convinced”, as interfaith dialoguers at Religions for Peace articulated to me (Lindsay 2021a). Therefore, there is little potential for impact, as participants generally already share pluralistic values and cultural referents.

Even if these community-level interreligious dialogues were able to attract more axiomatically diverse participants, there are two obstacles to fostering the substantial perspectival shift that dialogue programmers aim for. The first is the irony that, while a truly diverse gathering offers for potential for dialogue to foster meaningful change, it also bears higher emotional and psychological stress levels and is more challenging to create the “safe haven”1 necessary for transparent interpersonal revelation and reparations (Bowlby 1988; Bowlby 2014; Collins and Feeney 2000).

The second is that while local dialogues (chiefly those fostered by community nonprofits or grassroots groups) are more likely to have more interpersonal interactivity and microsociological impact potential, due to funding and logistical constraints they are typically geographically bound and source participants from similar cultures, therefore reducing the intercultural variety of the event and the opportunity to enter a quality of radical difference that can propose a perspective shift.

To understand the potential reach and impact potential of dialogue beyond its reputation as a “circle of the convinced”, I have begun to look into dialogue methodologies that combine accessible points of interaction across substantive social divides, with the potential to create a “safe haven” to increase psychological openness and reflexivity, and yet still bearing a modicum of impact potential (Lindsay 2020a, 2020b, 2020c, 2021b). As a sociologist and documentary filmmaker specializing in religious diversity, I will discuss in this article the use of documentary film as a form of interreligious dialogue, one that bears modest social impact potential to guide audiences from an intercultural outlook of fear, founded on stereotypes, to one of curiosity, a sense of complexity, and common ground across the crevasse of difference.

In this article, I intend to explore these questions while considering a cognitive and neurobiological understanding of behavioral and perspectival change. We know from our personal experience, and from research, that watching a movie can change the way someone lives their life. Documentary storytelling is a multidimensional change agent, a digital media artifact, yet connected to the world in a way scripted narrative does not purport to be. Documentary is rooted in the world, and watching it is a cognitively, psychologically, emotionally, socially, and politically complicated act. Thus, it is potentially a potent medium for stimulating discourse, reflection, and behavioral change. As noted by Brylla and Kramer, “documentaries have a greater potential than fiction films to impact our attitudes towards and interaction with the world, helping construct our social, cultural and individual identities” (Brylla and Kramer 2018). This article explores the power of visual storytelling and positive media representation as a potential form of interreligious dialogue. After establishing working definitions of interreligious dialogue and documentary film, it touches upon a literature review of emergent scholarship about the social impact of documentary film. Then, the article addresses the power of media in the formation of interpretive frameworks and schematic social imagination, finally introducing an exploration of cognitive and neurobiological frameworks for contemplating how documentary film might serve as an effective form of interreligious dialogue. It offers up an interdisciplinary cognitive-sociological theory of change whereby documentary film can act as a lever for increased intercultural and interreligious competence (Deardorff 2009; Morgan and Sandage 2016), because of its unique ability to disarm audiences with visual storytelling and engaging characters—and why the neurobiological events and cognitive processes surrounding these experiences may increase potential for changed perceptions and behaviors. It also delves into practical application as it contemplates best practices for how filmmakers might harness that power.

The theory of change described in this article grows out of the understanding that intercultural competence is a complicated skillset dependent upon both cognitive and sociocultural factors. Documentary film is a unique medium for engaging (1) cognitive components of change such as knowledge acquisition and worldview shifting; (2) neurobiological components of change such as neurochemicals and neurocoupling; and (3) social components for change, through both the para-social relationships offered through the medium of film and also through fellow audience members who experience the film together and engage its themes in reflexive conversation and new behavioral commitments. This article will explore all three trajectories for shifting perspectives, attitudes, and actions.

2. Terms

2.1. Defining Interreligious Dialogue

When considering the possibility of watching a documentary film as an experience of interreligious dialogue that can create perceptual, cognitive shifts through parasocial contact, some terms must be clarified, chiefly interreligious dialogue and documentary film. In this article, interreligious dialogue is understood as an intentional encounter between affiliates of diverse religions and faith claims, who gather with the pro-social intent to strengthen community ties and bridge social divides. Religion can provide a rich starting point for discussion, as it implies both diversity and ideals, because the gatherers are personally invested in the theme, and because religions tend to offer a toolbox for talking about reconciliation, peace, and justice. It is in this sense that we refer to the possibility of documentary form as a form of interreligious dialogue. Thus, the term “interreligious dialogue” should not be taken too literally. It is neither always religious, nor always between different religions, nor always dialogic (conversational).

Indeed, interreligious dialogue methods come in many forms, which can be categorized into the “dialogue canopy”, a 2005 typology authored by Eric Sharpe (Sharpe 2005). Each modality of dialogue speaks to discrete problems and solutions to the challenges of religious diversity (Abu-Nimer et al. 2007; Eck 2007; Panikkar 1978; Swidler et al. 2007). The typology can be used to catalogue several models of religious pluralism in Rome, both institutional and at the grassroots level. The five “branches” of the canopy of dialogue forms frequently referred to in this analysis are: Discursive (Theological and Academic), Social-Relational, Spiritual, Humanitarian, and Creative. This article posits that documentary film can be regarded as a Social-Relational form of dialogue—or, more precisely, a Parasocial-Relational form of dialogue, which brings unique individuals into contact—or at least parasocial contact, a term that will be further explored below.

2.2. Defining Documentary Film

The documentary form can be differentiated from narrative films in its reputation as “nonfiction” art, rooted in the “real world”. Attempted definitions of documentary film reflect documentary’s connection to “reality” as well as its nature as a subjective, mediated interpretation of the reality on the part of the filmmaker. Grierson’s 1966 definition of documentary as the “creative treatment of actuality” (Grierson 1966) is in line with Nichols’ reflection that “documentaries are sometimes considered ways of conveying information. They inform us about the world. And yet, they are never simply that. Tables, charts, spreadsheets convey information, but documentaries speak in the voice of a filmmaker and convey a perspective on the world” (Brylla and Kramer 2018). Sheila Curran Bernard, author of Documentary Storytelling, notes that “factuality alone does not define documentary films; it’s what the filmmaker does with those factual elements, weaving them into an overall narrative that strives to be as compelling as it is truthful” (Bernard 2023). Betsy McLane specifies that “documentary filmmakers limit themselves to extracting and arranging from what already exists rather than making up content. They may re-create what they have observed, but they do not create totally out of imagination as creators of stories can do” (McLane 2012). The “truth” status of documentary is contested by all who venture bravely into defining this form.

Documentary is an important reality-shaping communication, because of its claims to truth. Documentaries are always grounded in real life and make a claim to tell us something worth knowing about it. … [Documentarians] manipulate and distort reality like all filmmakers, but they still make a claim for making a truthful representation of reality. Throughout the history of documentary film, makers, critics, and viewers have argued about what constitutes trustworthy storytelling about reality.

(Aufderheide 2016)

The genre’s claims to “truth” [are] richly problematic.… Indeed, the fact that most documentarians refer to the people who populate their films as “characters” is blasphemy to some purists, who would rather refer to them as “subjects” or “participants”. But using the word “character” is more honest. It acknowledges the fact that documentary editing is a highly refined form of storytelling, one that sculpts larger-than-life performances out of everyday people doing ordinary things.

(Bricca 2023)

How do we dare speak of a truth that has been chosen, edited, provoked, oriented, deformed? Where is the truth? … We have only provided a few pieces of a puzzle that is missing most of its parts. Thus each viewer reconstructs a whole as a function of their own projections and identifications. [Our characters are] perceived globally by means of mere fragments of themselves.

(Rouch and Feld 2003)

Not only is the substance of documentary film elusive, but also the form. Documentaries come in a huge variety of aesthetic and narrative approaches, described very loosely in a typology developed by Bill Nichols known as the “Six Modes of Documentary Film”. Nichols identified six broad categories for organizing documentary approaches: expository, poetic, observational, participatory, reflexive, and performative. Although Nichols defines each classification, a brief study of this typology reveals quickly that the classifications process is highly subjective and contested. In keeping with limitless aesthetic approaches, Nichols acknowledges the variety of tasks undertaken by documentaries as they illuminate or explain different aspects and contexts of our shared social world.

