PhD Research: Need your videos

BroderickT

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Hey Dashcamtalk,

My name is Broderick. I am a phd student at Northwestern University. I do research on the judgments people make from video footage. You can see a recent published research here: https://www.pnas.org/content/116/4/1201

I am doing a new project that is seeking to understand how people judge the fault of others in dash cam videos.


Do you have any dash cam footage you can share from a car crash where you also have video of the same accident from a different camera (cell phone, redlight, body worn cam, etc.)?

Anything would be helpful and you’d be helping science.

Thanks for anything you can do.

BT
 
Agreed. But what we need is videos of the same incident that are captured from both the dash cam and other source, so we can test if there is any difference in the judgments made.
 
very slim odds of finding multiple viewpoint accident footage here

can tell you from experience from a Facebook page that I admin that people rarely make the correct judgement call on what happened in any video, arguments never end
 
On several of the Russian Car Crash YouTube channels you can occasionally find clips with more than one cam's perspective being shown. Dashcams are very common over there. Contacting the owners of those clips would be troublesome or worse. Rarely I've seen similar in the US and I do not remember where any of that stuff is- only that I saw it- so I can't much help there.

Most (but not all) dashcam users are safe drivers whose goal is to avoid crashes so you're going to have a tough time finding what you seek, but good luck to you anyway!

Phil
 
Agreed. But what we need is videos of the same incident that are captured from both the dash cam and other source, so we can test if there is any difference in the judgments made.

We might have exactly what you're looking for. I'll send you a DM.
 
There are a lot of professors out there, i upload videos of Danes making small and big mistakes in traffic, and for that i often get a ****storm on youtube, cuz it seem like if i dare point fingers of other motorists and i am not flawless myself, then it seem like i should not complain or point fingers.
And i am of course not a perfect motorist, but i would argue a lot better than some i see in traffic, unless the few other motorists just by chance always screw up in front of my cameras.

Just uploaded this little video, pretty much all of it people have problems with the color of intersections.


Nice BBMC have something, it is rare you find footage from a #2 source.
 
On several of the Russian Car Crash YouTube channels you can occasionally find clips with more than one cam's perspective being shown. Dashcams are very common over there. Contacting the owners of those clips would be troublesome or worse. Rarely I've seen similar in the US and I do not remember where any of that stuff is- only that I saw it- so I can't much help there.

Most (but not all) dashcam users are safe drivers whose goal is to avoid crashes so you're going to have a tough time finding what you seek, but good luck to you anyway!

Phil
My research assistant and I are deep down the Russian Car Crash Youtube rabbit hole now. Thank you for this suggestion.
 
Nice BBMC have something, it is rare you find footage from a #2 source.

It is rare. And I am super grateful to BBMC. For our other research on body-worn cameras vs. other angles, we made our own videos. This was a pain, but well worth it.
 
It is rare. And I am super grateful to BBMC. For our other research on body-worn cameras vs. other angles, we made our own videos. This was a pain, but well worth it.

I suppose you could do something similar with multiple dash cams in different vehicles or perhaps views from a dash cam and a CCTV cam or smart phone video. Despite being a pain the advantage is that you could control what occurs in a faux accident or other incident and then analyze the perceptions of the viewers. Then a similar but different scenario could be staged for further analysis and comparison.
 
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I suppose you do something similar with multiple dash cams in different vehicles or perhaps views from a dash cam and a CCTV cam or smart phone video. Despite being a pain the advantage is that you could control what occurs in a faux accident or other incident and then analyze the perceptions of the viewers. Then a similar but different scenario could be staged for further analysis and comparison.
Totally. We are making videos doing exactly this. However, while staged videos give us greater experimental control, using videos from the "real world" increases the believability of our findings. Plus, filming a realistic car crash is a bit outside my research budget today.
 
The general conclusion is that people's brains construct the story they want to see from a video, whatever the video actually shows. Very rare for 2 people watching the same dashcam video to come to the same conclusion!
While no two people are exactly the same, there are predictable tendencies among people. One of my favorite examples of this is an experiment that filmed a confession from three different angles. In the first, participants saw the camera focused on the suspect. On the second, it was focused on both the suspect and the officer. In the third it was just focused on the officer. When asked to judge the likelihood of coercion, people thought the first video was the least coercive, followed the second, with the video focused on the officer as the most coercive. (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1559-1816.1986.tb01139.x). The implication of this is that interrogations taped with the camera focused on the suspect, may lead observers (judges and juries and others) to think a confession is voluntary. While there will always be idiosyncratic differences in individuals, the tendency matters a lot, because a large enough shift (say in the case of a grand jury) could have large ramifications.
 
Totally. We are making videos doing exactly this. However, while staged videos give us greater experimental control, using videos from the "real world" increases the believability of our findings. Plus, filming a realistic car crash is a bit outside my research budget today.

Obviously, you need a heroic graduate student or other individual who would be willing to actuate a real car accident with cameras at the ready! :smuggrin:

Edit: I guess you'll need a car you can devote to the cause as well. :)
 
This is cool, happy to offer assistance :giggle:
 
While no two people are exactly the same, there are predictable tendencies among people. One of my favorite examples of this is an experiment that filmed a confession from three different angles. In the first, participants saw the camera focused on the suspect. On the second, it was focused on both the suspect and the officer. In the third it was just focused on the officer. When asked to judge the likelihood of coercion, people thought the first video was the least coercive, followed the second, with the video focused on the officer as the most coercive. (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1559-1816.1986.tb01139.x). The implication of this is that interrogations taped with the camera focused on the suspect, may lead observers (judges and juries and others) to think a confession is voluntary. While there will always be idiosyncratic differences in individuals, the tendency matters a lot, because a large enough shift (say in the case of a grand jury) could have large ramifications.
You could do a similar experiment with dashcam field of view and its effect on judgement of appropriate speed and judgment of appropriate following distance.

But even if the videos are identical, different people will not come to the same conclusions, it's difficult to even get them to agree on the rules/law of driving and who had right of way.
 
While there will always be idiosyncratic differences in individuals, the tendency matters a lot, because a large enough shift (say in the case of a grand jury) could have large ramifications.

Absolutely true, and I'd enjoy seeing your finished work just out of curiosity. How something is presented can make a huge difference in how most people perceive it.

Phil
 
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