How do features of movie content relate to the psychological makeup of the audiences they attract?
We study this question by employing advanced analytical tools to a new rich dataset that combines detailed characterizations of movies and their plots [IMDb] with personality measures [myPersonality] of social-media users who “liked” them.
We identify novel associations between movie features such as quality, revenue and genre, and the personality dimensions of their fans. We then use machine-learning to show that movie plots—captured via text—predict the personalities of fans beyond all other variables studied. We further use text analytical methods to quantify how different psychological themes (eg. leisure) and unique concepts that organically emerge from the data (eg. adultery) relate to fans’ personalities, and show that movie plots align with the characteristic ways in which their fans think, feel, and behave. For example, films with anxiety have Neurotic fans, where social films attract Extraverted fans.
Our findings provide fine-grained mappings between dimensions of personality and movie preferences, facilitate scalable automated assessment of audience psychographics, and showcase a text-analytic framework for studying how features of multidimensional cultural products relate to psychological characteristics of their consumers.
[Keywords: personality, movie preferences, psychographics, text analysis, machine learning]
Eight genre categories have statistically-significant relationships with personality dimensions. Each genre has an unique pattern of relationships with the Big Five, where most effects are small to medium in size (Figure 3).4 The genre with the strongest links to personality traits is Sports, whose liking has not assessed in any previous studies of the links between movie preferences and personality. Fans of Sports movies are lower on Openness and Neuroticism, and are higher on conscientiousness, Extraversion, and Agreeableness. These associations mirror the relationships of the Big Five and actual physical activity among people, for all traits except Agreeableness (2015). However, Agreeableness tends to be higher among supporters of sports teams (Donavan, 2005).
Crime movies have fans that are more extroverted and less agreeable, akin to people who gravitate towards crime in real life (Kern et al 201311ya; O’Riordan and 2014; Rogers, 2006). Devotees of Sci-fi and Fantasy movies have greater Openness, lower Extraversion, and lower Conscientiousness—indicating that movies of these genres attract imaginative, reflective, and spontaneous people (2003). Family movies have fans that are higher on Agreeableness, a trait which is high among people who value close relationships and family ties ( et al 2017; Tov, 2016).
Finally, fans of Horror movies are more Neurotic, perhaps because Horror provides anxious individuals a means to experience their anxiety in a nonthreatening and controllable setting (2021). Fans of Horror films are also less Agreeable and less Extraverted. Of note, Horror has been shown to generate stronger fear responses among individuals higher in either Neuroticism or Agreeableness (Clasen, Kjeldgaard-2020). However, these two traits show the opposite relationship with liking Horror, suggesting that the psychological mechanism underlying these links might differ between the 2 traits.