Some documentaries set out to explain aspects of the world to us. They analyze problems and propose solutions. They try to account for aspects of the historical world by means of their representations. They seek to mobilize our support for one position instead of another. Other documentaries invite us to understand aspects of the world more fully. They observe, describe, or poetically evoke situations and interactions. They try to enrich our understanding of aspects of the historical world by means of their representations. They complicate our adherence to positions by undercutting certainty with complexity or doubt. …We need explanations, with their concepts and categories, to get things done. If we know what causes poverty or sexual abuse, pollution or war we can then take measures to address the issue. We need understanding, with its requirements of empathy and insight, to grasp the implications and consequences of what we do. Actions rely on values, and values are subject to question. Lives, as well as concepts and categories, are at stake. Understanding, like critical perspective, leavens explanations, policies, solutions.

(Nichols 2017)

Suffice to say: what constitutes a “documentary” is less and less clear as experimentation and hybridization complicate the thin line between nonfiction and fiction, between fact and interpretation. Nevertheless, the “grey area” of the documentary form does not throw into too much question its status as a potential form of interreligious dialogue, as the most relevant aspect of the power of documentary to information schematic social associations, interactive behaviors, and perceptual shifting also applies to fiction filmmaking. The “truth” status of documentary—at least the truthiness attributed to it over and above that of narrative filmmaking—serves to intensify its authority as a source of social information and, therefore, its potential impact upon the schematic imagination. This introduces an ethical responsibility on the part of the documentary filmmaker, given that the tone of representation—trusted as authoritative by an audience—is presented and received as “truthful”, and therefore, filmmakers are behooved to create precise renderings of communities and all their complexity. Indeed, Caty Borum Chatoo and Will Jenkins find that social-issue documentaries are even influential for U.S. policy engagement “when they are perceived as emotional, factual, and nonpartisan. Documentary is thus positioned as ‘situated knowledge’ in a policymaking context—narrative that presents human implications and lived experiences” (Borum Chattoo and Jenkins 2019). The perceived authority and impact of documentaries is attributed to the dual defining characteristics of documentary: creative expression and reflection of truth.

Increasingly in the documentary world, filmmakers are encouraged to think very deliberately about story structure and character development, heightening the mediated nature of the “reality” the documentary purports to present. The most preeminent manuals on documentary filmmaking (Fadiman and Levelle 2008; de Jong and Knudsen 2014; Rabiger and Hermann 2020) devote time to narrative construction and emotional appeal. Sheila Curran Bernard argues that a documentary should tell “a story for greatest emotional impact and audience participation” (Bernard 2023), and most documentary manuals suggest filmmakers follow a classic Aristotelian three-act story structure for maximum suspense, engagement, and universal relevance. Audiences, thus, experience the documentarian’s perspective more than they are experiencing an objective “reality”. Therefore, the interreligious dialogue we propose to be entered into through documentary viewing is more with the filmmaker than with the community or characters being portrayed.

3. Discussion

3.1. Social Cognition and Socialization: Interactive Enforcement of Out-Group Bias

As we contemplate the power of documentary film for dissolving social bias, or debiasing, let us begin by stating the question at the heart of this challenge: why is inclusive social diversity so hard for humans to get right? As foregrounded above, there are two dimensions to our resistance to the other: cognitive and social.

We are cognitively predisposed against including those we perceive as “other”. Since the origin of our species, our brains have had one main job: to keep us alive. One of the primary factors of survival fitness is staying close to one’s own tribe. The human brain exerts an array of unconscious pressures to facilitate and maintain closeness to one’s in-group group—and caution about one’s out-group—through a series of shortcuts known as cognitive biases. Cognitive scientists have identified over 180 cognitive biases2 that that make us more efficient in our social worlds (Baron 1997). Our cognitive errors instigate a range of survival-enhancing behaviors that bear social implications: we are dependent upon our tendencies to produce meaningful patterns from purely random data, to infer a great deal from too little information, to see what we expect to see, to see what we want to see, to believe what we are told, to imagine that others agree with us (Gilovich 2008). These tendencies are especially present in religious environments, writes Wesley J. Wildman, as “well-established cognitive tendencies regularly and predictably produce errors in belief and interpretation, that such vulnerabilities to error are amply present in religious settings, and thus that means of diagnosis and correction of such tendencies to error have a potentially vital role to play in religious settings” (Wildman 2009).

For most of our 380,000 years as homo sapiens we have lived in religiously, ethnically, and ideologically homogenous social worlds, so this adaptation has worked out quite nicely. Without this efficient form of processing, we would be paralyzed, constrained to time-consuming rational assessment of literally every aspect of our lives. In the time it takes to assess a threat, you could already be eaten by a tiger or shot by a spear, so your brain helps you act fast and stay alive.

But the world has changed immensely, especially in the last 200 years. If we date the beginning of modern “social diversity” generously to the Industrial Revolution, we have only been tasked with productive and egalitarian collaboration across social divides for 0.05% of our species’ history. In a 90-year human lifespan that would be only 16 days. It makes sense that our cognition has not fully caught up with the exhaustive upheaval of our social fabric in these recent centuries. So, we are collectively infantile about handling social diversity and all its complexity. Although our brains evolved in homogenous social environments, our social world has changed immensely in the modern age, and what was once “adaptive” functioning is now “maladaptive”. We must recognize that our efforts at pluralism are impeded by cognitive functioning which, although meant to keep us alive and connected to our tribe, may also generate negative emotional associations and simplistic generalizations. When our survival-minded brains prime us to be cautious about anyone who is not like us, our default setting looks a lot like xenophobia—fear of the stranger.

Cognitive resistance to otherness is reinforced by another layer of complication: sociologists call it socialization, or how we are shaped by the world through our social interactions from the earliest weeks of our infancy. Our knee-jerk “fear of the stranger” is powerfully reinforced by our socialization to think of “the other” in line with the biases of our families, peers, religions, workplaces, and the media. Sociologists who study socialization—or how we are shaped by our social environments such as family, religion, school, media, and our peer groups—have found that we co-create our very sense of reality and meaning. How you interpret the world is tied intimately to who taught you about the world. As sociologists Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann wrote in The Sociology of Knowledge, “Conversation is the primary vehicle for reality-maintenance” (Berger and Luckmann 2011). Wesley Wildman points out that religious environments are especially susceptible to socialized collective belief patterns:

We give our friends special authority to determine what we believe about the world, other people, and ourselves. While that saves energy and increases the richness of our interpretation of reality at low cost to us, it can also lead to serious errors of judgment and mistaken beliefs. … Members of religious communities tend to believe what their religious leaders tell them, particularly in religious groups that esteem their leaders highly and embrace the role of centralized authority in their common life. In this way, religious groups are frequently able to maintain leadership-defined plausibility structures even in the face of considerable evidence to the contrary. The authority-laced social fabric of religious groups appears to depend to a significant degree on this tendency to believe what we are told, and the outcomes are not always positive.

(Wildman 2009)

Further igniting this complexity is the fact that that the same social phenomenon can have a different meaning for different people, according to what kinds of perceptual lenses they engage to interpret the world, what kind of discourses they are engaging, and what kind of media they are watching. We must contend with multiple realities, different moral priorities, differing needs and limited resources—often fighting for power.

Clearly, diversity training and intercultural/interreligious dialogue practitioners have a lot to contend with here—between our biased brains and our socialization, the deck is stacked against social change in the direction of equity and inclusion.

3.2. The Power of Media Images in the Socialization Process

The power of documentary film as a form of dialogue has roots in the cognitive force of visual information and the unique status of media as a powerful agent of socialization and re-socialization. Digital media readily informs the development of processes of cognition and effect, from the social adaptation of individuals to socio-cultural conditions and social roles, standards, and social groups; to interiorization processes whereby individuals master social standards and values; and exteriorization processes whereby internalized social norms and standards are translated into reactions to external cultural stimuli (Uznienė 2014).

How marginalized groups are represented in Western news cycles and fictional media is part of how negative associations and stereotypes are established and perpetuated around demographics most likely to be underrepresented, misrepresented, tokenized, or stereotyped: people of color, Muslims, the LGBTQ+ community, women. In the formation of our schematic imaginations about “the other”, media may constitute our only source of information. Cognitive science recognizes schema formation as a hardwired cognitive disposition that propels us to automatically turn to “folk psychology”, explained by Brylla (Brylla and Kramer 2018) as everyday knowledge to interpret social interactions and to make sense of the motivations and actions of others (Currie 2004; Hutto 2007). Media informs this narrative practice of social meaning-making, including for the media practitioners themselves, resulting in what Carl Plantinga calls, the “filmmaker–audience loop” (Plantinga 2011). Negative media representations take hold not only on a perceptual and interpretive level, but also on an emotional level, constituting negative emotional associations which can take root subconsciously and are resistant to change because they are implicit and rarely interrogated. As Arendt and Northup note, “Associations can be activated irrespective of whether a person considers these evaluations as accurate or inaccurate. Most important, specific associations, which get activated when encountering a social stimulus, are the basis on which automatic affective reactions are built. For example, viewing local television news about a crime committed by an African American (news stereotype) may activate specific concepts in memory related to the ‘Black criminal’ stereotype”. The authors also found that long-term exposure to news stereotypes can influence implicit attitudes, which in turn predict social behaviors and lead to negative societal consequences under certain circumstances (Arendt and Northup 2015).

