Prof. Gideon Nave (University of Pennsylvania)
Datum: July 25th
Zeit: 10:00am - 12:00pm
Ort: LMU main building, Geschw.-Scholl-Pl. 1 (M) / M 101
Titel: We Are What We Watch: Movie Plots Predict the Personalities of Their Fans
Abstract: 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 with personality measures 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 (e.g., leisure) and unique concepts that organically emerge from the data (e.g., 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.