We Are What We Watch: Movie Plots Predict the Personalities of Those Who “like” Them

Nave, Gideon, Jason Rentfrow, and Sudeep Bhatia. 2020. “We Are What We Watch: Movie Plots Predict the Personalities of Those Who “like” Them” PsyArXiv. November 26. doi:10.31234/osf.io/wsdu8

Abstract: The proliferation of media streaming services has increased the volume of personalized video consumption, allowing marketers to reach massive audiences and deliver a range of customized content at scale. However, relatively little is known about how consumers’ psychological makeup is manifested in their media preferences. The present paper addresses this gap in a preregistered study of the relationship between movie plots, quantified via user-generated keywords, and the aggregate personality profiles of those who “like” them on social media. We find that movie plots can be used to accurately predict aggregate fans’ personalities, above and beyond the demographic characteristics of fans, and general film characteristics such as quality, popularity, and genre. Further analysis reveals various associations between the movies’ psychological themes and their fans’ personalities, indicating congruence between the two. For example, films with keywords related to anxiety are liked more among people who are high in Neuroticism and low in Extraversion. In contrast, angry and violent movies are liked more by people who are low in Agreeableness. Our findings provide a fine-grained mapping between personality dimensions and preferences for media content, and demonstrate how these links can be leveraged for assessing audience psychographics at scale.