The vastly negative and imprecise representation of marginalized populations, well-documented by an overwhelming amount of scholarly literature and research studies,3 has fostered widespread hegemonic hostility that bears real-life consequences on legislative and interpersonal dimensions. Beth Haller explains that Western societies are mass-mediated, and “their citizens understand ‘reality’ through personal experience and mass media information” (Haller 2010). In 2015, the average U.S. resident consumed 15.5 hours of media a day (Yuen 2019); considering that 58% of American TV content viewers feel that media, from news to entertainment, reinforces harmful stereotypes about diverse people in the United States (Stoll 2021), that 46% of news stories reinforce gender stereotypes, and that only 4% of stories clearly challenge gender stereotypes, it is clear that negative media representations are ubiquitous (Hedegaard 2020).

Given that this article specifically speaks to the use of interreligious dialogue to disrupt stereotypes and negative attitudes across religious divides, it is useful to harness research on negative, essentialized representations of Muslims in American mass media. In addition to Jack Shaheen’s body of research on “the TV Arab”, in which he builds a typology of typical Arab stereotypes fund in media (Shaheen 1984, 1985, 2015), we can also point to his “Three B’s” theory of Muslim representation as belly dancers, billionaire sheiks, and bombers. Muslim-as-terrorist has become an especially prevalent representation in American news since the attacks of 11 September 2001 (Byng 2008; Hutcheson et al. 2004; Hutchison and Rosenthal 2010). Remarkably, Jackson (Jackson 2010) found that Osama bin Laden may have been the first Muslim with whom non-Muslim Americans had intergroup contact and formed a parasocial relationship.

Undoubtedly, this trend in representation contributed to widespread ambivalence and negative associations with Islam in the collective consciousness of the American public (Pew Research Center 2010), whereby “Muslims” are essentialized into a handful of unflattering superficialities—a trend known as the “outgroup homogeneity effect”, or undifferentiated categorical perceptions of outgroup members (Moskowitz 2005). This leads directly to the formation of prejudice and the enactment of discrimination (Kite and Whitley 2016; Nelson 2009), as well as shaping audiences’ long-term mental representations of the real world and even change their general beliefs toward these groups (Polichak and Gerrig 2002). Dyer further attests that the way social groups are treated in real life is a direct consequence of their media representation (Dyer 2002, 2006). Research conducted by the Opportunity Agenda has demonstrated that such stereotypes can also inform the self-esteem, self-perception and self-identity of members of the stigmatized outgroup (Cortés 2000; Zhang and Haller 2013), detrimentally impacting their cognitive and social performance due to long-term stress arousal (Schmader et al. 2008).

Nevertheless, stereotypes are a product of our schematic cognition, an important tool for navigating social environments and natural hazards and cannot be argued against. The problem is introduced when they form the basis for discrimination and detrimental enforcements of hegemonic in-group/out-group binaries. This tendency has had calamitous consequences in our human family. Discrimination across social divides is one of the oldest aspects of the human condition—and one of the costliest, culminating in seemingly endless examples of workplace and housing discrimination, economic burden, depression and suicide, polarization, hate crimes, police brutality, violent conflict—even war and genocide. Researchers found in 2020 that racism and sexism cost the US economy USD 16 trillion (Cook 2020). Conversely, in 2019 a Boston Consulting Group study found that companies with more diverse management teams have 19–36% higher revenues due to innovation (Lorenzo et al. 2022). If for no other reason than the fact that diversity is not going anywhere—twenty years from now, non-Hispanic Whites will constitute a minority within the US (Frey 2022)—it is worth considering how the power of media can be harnessed to pro-social effect. If it has been part of the problem, it has equal power to form part of the solution to our collective, expensive troubles with social inclusion. Audiences are ready for a shift toward inclusive media: 68% of American media viewers said in a survey that it is important for media to represent the diversity in American communities (Stoll 2021). A Televisa Univision study states that is number is closer to 80% (O’Connor 2017). Moreover, the 2016 Hollywood Diversity Report affirmed that “increasingly diverse audiences prefer diverse film and television content”. More specifically, the report found that films with more diverse cast had the highest median global box office receipts and the highest median return on investment. It also showed that social media engagement peaked for scripted broadcast and cable television shows that also had more diverse casts. Acknowledging the power of media to influence attitudes and behaviors tied to social diversity and inclusion efforts, we now consider specifically the format of documentary films.

3.3. The Social Impact of Documentary Films

This article focuses on the cognitive and neurobiological implications of documentary storytelling and its potential to incite perceptual shifts and experiences of interpersonal connectedness. This conversation can be foregrounded with a companion exploration of literature on the potential of documentary change for positive social impact and increasing intercultural competence across religious divides. What do we know about the success of filmmakers who have set out to use their films for social good? Can their films’ social impact be measured? The field of impact measurement has burgeoned in the past years, as documentary filmmakers become beholden to governmental and granting organizations’ reporting requirements. The desire to measure social change tied to documentary is not only rooted in the need to satisfy funders but also a genuine concern to develop effective prosocial interventions that harness the tools of documentary.

A “folk psychological” or intuitive approach to documentary film’s social impact might argue that documentary films can have a social impact by raising awareness about an issue, or by inspiring people to act. Documentary filmmakers, by presenting fact-based information and providing multiple perspectives on a subject, can give voice to marginalized or underrepresented groups and challenge dominant narratives or stereotypes. Documentary film can also provide context and historical background, helping to create a more nuanced understanding of a subject and think more deeply about the issues and characters at hand. By presenting a variety of viewpoints and evidence, documentary films can encourage critical thinking and open-mindedness, helping to dissolve biased beliefs or assumptions. Documentary producers can partner with mission-driven organizations committed to disrupting stereotypes, in order to amplify message and impact. Producers can also strive to hire filmmaking collaborators and crew from demographics traditionally underrepresented in the industry, such as women and people of color.

These commitments seem like commendable guiding principles, but the next question concerns the measurement or proof of impact. Impact questions around narrative studio and independent films have engaged traditional metrics of film “success”, focusing on studio economic indicators that are relevant for large-budget films. But the author notes that efforts focused on box office receipts and audience size are “really measures of successful film marketing or promotion, missing the mark when it comes to understanding social impact” (Whiteman 2004). Indeed, organizations producing documentaries face the added challenge of convincing funders or executives that their productions deliver social value in addition to (or in some cases, instead of) economic value. Yet, in the public interest media sector, the lack of shared definitions or standardized measures of multidimensional concepts such as “engagement” and “impact” is still a challenge for organizations investing resources in interactive documentary production and trying to make the case for its social value (Flynn 2017).

In the independent documentary film industry, a conversation about measurement has erupted, although scholarship on the matter is decidedly emergent. According to Karlin and Johnson, film campaigns are utilizing a broad array of strategies to engage audience members, including “action kits, screening programs, educational curriculums and classes, house parties, seminars, panels” (Karlin and Johnson 2011) that often turn into “ongoing ‘legacy’ programs that are updated and revised to continue beyond the film’s domestic and international theatrical, DVD and television windows” (About Us. Participant Media n.d.) We have seen the rising occupation of the “impact producer” and companies dedicated to writing impact strategies for documentaries (Doc Society 2020; Impact Producers Lab Doc Society n.d.; Meet the Impact Producer n.d.; Mejia 2022; Social Impact Producer n.d.).

By way of a literature review, the scholarship on documentary impact ventures into debates around how to define Social Return on Investment (SROI), affirming that the first step is to choose clear impact predictors (Flynn 2017). Indicators can point to different levels of impact: attitudes on levels of individual, group, society; financials shifts on corporate levels; shifts in law or governmental policy. Local grassroots impact might be staged through the preparation of small group discussion or questions guide, or downloadable curriculum materials, to accompany film screening in interfaith groups and educational settings. Educational curriculums and partnerships are a common theme, as are invited screenings with influencers and hashtags, challenges, and pledges. Placing films in classroom curricula is commonly recommended as an accessible and effective impact strategy. Borum Chatoo finds that emotional engagement is a highlight mechanism to explain human-narrative-centered documentary’s potent audience impact potential.

