It's a shame the players have to think and play in real time while they get refereed and analysed in slow motion.
And enough with still photos and gifs showing "leading with the shoulder" and "swinging arms", you can take a still from footage of a perfectly legal normal big tackle and make it look bad. Unless you're supposed to play the game with your elbows bent and your arms out in front of you like superman the whole time.
For the record I think Fekitoa should have been banned longer and agree Cane shouldn't have been banned.
Cane's collision with Henshaw is definitely one of those situations where viewing what happened in slow motion makes it look a lot worse than it really was. The reason for that is, while you are seeing it in slow motion, your brain is still operating in real time, so you your perception of the available reaction time is distorted. This phenomenon is known as
"Slow Motion Intentionality Bias", and this is not BS, its real, and is becoming something of a worry for criminal defence and prosecution lawyers with the increasing amount of video evidence being shown in courts and legal proceedings
Here are the significance statement and the abstract from a scientific study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.
[TEXTAREA]
SIGNIFICANCE
When determining responsibility for harmful actions, people often consider whether the actor behaved intentionally. The spread of surveillance cameras, "on-officer" recording devices, and smart-phone video makes it increasingly likely that such judgments are aided by video replay. Yet, little is known about how different qualities of the video, such as replay speed, affect human judgment.
We demonstrate that slow motion replay can systematically increase judgments of intent because it gives viewers the false impression that the actor had more time to premeditate before acting. In legal proceedings, these judgments of intent can mean the difference between life and death. Thus, any benefits of video replay should be weighed against its potentially biasing effects. [/TEXTAREA]
[TEXTAREA]
ABSTRACT
To determine the appropriate punishment for a harmful action, people must often make inferences about the transgressor's intent. In courtrooms and popular media, such inferences increasingly rely on video evidence, which is often played in "slow motion." Four experiments (
n = 1,610) involving real surveillance footage from a murder or broadcast replays of violent contact in professional football demonstrate that viewing an action in slow motion, compared with regular speed, can cause viewers to perceive an action as more intentional. This slow motion intentionality bias occurred, in part, because slow motion video caused participants to feel like the actor had more time to act, even when they knew how much clock time had actually elapsed.
Four additional experiments (n = 2,737) reveal that allowing viewers to see both regular speed and slow motion replay mitigates the bias, but does not eliminate it. We conclude that an empirical understanding of the effect of slow motion on mental state attribution should inform the life-or-death decisions that are currently based on tacit assumptions about the objectivity of human perception.[/TEXTAREA]
I know there are a few of you here with a scientific bent so you might find the whole thing interesting. You can read the full scientific study here (free, not behind a paywall). Of particular interest is Study 2 as it deals with professional sport.
Warning: there is some video in this link that some may find disturbing. Its probably work safe but not child safe - the link itself is safe because none of the video will start automatically.
http://www.pnas.org/content/113/33/9250.full
I think this is certainly going to change the way I look at foul play replays in the future.