Scholars have found that documentary can influence audiences because of its emotional appeal and narrative transportation into an engaging story, perceived realism, capacity to fuel empathy, and ability to re-frame audience attitudes about fraught—often ideologically polarized—social issues (Borum Chattoo and Jenkins 2019).

Sean Flynn, in attempting to define what constitutes a documentary’s success or impact—and how to measure it—identifies desired outcomes such as “sustained attention, greater narrative comprehension, enhanced learning, empathy or civic engagement; and larger societal impacts like improved public discourse, behavior change or policy change”. Flynn also emphasizes the possibility of tracking “more subtle dimensions of social change—like the long-term impacts of a participatory media making process rather than the final media product—as well as a variety of hard-to-measure institutional impacts, such as innovations in artistic forms or organizational process” (Flynn 2017). The social value of interactive documentaries is multidimensional and this conversation has also begun to “harness the new streams of data offered by online and mobile platforms to track user behavior: sites visited, petitions signed, letters sent, networks joined, rants recorded. Emerging search and ‘sentiment’ tools are able to track a story or meme as it travels across the Web, picking up velocity and influence and morphing as it goes” (Clark and Abrash 2011a).

The literature collectively emphasizes that the very notion of “impact” must be operationalized, defined carefully, with clearly specified and tangible indicators, before we can say anything meaningful about the social impact of documentary films. The impact might be defined as improvement in attitude amongst documentary film audiences, that is, a more positively-valenced schematic social imagination across any given social divide, constituting a pro-social perceptual shift and more constructive, cooperative interactive behaviors. A number of research studies (Barrett and Leddy 2008; Clark and Abrash 2011b; Doc Society 2020; Donnelly 2020; Finneran 2018; Moore 2015; Napoli 2014; Nonnecke and Sevcik 2017; Participant Media 2014), newspaper and magazine articles (Cieply 2014; Childress and Driver 2022; Fraser 2011; Jones 2011), media scholars (Ajiwe et al. 2015; Bell 2011; Jacobs 2015; Marfo 2007; Nisbet and Aufderheide 2009; Shah 2015), social media musers (Obe 2021), and (of course) impact producers (Social Impact Producer n.d.; Global Impact Producers Alliance n.d.; The Social Deck 2021) have explored the ways in which documentary film bears an especially strong moral force when it comes to recalibrating unsavory notions about people on the basis of social divides.

As noted above, studies have found that news programming is even more powerful than entertainment television in its ability to uphold and reinforce stereotypical images and representations of any given human demographic (Chandler 2015; Geiger 2020; Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism 2020; American Press Institute 2017). News videojournalism possesses the cultural capital of “authority” and objectivity, and is trusted by audiences to deliver quality information reflecting the real world. Likewise, the “truth” status of nonfiction filmmaking rooted in the “real world” intensifies its authority as a source of social information, and therefore its potential impact upon the schematic imagination, notwithstanding the ample literature contesting the platform of documentary film for presenting objective reality (Borum Chattoo and Jenkins 2019; Godmilow and Shapiro 1997). Documentaries and news videos, nevertheless, attribute positive and negative attitudes across social divides with more efficacy and gravity than do fictional serialized television shows, and thus represent a worthwhile object of investment for considering them as mediated forms of interreligious dialogue.

Further study is needed on non-cognitive “impact measurement” in the documentary film world, in order to create a more holistic assessment of best practices and consequences for documentary social impact.

3.4. A Cognitive Perspective on Documentary Film

Considering the power of documentary film to impact an audience’s schematic social imagination and inspire a pro-social perceptual shift that may influence interactive behaviors, we see a now-extensive literature on the impact potential of documentary film. As reviewed in the previous section, this discussion has become more relevant and extensive in recent years as “impact producing” has arisen, whereby social impact toolkits and audience engagement strategies are developed to enhance the ability of a given film to foster positive social change.

A companion to the microsociological and macrosociological perspectives on documentary-influenced social change is a cognitive approach that applies the frameworks of cognitive science and neurobiology to assess perceptual, rational, and emotional internal shifts that documentary may inspire. Cognitive studies have been applied to film since the 1980s, although cognitive film scholars have largely favored the analysis of fiction film over documentary. Brylla and Kramer (2018) narrate the waves of cognitive film analysis.

The first regarded film as a text to be deciphered using predominantly [ca. 1985–1995]. … The second shifted the focus from film-as-text to film-as-reception, initially building on linguistic and computational models of cognition [up through 2010]. … The third and latest wave has theoretically and empirically explored cognition as grounded in the human body and its interaction with the environment … and has tentatively begun to use contextual paradigms, such as spectators’ individual differences and sociocultural settings. … When applied to documentary, this paradigm enables the analysis of a multitude of spectatorship dimensions, such as sensory perception, narrative comprehension, character empathy and the evaluation of realism, as well as the examination of various dimensions of authorship, including creativity, ethics, reflexivity and activism. … Within the field of cognitive film studies, a handful of film scholars have engaged in the study of documentary, particularly with regard to its specificity when compared with fiction, its different modes of narrative address, and its spectatorial reception.

(Brylla and Kramer 2018)

A trend in cognitive film studies is the engagement of “mirror neurons” as a lever to explain the impact of film on audience reception and empathy. Dan Shaw maintains that “the discovery of the existence and emotive function of mirror neurons confirms that we simulate other people’s emotions in a variety of ways, even in cinematic contexts”, arguing that mirror neurons are the neurophysiological foundation for cinematic empathy (Shaw 2016). Moreover, Vittorio Gallese, one of the co-discoverers of mirror neurons, and Michele Guerra co-authored a book on cinema and neuroscience claiming that audiences simulate the emotions of film characters with our mirror neurons and experience a feeling of “involvement” in the movement of the camera on the part of the spectator and a sense of spatiotemporal immersion in the film (Gallese and Guerra 2020; Gallese et al. 2004; Gallese 2003).

The cognitive reception of digital media characters leads to a discussion about parasocial interaction, which will be explored further below as we further contemplate how the science of storytelling impacts us neurobiologically, a crucial dimension of social inclusion efforts as it, along with socialization, forms part of the substrate of our behavioral complex (Hasson and Frith 2016).4

3.5. Two Primary Levers of Social Change

Social scientists who study bias—and de-biasing—have found that there are two primary levers of change: (1) self-awareness about why we act the way we do, and (2) meaningful contact across social divides.

The factor of self-awareness refers to how much we consciously grasp that our basic brain functioning—and its tendency to bias and error—determine our experience of life alongside everyday social interactions in ways that, for most of us, are totally unconscious. A large part of debiasing work is bringing those invisible forces to consciousness and understanding more about how our cognition and our socialization work together to determine our perspectives and drive our behaviors. Therefore, great emphasis is placed on implicit bias training in the world of Diversity, Equality and Inclusion training. Sherman et al. recount an approach to diversity training and dialogue that is centered around unearthing unconscious and implicit social biases (Sherman et al. 2019).5

Wesley J. Wildman notes that religious groups, as well as economic and political practices, do have vested interests in neglecting resources for diagnosing and correcting tendencies to cognitive error.

Resistance to awareness of cognitive biases exists both inside and outside religious groups; economic and political practices in all eras and of all types have every bit as much to gain from neglecting to enlighten people about their cognitive operations as religious groups do—just consider the techniques employed in commercial advertising and political campaigns. … On the other hand, noticing the detailed mechanisms of change even in a preliminary way is essential for evaluating secular and religious methods for promoting discernment, self-awareness, and character change”.

(Wildman 2009)

The necessary companion to self-awareness for disrupting and dissolving social stereotypes, as argued by sociologist Robert Putnam, is meaningful contact. Putnam found that meaningful contact has power to disconfirm stereotypes, build common ground, and come to appreciate the complexity of the other person (Putnam 2007). That is opposed to casual contact, such as riding public transportation together, or even living in the same neighborhood but never talking or interacting. Casual contact allows for a maintenance of flawed perceptions of the other; but with meaningful contact, new information can be introduced to the interactive dynamic, allowing for a perspective shift.

Robert Putnam’s findings about ethnic enclaves in big cities showed that you cannot just throw people into a city together—or for that matter, an interreligious dialogue—and expect multicultural integration. As discussed above, the human brain works hard to keep us smug in the warm embrace of our comfortable affinity biases and prejudices. Moreover, faced with the unfamiliar, the brain generates a panoply of threat signals in the form of endorphins and adrenaline—fight and flight impulses—so that we avoid each other (Steimer 2022).

In order to shift a prejudice—or assign a new positive association to a cognitive schema—one must build meaningful contact, over time, in order to forge new neural pathways and integrate new interpretive frameworks into the brain’s information processing and schematic filing system.

3.6. Documentary Film as Meaningful Contact: A Parasocial Interreligious Dialogue

According to mounting evidence, documentary films bear potential as a social change agent. As explained above, documentary storytelling can leverage the mind and the heart, simulating in-person meaningful contact in a way that might shift schematic associations and provide a template for new behaviors.

To posit documentary films as interreligious dialogue introduces several considerations that must be acknowledged. First, it is a one-way flow of information and does not allow for the “mutual recognition” that—in my many years as an ethnographer of dialogue—dialoguers often say they aim to achieve. Nevertheless, this one-way flow of information may also allow for nonthreatening reflexivity on the part of the audience member, and the receptive stance of the audience is a role we are accustomed to as rampant consumers of digital media. Moreover, a post-screening conversation can be engaged with fellow viewers of the documentary which can allow for the co-creation and reflection associated more commonly with interreligious dialogue.

Second, documentary film is not a “discursive” dialogue as its central feature is storytelling. This second quality lends to an increased impact potential, however, as interreligious dialogue that is restricted to discursive methods generally does not allow for the reflexivity, longitudinality, or “safe haven” necessary to stimulate a perceptual shift.

Face-to-face conversations can fail to disrupt stereotypes that are deeply ingrained, because a person may be too distracted by threat signals in order to listen. And, of course, face-to-face encounters can be cost-prohibitive. Furthermore, a person already embedded in the same cultural context with their dialogue partner may not be exposed to concrete social difference, whereas documentary offers a cost-effective, convenient way of entering a far-flung world in a truly intimate way. Indeed, “documentary practitioners can create films that have the capacity to collectively reconfigure such stereotypes and reduce the perception of the categorical other’s ‘abnormality’. Such research-led, critical practice shows that cognitive models can help filmmakers make conscious (rather than intuitive) decisions about representation, narrative structuring and the use of audiovisual aesthetics—decisions that are informed by an understanding of their film’s possible social implications” (Brylla and Kramer 2018).

Storytelling as a dialogue modality frequently employed in the grassroots and nonprofit levels of dialogue; indeed, interreligious dialogue practitioners have long known that storytelling fosters meaningful contact through emotional connection. The value of a story was well-known by psychoanalyst Carl Gustav Jung, who wrote about how narratives motivate people to action, allow them to experience emotional depths and empathize with each other. For Jung, the most gripping stories were archetypal, tapping into a deeper mythic structure—inadvertently describing a universal form of mental experiences rooted in human neurobiology (Jung and Carrington 2010).

Indeed, in order to intentionally spark a transformation in a person, the most reliable pathway is to appeal to the emotions, which are housed in the oldest part of our brain: the limbic system, the part of us that is more connected to behavior and fundamental drive. Neuropsychologists have observed that “the key to learning is that it is a fundamentally emotional process” (Fabritius and Hagemann 2017). Bowman concludes that “using stories to impart information in classroom settings stimulates the social brain by activating learners’ emotions, thereby increasing their receptiveness to information” (Bowman 2018).

Also, stories give us a common, uniting framework in order to cultivate a common experience. A story is the fastest way to build trust and invite the other person into a confidence. Storytelling provides an experience in the brain that mirrors in-person contact, in terms of pleasure and bonding neurochemicals such as cortisol, dopamine and oxytocin, temperature fluctuations, and the listener’s neurocoupling with the storyteller.

As we see fictional characters interact, our bodies tend to release a neuropeptide called oxytocin, which scientists first found in nursing mothers. Oxytocin has subsequently turned up in studies of couples and group-bonding—indeed, we find oxytocin whenever humans feel close to each other, or even just imagine being close. The brain activity of both storytellers and story listeners starts to align thanks to mirror neurons, brain cells that fire not only when we perform an action but when we observe someone else perform the same action. As we become involved with a story, fictional things come to seem real in our bodies. […] That’s when the storytelling miracle comes to pass: As the cortisol that feeds attention mixes with the oxytocin of care, we experience a phenomenon called “transportation”. Transportation happens when attention and anxiety join with our empathy.

(Smith 2016)

Scientists are discovering that chemicals like cortisol, dopamine and oxytocin are released in the brain when we’re told a story. Why does that matter? If we are trying to make a point stick, cortisol assists with our formulating memories. Dopamine, which helps regulate our emotional responses, keeps us engaged. When it comes to creating deeper connections with others, oxytocin is associated with empathy, an important element in building, deepening or maintaining good relationships. Perhaps most importantly, storytelling is central to meaning-making and sense-making. It is through story that our minds form and examine our own truths and beliefs, as well as discern how they correlate with the truths and beliefs of others. Through story listening, we gain new perspectives and a better understanding of the world around us. We challenge and expand our own understanding by exploring how others see and understand the world through their lens. By sharing and listening to each other’s stories, we all get a little bit closer to what’s true.

(Peterson 2017)

A story incorporating both unpredictability and relatability stimulates the limbic system where the amygdala and hippocampus live, appealing to the mind through the heart, stimulating curiosity and open-mindedness while grasping an audience in the uniting, ordering framework of the story. “A happy ending to a story triggers the limbic system, our brain’s reward center, to release dopamine which makes us feel more hopeful and optimistic” (Monarth 2014). Neuroscience researchers suggest that our brains actually respond to what is happening in a story as if it were a genuine experience. Indeed, “multiple research teams have discovered that our brains respond to viewing or even reading stories much like they do to real life. … Our limbic system, mirror neurons, neurotransmitters, and cortical pathways are all engaged. Our experience of narrative transportation is tangible; as far as many areas of our brains are concerned, we do indeed, enter that other world of the story”.

(Landrum et al. 2019)

Scholars have also drawn deeply on the modality of storytelling in exploring the phenomenon of neurocoupling, whereby mirror neurons create coherence between a speaker’s brain and the brains of his/her audience members (Ariel Group 2020).

Using brain scans (fMRI), researchers have discovered that speaker–listener neural coupling is widespread and extensive even in everyday verbal communication. Specifically…during successful communication speakers’ and listeners’ brains exhibited joint, temporally coupled response patterns. Their findings further suggested that the stronger the neural coupling between interlocutors, the better one’s understanding of natural communication.

(Bowman 2018)

During successful communication, speakers’ and listeners’ brains exhibit joint, temporally coupled, response patterns. Such neural coupling substantially diminishes in the absence of communication, such as when listening to an unintelligible foreign language. Moreover, more extensive speaker–listener neural couplings result in more successful communication. … The recording of the neural activity from both the speaker brain and the listener brain opens a new window into the neural basis of interpersonal communication, and may be used to assess verbal and nonverbal forms of interaction in both human and other model systems.

(Stephens et al. 2010)

In the course of communication, with the help of a story, certain areas in the brains become active that would be active if the communicating person actually experienced events presented in the story. […Neuroscientists locate] the mirror neurons in specific brain areas which are involved when we perform certain actions or have certain emotions or sensations. Interestingly, these areas are also recruited when we simply observe someone else performing similar actions, having similar sensations or having similar emotions. These areas called shared ‘circuits’ transform what we see into what we would have done or felt in the same situation. With such brain areas, understanding other people is not an effort of explicit thought, but becomes an intuitive sharing of their emotions, sensations and actions.

(Zubiel-Kasprowicz and Waligórska 2016)

It is important to offer the caveat to any discussion of mirror neurons that they are a relatively recent development in the art and science of neurorelationality; only discovered in the early 1990s at the Università degli Studi di Parma in Italy by Giacomo Rizzolatti, Leonardo Fogassi and Vittorio Gallese, Turvey (2020) asserts that, “among neuroscientists themselves, such explanations are controversial and by no means universally accepted. While few doubt the existence of mirror neurons in macaques, there is much debate about whether they function in the manner claimed by those who discovered them, as well as whether something like them lies at the core of human behaviors such as empathy and art appreciation”. Some prominent cognitive scientists have gone so far as to dismiss talk of mirror neurons as a myth, a bubble of hype, and an entirely too convenient device for narrating complex dynamic processes to ourselves. Turvey cautions that, “rather than rushing to embrace the latest scientific theory, it might be wise for film scholars to wait until it has been subjected to rigorous scrutiny by those who have the requisite expertise and neutrality to assess it properly. New scientific paradigms often generate an “irrational exuberance” about their explanatory possibilities” (Passaro 2012; Turvey 2020).

Given this caveat, let us proceed to a less controversial term to understand the power of film: that of parasocial interaction. Scholars of parasocial interaction attest that media, in a way, befriends us. Media provides something sociologists call parasocial contact, para coming from the Greek for “next to”, resembling, or near.

The Parasocial Contact Hypothesis (PCH) was proposed by Edward Schiappa, Peter B. Gregg, and Dean E. Hewes as a communication analogue to Allport’s Contact Hypothesis (Allport 1954). Extending Allport’s argument that, under appropriate conditions, interpersonal contact is one of the most effective ways to reduce prejudice between majority and minority group members, these scholars questioned whether the socially beneficial functions of intergroup contact have an analogue in parasocial contact. The terms was first proposed by Horton and Wohl (Horton and Wohl 1956), who introduced the phrase “parasocial interaction” to suggest that communication media can provide viewers with “an apparently intimate, face-to-face association with a performer” (p. 228). Schiappa et al. (2005), noting that people process mass-mediated parasocial interaction in a manner similar to interpersonal interaction, argued that the socially beneficial functions of intergroup contact may result from parasocial contact. They tested their hypothesis using media representations of the LGBTQ+ community, finding that parasocial contact was associated with lower levels of prejudice, and suggesting that parasocial contact facilitates positive parasocial responses and changes in beliefs about the attributes of minority group categories. This study was validated recently by Massey et al., who found that attitudes and beliefs about “real life” LGBTQ+ individuals correlate with media representations (Massey et al. 2021); by Abrams et al., who conducted a correlating study regarding impressions of American Muslims based on nonfictional media representation (Abrams et al. 2018); and by Wong et al., regarding impressions of individuals with bipolar disorder based on media images (Wong et al. 2017).

Parasocial contact, although mediated and pixelated, sparks a physical response, unlocking the same neurochemicals that face-to-face contact does; “the media viewer feels as if he or she is in a reciprocal social encounter with the media performer. This experience is especially triggered when the media performer addresses the viewer via body orientation and looking into the camera. […] While parasocial interaction occurs during viewing, a parasocial relationship can transcend the immediate viewing exposure and more resembles a sense of liking for, or short- or long-term involvement with, the media performer” (Dibble et al. 2016).

If a documentary filmmaker can leverage character development and storytelling methods in such a way that audience members feel personally immersed in the film, there is a potential for the disruption of social bias. The original theorists of the Parasocial Contact Hypothesis reported that “parasocial contact was associated with lower levels of prejudice. Moreover, tests of the underlying mechanisms of PCH were generally supported, suggesting that parasocial contact facilitates positive parasocial responses and changes in beliefs about the attributes of minority group categories” (Schiappa et al. 2005).

The conversation about mirror neurons is also reintroduced in relation to parasocial contact in order explain how audience members can even feel physically connected with digital figures, positioning these nerve clusters as an innate neuronal system that grounds intersubjective intentionality. Characters in a television series are interpreted as storytellers by the viewer, and oxytocin, neural coupling and mirror neurons are engaged as they would be with an “in-person” storyteller, broadening possibilities for new associations and empathic experiences. Zubiel-Kasprowicz, M., & Waligórska note that, “in the course of communication, with the help of a story, certain areas in the brains become active that would be active if the communicating person actually experienced events presented in the story. All this is possible thanks to the presence of mirror neurons in the brains that build a particular arrangement of neurons” (Zubiel-Kasprowicz and Waligórska 2016).

Cognitive film theorist Torben Grodal’s work on embodiment and emotion has taken much from recent developments in the neurosciences. He refers to the fact that social intersubjectivity involves taking the position of the other, linking the audience with the film’s protagonist. leveraging mirror neurons as his bridging device. Grodal has adapted mirror neuron research for film theory by arguing that these nerve clusters link perception, emotion cognition and motor action together (Grodal 1997). Elsewhere he writes that, “via mirror neurons, the facial expressions’ emotions resonate in the onlooker, and that explains the emotional contagion emanating from close-ups” (Grodal 2009; Tsang 2011).

Indeed, cognitive studies affirm that digital storytelling affects us on a personal level in almost the same way as a face-to-face encounter. The human brain processes media experience in a similar fashion to how it processes “direct experience”, so audiences generally relate to televised characters as they would real people (Kanazawa 2002). Reeves and Nass invoke the “media equation” in describing that “mediated life” is equivalent to “real life”, at least as far as people’s cognitive and behavioral responses are concerned (Reeves and Nass 1996). Schiappa et al. note that “People use the same communication-related cognitive processes for both mediated and interpersonal contexts”, and note that “people and media are coequal communication alternatives that satisfy similar communication needs and provide similar gratifications” (Perse and Rubin 1989), and form positive or negative attitudes about the characters they watch on television in the same way they do in “real life” (Conway and Rubin 1991).

Schiappa et al.’s 2005 proposal of the Parasocial Contact Hypothesis centered around fictional characters, as has so much of the scientific discussion about parasocial interaction (PSI). But documentaries, it may be argued, carry even more “weight” for audiences as the nonfiction format is considered more authoritative and connected to the “real world”, notwithstanding the mediated and subjective nature of documentary images. One study showed that an internet-based storytelling program with a combination of stigma content and interactivity was able to significantly reduce public stigma and microaggression immediately after the experiment and at the 1-week follow-up assessment. The study aligned with literature showing that stigma content with storytelling elements served to be deeply immersive. “The effect might be due to the application of a conversational storyline, which allowed one to feel like interacting with the protagonist even without choosing responses and actions. Thus, storytelling in the form of conversations alone might already provide an effective means for participants to immerse themselves and feel a sense of agency” (Fong and Mak 2022).

The point is that documentaries can give us the experience of meaningful contact across social divides. They help us perceive the complexity of the other person, debunking superficial stereotypes. They raise awareness about common ground that we share with people from very different walks of life (Igartua 2010). It is a cost-effective and convenient way of traveling through new worlds and unfamiliar perspectives. Story audiences “are emotionally transported into the storyteller’s world through empathy and imagery, interiorizing the stories through narrative transportation and making a connection with the protagonist. In this sense, video storytelling has a tremendous power compared to written storytelling as it favors the occurrence of the emotional dimension of consumer relationship experiences, transforming individual consumption experiences into collective ones” (Pera and Viglia 2016).

It is worth acknowledging, also, that stories told through digital media also have a special grip on our brains, transmitting information visually, which embeds in the long-term memory bank, constituting 90% of the information that we ultimately retain (Burmark 2002). Moreover, visual information processing is much more efficient than textual information processing and drastically improves comprehension of complicated information (Horn 2001).6 Finally, confirming what was addressed above regarding the power of emotion in behavioral and relational shifts, visual cues trigger emotions with rapidity and intensity, and emotional reactions further influence information retention (Gutierrez n.d.). Digital media also uniquely commands our attention—which anyone with an Instagram account can attest to—which is important, given what Microsoft established in 2015 that our collective attention span is 8.25 s (less than that of a goldfish) (McSpadden 2015), and it is declining over time (Jørgensen 2019). Because images evoke stronger affective responses than verbal representations, and because they can act as mental short-cuts for information processing used in decision making (Kotler and Gertner 2002), the potential of documentary to determine or shift schematic conceptions becomes more substantial. “Recent advances in cognitive and affective neuroscience have provided new tools and models for the study of unconscious emotional and cognitive responses and understanding human thought and action. … These approaches hold out the promise of an unparalleled approach to understanding and measuring unconscious drivers of human decision making” (Anand et al. 1988; Appiah 2006; Babin and Burns 1997; Gardner et al. 2012; Kahneman 2011; Michael et al. 2019; Moore and Oaksford 2002).

This research can aid documentary filmmakers who aspire to create visual narratives which can serve effectively as interreligious dialogue (Wolfe 2001). Translating research into practice takes a great deal of curiosity and imagination but it allows for data-grounded approaches to nonfiction filmmaking that can help practitioners avoid the trappings of cognitive error, intuition, and folk psychology.

3.7. Self-Report on Increasing Intercultural and Interreligious Competence via Documentary Films

The semester syllabus of a “Religions of the World” course I teach includes a lesson about the Muslim hijab, the position of women in Islam, and a screening of the documentary Jilbab about the Indonesian hijab (So Fare Films 2012). The film uses voices of Indonesian women to explore the function of autonomy, feminism, and personal choice in relation to wearing the hijab. After multiple screenings between 2018–2022, many students reported that the film and ensuing discussion completely changed their perspective on the matter of the hijab. Most students had believed the hijab to be purely an oppressive garment and a symbol of restrictions upon females in Muslim contexts. After one screening in Fall 2022, a student sent an email saying that the viewing of the documentary film Jilbab was a very important part of her education on contemporary Islam, about which she had held many misperceptions and stereotypes.

The email inspired us to conduct an informal survey of students our courses about their areas of intercultural and interreligious competence—specifically, how viewing a documentary film added to their knowledge about different cultures and religions affected their attitudes and skills. The following question was sent to the students:

How did watching the documentary Jilbab impact your knowledge about the hijab? Did it change your mind or clarify anything for you?

With the caveat that self-reported, non-anonymous data is considered incomplete and positively biased, it seems worthwhile to share select student reflections on the relationship between documentary film and interreligious knowledge, attitudes, and skills. Most student respondents were 18 or 19 years old, European or white-American, and hailing from majority culture (Lindsay 2022).

The most frequent adjective used by students to describe the documentary film was “eye-opening”, and roughly 90% of the respondents noted that they had been socialized with stereotypes and bias against the hijab that were effectively disrupted and dissolved by the film. Students expressed appreciation for exposure to various voices and perspectives, noted that they had never met a woman who wore a hijab so the film gave them parasocial exposure to young women in their own age group with a very different life experience, and realized that they had been unconsciously socialized with a negative perception of the hijab—many, in fact, realizing, that they did not realize that they had a strong opinion on the matter with no education or personal familiarity to ground their reasoning. After viewing the documentary, many students became more aware of the diversity that is attached to socialized notions of dress and female power and embraced the variety or rationales, aesthetics, and motives behind the wide world of the hijab: “The amount of different reasons from religious to cultural to fashion was not what I was expecting”. Most students were struck by the films’ theme of the importance of women’s personal autonomy, having taken their own for granted, and felt strongly that choice is a fundamental element of feminism: “The women clarify in the video that for each woman it is a choice whether or not to wear it and has to do with their personal connection to it”. Ultimately, many concluded after watching the film that “I believe a woman should have the same right as any other woman in the world to disguise or display herself as she so chooses”. Below is a sampling of representative statements from students about their experience viewing Jilbab.

This film truly has taught me to be more open-minded about other religions and to learn more about them before making any judgements such as I have before about Muslim women being forced to wear hijabs.

I have confronted my own personal biases on things like Muslim women and opened my eyes on how they believe and why they think the way they do.

This week’s movies were extremely eye opening. Watching Jilbab was maybe one of the most interesting topics I have learned in this class, likely due to my surprisingly little knowledge on the concept.

Upon watching the Jilbab documentary I can say that I have changed opinions on the matter. I always believed that the hijab must be oppressive, and that no one truly wanted to wear them. Honestly, I have never had any friends that wear a hijab, so I am pretty naive to the topic.

Before this class, I had a few prejudices of my own, and I can confidently say they are gone. For example, although my mother is an Iranian immigrant and I know about headscarves, I still found them oppressive to women. After watching the Jilbab documentary, and hearing from multiple different women that they actually make the choice and how it is made to protect and be considered beautiful I was taken aback. I always felt that woman covered because they felt forced, but it showed me, along with many other things in the class, that I need to be educated before making statements/opinions about it.

I was rather naive when it came to Muslims and their Hijabs. I never understood why females of this religion wore Hijabs and saw them as a symbol of a lack of freedom. As I soon came to learn, feminists affiliated with Islam believe that the Hijab allows for personal autonomy. … I learned that some Muslims believe the Hijab allows them the power to see and gives them the power to reveal as much or as little of themselves to those around them.

Our discussion about the Hijab is something that will stick with me forever. I, like many others, have always maintained that the Hijab was a sign of female oppression and never considered it as a symbol of power and freedom. With your teachings and film, I now have adopted a completely different and open-minded approach to the Muslim religion and other religions that I am significantly uninformed about. Due to our honest and candid conversations about religion, I have learned to replace blind stereotyping with curiosity. This, I concur, is one of the most valuable traits any person can have.

The movie Jilbab made me question and reassess my previous point of view on veiling. As a feminist myself I admit I may have had prior bias on the meaning behind the Hijab. I had always supported and appreciated the wearing of a Hijab and understood its religious significance, yet I did not fully understand a muslim’s women [sic] choice and reasoning behind choosing to wear a veil. I learned that they may use it as a way to show their religion visibly, or to gather respect, ward off sexual objectification, and many other reasons. These women each have different reasons and exact views on the veiling but all personally choose to wear the veil.

In addition to my lack of knowledge, United States cultures and norms tend to portray veiling in a negative light and associate it with negative connotations. Until watching Jilbab, it didn’t really cross my mind that women had the choice not to veil. … the film explains how patriarchal society in America wants women to dress in a showy way, with tight-fitting clothes and exposed skin. So in reality, veiling is opposing the standards of the patriarchy. I thought this was a very interesting point made and a perspective I’ve never really been exposed to before.

Students also drew parallels from the documentary film’s themes and characters to their own religious contexts, standards, and choices in dress and personal conduct. They gained insight about how they interact with Western beauty standards that, oppositely to the practice of veiling, often encourage women to expose more of their bodies.

I too, always thought that women were being forced to wear veils at any time. Considering the fact that I hated having to cover my shoulders in school when it was 90 degrees in the classroom, I could not understand how any woman could willingly wear something so covering. Jilbab certainly gave me more perspective. From the Jilbab film, I gathered the most that women wore it as a sign of their own respect for themselves as well as their religion. … What struck me the most were the drawings at the end of a “typical Muslim woman”. I noticed that many of the pictures depicted no body at all, simply a face and a jilbab. This showed me that women’s bodies in those countries are not thought to be as emphasized as they might be in America. The Muslim woman is clearly separated from her body, and only her face is focused on. If I were to draw an American woman, I would certainly draw the rest of her body with a feminine physique. … I know that I spend a lot of time focusing on how I look, especially when I know boys will be there. I do my makeup, I do my hair, I wear push-up bras, and look for pants that flatter my curves. Whether conscious of it or not, I realized that maybe I do not have as much freedom over my body as I thought I did. Maybe I would feel more accepting and loving of myself if I was not constantly dressing each day to look “hot”. Up until watching this movie, I held the conception that the “slutty” clothes I wear to the club were an example of me expressing myself and wearing what I want. Is this a false consciousness? Do I even like wearing those things and would I choose to wear them if I wasn’t trained to please men? Am I literally objectifying myself? I think I might have internalized misogyny! Help!

Many students drew parallels between the hijab and standards of dress for women in other religions, such as the wigs of Orthodox Jewish women or the habits of Catholic nuns—and realized they had held a double standard against Muslim women’s dress, considering it to represent oppression while characterizing the Jewish and Catholic fashions as “traditions”.

Until recently, I thought that hijabs/head scarves/veils were a sign of religious oppression at the hands of the patriarchy, and I never really gave it much more thought. I wasn’t alone in this. … I didn’t act like a white savior or anything, instead, I simply felt bad for the women I saw wearing them. After learning more this week from the documentary film, I realized that there is no one-size-fits-all, and if you think about it, no religion is completely exempt from the patriarchy and oppression that I assumed all hijab wearing women experienced. After all, any form of religion is a human institution and/or a construct created by humans. My religion too (Roman Catholicism), has plenty things that are patriarchal about it. Take the fact that only men can be priests—this is a red flag to me and something I personally struggle with. … I’m realizing that women who wear a head scarf face a very similar ‘struggle.’ As I learned from the documentary, there are countless ways that Muslim (or other hijab wearing) women chose to express their religion, spirituality, or lack of it. Some wear the hijab because it’s what’s expected of them by their family (similar to how my parents taught me that I shouldn’t have sex before I get married). Some wear it because they want to, and they are proud and grateful that they get a choice (similar to how I can choose to go to any church I want!). And some even wear it as a fashion statement (Jilbab film)!

The documentary film Jilbab ultimately serves to acquaint viewers with the complexity of the human social world, especially evident in the intersection of religion and gender. A student concluded, “I’m realizing that there is so much complexity that lies below the surface of this topic, and that that is where the beauty lies. Learning to not make judgements or assumptions and accept that there is a lot of gray area when it comes to religion and how people choose been super awesome to learn this week”.

3.8. Longitudinality

Viewing one documentary film may not shift a deeply engrained social schema that has been honed over years of implicit and explicit socialization. Longitudinal exposure across social divides reinforces new connections and associations, strengthening neural pathways over time. Therefore, watching an episodic docuseries about a distant culture allows for us to revisit these issues over time and develop new neural pathways and emotional associations in our brains, paving the way for friendliness and curiosity. This is the central study of neuroethology, or the study of habits. To re-route a neural pathway signaling threat based on visible difference, one must engage in repeated exposure, firing the repeated release of pleasure pathways and neurocoupling mechanisms, paving a pathway for the brain to recategorize a once-unfamiliar person as a member of your in-group and building a more positive emotional valence to the schematic category. An “in-group”, after all, is a fluid, elastic social unit—or since we are talking about brains, shall we say plastic? (Begley and Goleman 2008; Doidge 2007; LeDoux 2003; Schwartz and Begley 2013) Brain plasticity and adaptive neuroethology are sources of hope for those who wish to engage neurobiological and cognitive principles to influence discriminatory social schemas. According to Dr. Patricia Wolfe, “Learning is the act of making (and strengthening) connections between thousands of neurons forming neural networks or maps”, while “memory is the ability to reconstruct or reactivate the previously-made connections” (Wolfe 2018). So, when we learn something new, we are actually creating new connections between our neurons.

In line with all that has been discussed above regarding the power of storytelling—especially visual nonfiction storytelling—we read the following description of a neuroplastic shift.

When our experience of the world produces strong emotions—whether of desire, threat, pleasure, or relief—brain change takes on extra momentum. Emotions focus our attention and our thinking, partly through connections between the amygdala and a variety of cortical structures and partly through the wash of neuromodulators (including dopamine) released from the brain stem.… When those emotions recur over and over, in response to a particular event, perception, thought, memory, or need, then attention directs memory consolidation systematically. Our recurrently-focused brains inevitably self-organize in a particular direction, entrenching particular interpretations and emotional associations. […] Thus, repeated experiences establish patterns, forming habits, and those habits link with other habits that also evolve with repeated experiences.

(Lewis 2017)

Longitudinality is key for knowledge accumulation and even more for affective redirection. Wolfe again notes, “It takes time for consolidation to occur. How long it takes all depends on the information learned and the individual who is studying it. We do know that consolidation does take place and that introducing new information too soon disrupts consolidation of previous learning (Armstrong 2008; Smith 2005; Whitaker 2018; Wolfe 2010).

This is a masterful recipe for social change: a well-constructed and engaging story, with a visual element, advancing positive—or at least accurate—representations of various social groups, viewed over time. It is not only pleasant, engaging, memorable, and convenient—but it also hits a lot of the most crucial marks of effective diversity education and intercultural, interreligious dialogue.

It is true that, for the form’s history, most documentary films are stand-alone feature films. Indeed, media scholars refer to the period after 2000 as the New Golden Age of Television, attributed to the rise of serialized fiction shows such as The Sopranos and Six Feet Under, and the fall of the dominance of television networks in favor of digital streaming platforms. Following the explosion in episodic fictional television, beginning around 2017 and with increasing ubiquity dating to the COVID-19 global pandemic, industry reports and internet articles alike (Berman 2021; Fischer 2021; Gould 2021; Morfoot 2018; Serrels 2023; Parrot Analytics 2021) have followed the increasing popularity of documentary series and, therefore, the increasing viability of them as a business model for studios and digital streaming platforms, although there are questions as to whether longform series will hold their popularity (Morfoot 2021). The documentary series is now to be considered an “emerging” format, which is a direct response of the digital revolution which has increased a thousand-fold independent filmmakers’ access to professional and prosumer filmmaking equipment, editing equipment, citizen journalism trends, and the possibility of excess footage, all of which makes the series format more attainable for filmmakers.

Given the increasing popularity of this format, their longitudinal impact is sure to be an increasingly studiable object over time. Most concrete data lives ahead of us as to the longitudinal perceptual impact potential of the documentary film series. In my opinion, it is a format worth investing in because brain science and social science affirm the impact potential of repeated acts, the power of repetition and constancy, and the gravitational force of habits. Research indicates overwhelmingly that duration matters when it comes to trying to change minds and nudge them in a more receptive, cooperative direction in a way that has staying power.

4. Limitations

The primary limitation of this study has been my specialization in the social sciences, with untrained curiosity driving my cognitive questions. Thus, my argument suffers the risk of folk psychological assumptions and dilettantism, in line with the assessment of philosopher David Davies who argues that our “inquiry concerning the arts should be informed by our best understandings in those sciences that bear upon the cognitive and perceptual capacities exercised in the generation and reception of artworks”—note emphasis of the word best—“And this means that we should not avail ourselves of a particular scientific view without taking account of the critical discourse within the relevant branch of science” (Davies 2013, 2018). Although natural sciences have much to teach us about the affective, cognitive, and perceptual capacities we exercise when engaging with art because our “folk psychological” assumptions about these are often wrong, much science is not “settled”, especially in the human and social sciences. Malcolm Turvey continues this caution.

This may not only result in embracing a flawed scientific paradigm, but also can also distort our understanding of the very artistic practices we seek to clarify scholars to cherry-pick and mischaracterize our artistic practices in order to fit the science. Second, when drawing on a scientific theory, it is crucial that film scholars also consider criticisms of it. Although we may not be in a position to determine who is right in a scientific debate, we should entertain criticisms of the theory in case they reveal pitfalls and other problems in applying the theory to cinema, or show the theory to be on far less secure ground than it may seem to be.

(Turvey 2020; Turvey 2005)

Thus, my harnessing of cognitive and neurobiological literature to explore responses to documentary film must be couched in caution and suggests an agenda for deeper, specialized research.

Less of a limitation of this study and rather a final caveat, I will acknowledge that the format of film-as-dialogue is a one-way information stream that has specific implications for perceptual shift, given its nature as a parasocial interaction. There are many reasons I think the unilateral nature of film viewership can still be positioned as a dialogue, not least because my previous ethnographic investigation of the notion of “mutual recognition” revealed this term to be more of a discursive totem in the Durkheimian sense, rather than a guarantee of mutual, perceptual shifting or intersubjectivity, let alone an achievement of reciprocal telepathic clarity about the contents of “the other’s” humanity and life experience. Therefore, the one-way nature of the parasocial interaction made possible by the documentary film can be “competitive” with the proposal of mutuality, which is more aspirational than guaranteed, even in an in-person interreligious dialogue. There is no way we can predict the outcome of an in-person dialogue. Proposing documentary film as interreligious dialogue allows us to speak with a modicum of confidence about the reception and reflection that might be experienced by one party, rather than attempting to guarantee mutuality.

5. Conclusions

Ultimately, the article’s contribution to intercultural competence is this theory of change: that documentary film is a powerful agent for constructive, sustainable cognitive behavioral change, for both producers and audiences, because it offers a unique and potent combination of new knowledge, positive emotional impact, and meaningful parasocial contact, potentially resulting in perceptual shifts, reoriented associations, and improved attitudes about the other social group, which can then be reinforced through community discourse and action.

Robust, enduring cultural change and seeding intercultural competence takes a long time, requiring long-term resolve and a variety of approaches. One leading scholar of intercultural competence, Darla Deardorff, subdivides intercultural competence into three primary areas: knowledge, skills, and attitude (Deardorff 2020). Documentary film activates each of those categories. A documentary film can serve as an effective interreligious dialogue through building knowledge among audiences about the particularities of a far-flung walk of life that they might not otherwise have been exposed to. Skills are best brokered in-person, but it is obviously cost-prohibitive to travel constantly and interface with people in far-flung corners of the globe. But documentary films bring the world directly to its audience. If a person does not have the means or the capacity to experience meaningful contact across social divides in vivo, documentary film can act as an intermediary, offering parasocial contact and an opportunity for fostering awareness and new emotional associations with the social group in question. Reflexive fraternizing with peer audience members can maintain and extend these new cognitive pathways, especially if the film’s release is accompanied by a Social Impact Strategy that provides a framework for continued social action on the themes of the film as well as shared discursive reflections on the film, which ultimately paves the way for active intercultural skill-building.

This article has delivered a granulated argument on social, cognitive, and neurobiological grounds for the utility of documentary film as a form of interreligious dialogue. However, what I have proposed here also falls in line with an intuitive “folk psychological” notion of film-as-dialogue, which has emerged in recent years in film festivals such as the Interfaith Film and Music Festival (New York, NY, USA), the Religion Today Film Festival (Trento, Italy), the XXII Tertio Millennio Film Fest in Rome, Italy (they call themselves “the festival of the interreligious dialogue”), and the group INTERFILM (the International Interchurch Film Organisation). I have attempted here to give academic grounding to popular assumptions of film’s power to stimulate social inclusion across social divides, exemplified in seemingly innumerable examples of films presented as the central activity of interreligious dialogue gatherings (Newsroom 2016; PeaceTraining.eu 2019; Strand 2018; Van Reeth 2022) or as a bearer of the central message of interreligious dialogue, delivering “testimonies of religious diversity” as well as the chance to “plant a seed of a new vision” of inclusive citizenship as they “open spaces of discussion and dialogue” (The Lutheran World Federation 2021a) and represent “a powerful tool to approach human rights and overcome stereotypes, by celebrating diversity and giving voice and visibility to minority communities” (The Lutheran World Federation 2021b).