Moral Salience in Film Reviews Associated With Film Success
An Analysis of 1.6 Million Reviews
Abstract
Abstract: Moral reflection, a prevalent response to popular media, can play an important role in audience media appraisal. Employing a computational approach, this study examined the effect of moral salience in film reviews on film success. By analyzing moral words from the Moral Foundation Dictionary in a large corpus of approximately 1.6 million IMDb film reviews, we found that moral salience in reviews was strongly associated with film success. Specifically, the salience of moral foundations identified as care, fairness, loyalty, and authority was positively associated with audience ratings, popularity, and gross domestic revenue. These findings demonstrate the real-world implications of moral reflection and entertainment media appraisal postulated by entertainment media theories. This research also offers methodological insights for automated analysis of movie review data.
References
(1977). Self-efficacy: Toward a unifying theory of behavioral change. Psychological Review, 84(2), 191–215.
(2007). Morality and movies: What are people thinking? A content analysis of informal movie reviews online. https://ecommons.cornell.edu/bitstream/handle/1813/5420/Thesis_and_Preliminary.pdf?sequence=1
(2014). Moved to think: The role of emotional media experiences in stimulating reflective thoughts. Journal of Media Psychology: Theories, Methods, and Applications, 26(3), 125–140.
(1997). The aging woman in popular film: Underrepresented, unattractive, unfriendly, and unintelligent. Sex Roles, 36(7–8), 531–543. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02766689
(2017). The morality of television genres: Norm violations and their narrative context in four popular genres of serial fiction. Journal of Media Ethics, 32(2), 99–117. https://doi.org/10.1080/23736992.2017.1294488
(2009). Natural language processing with Python: Analyzing text with the natural language toolkit. O’Reilly Media.
(2012). Trends of sexual and violent content by gender in top-grossing US films, 1950–2006. Journal of Adolescent Health, 51(1), 73–79.
(1947). 2002. A panorama of American film noir, 1941–1953. City Lights Books.
(2014). Gender, comedy and reviewing culture on the Internet Movie Database. Participations, 11(1), 31–49.
(2022). Record-high 50% of Americans rate U.S. moral values as “poor.”. https://news.gallup.com/poll/393659/record-high-americans-rate-moral-values-poor.aspx
(2009). A blueprint for success in the US film industry. Applied Economics, 41(5), 589–606. https://doi.org/10.1080/00036840601007351
(2019). Prosocial television, preschool children’s moral judgments, and moral reasoning: The role of social moral intuitions and perspective-takin g. Communication Research, 46(3), 355–374. https://doi.org/10.1177/0093650217733846
(2006). Individualization in Europe and America: Connecting religious and moral values. Comparative Sociology, 5(2–3), 203–230. https://doi.org/10.1163/156913306778667339
(2002). What makes a blockbuster? Economic analysis of film success in the United Kingdom. Managerial and Decision Economics, 23(6), 343–354.
(2017). The purity/sanctity subscale of the Moral Foundations Questionnaire does not work similarly for religious versus non-religious individuals. Psychology of Religion and Spirituality, 9(1), 124–130.
(2016). Purity homophily in social networks. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 145(3), 366–375. https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0000139
(2021).
Advances in research on the model of intuitive morality and exemplars (MIME) . In P. VordererC. KlimmtEds., The Oxford handbook of entertainment theory (pp. 230–249). Oxford University Press.(2014). Repeated exposure to narrative entertainment and the salience of moral intuitions. Journal of Communication, 64(3), 501–520. https://doi.org/10.1111/jcom.12098
(2019). Generational change? The effects of family, age, and time on moral foundations. The Forum, 17(1), 121–140.
(2019). Moral foundations dictionary for linguistic analyses 2.0. Unpublished manuscript.
(2016, May).
An empirical exploration of moral foundations theory in partisan news sources . In N. CalzolariK. ChoukriT. DeclerckS. GoggiM. GrobelnikB. MaegaardJ. MarianiH. E. MazoA. MorenoJ. OdijkS. PiperidisEds., Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC’16) (pp. 3730–3736). European Language Resources Association (ELRA).(1984). An analysis of alcohol portrayal on prime-time television. International Journal of the Addictions, 19(4), 403–410.
(2023). The problem of purity in moral psychology. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 27(3), 272–308.
(2009). Liberals and conservatives rely on different sets of moral foundations. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 96(5), 1029–1046.
(2011). Predicting popularity of mass market films using the tenets of disposition theory. International Journal of Arts and Technology, 4(1), 48–60. https://doi.org/10.1504/IJART.2011.037769
(2017). Does repeated exposure to popular media strengthen moral intuitions? Exploratory evidence regarding consistent and conflicted moral content. Media Psychology, 20(4), 557–583.
(2018, January). Why is Hollywood so Liberal? The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/27/opinion/sunday/hollywood-liberal.html
(2004). Intuitive ethics: How innately prepared intuitions generate culturally variable virtues. Daedalus, 133(4), 55–66. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20027945
(2021). Reflections on extracting moral foundations from media content. Communication Monographs, 88(3), 371–379.
(2021). The extended Moral Foundations Dictionary (eMFD): Development and applications of a crowd-sourced approach to extracting moral intuitions from text. Behavior Research Methods, 53, 232–246.
(2020). Moral foundations Twitter corpus: A collection of 35k Tweets annotated for moral sentiment. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 11(8), 1057–1071. https://doi.org/10.1177/1948550619876629
(2023, November 01). Film moral [Code, data]. https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/TUEAM
. (2020). IMDb Statistics. https://www.imdb.com/pressroom/stats/
(2016). Media’s influence on people’s morality and well-being. The Routledge Handbook, 675, 145–156.
(2012). The cultural salience of moral character and virtue declined in twentieth century America. The Journal of Positive Psychology, 7, 471–480. https://doi.org/10.1080/17439760.2012.715182
(2018). Text mining and sentiment analysis for predicting box office success. KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS), 12(8), 4090–4102.
(2005). The moral imagination in primetime television. International Journal of Cultural Studies, 8(3), 353–374. https://doi.org/10.1177/1367877905055682
(2009). Reality TV as a moral laboratory: A dramaturgical analysis of The Golden Cage. Communications, 34(4), 449–472. https://doi.org/10.1515/COMM.2009.027
(2017). The role of entropy of review text sentiments on online WOM and movie box office sales. Electronic Commerce Research and Applications, 22, 42–52.
(2017). Large-scale patterns of entertainment gratifications in linguistic content of US Films. Communication Studies, 68(4), 422–438.
(2019). Are enjoyment and appreciation both yardsticks of popularity? Journal of Media Psychology: Theories, Methods, and Applications, 31(2), 55–64.
(2018). Acquiring background knowledge to improve moral value prediction. Proceedings of the 2018 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining. ACM, 552–559.
(2012).
Morality subcultures and media production: How Hollywood minds the morals of its audience . In R. TamboriniEd., Media and the moral mind (pp. 99–116). Routledge.(2002). Experimental methods in political science. Annual Review of Political Science, 5(1), 31–61.
(2010). Appreciation as audience response: Exploring entertainment gratifications beyond hedonism. Human Communication Research, 36(1), 53–81.
(2014). Entertainment we watch and entertainment we appreciate: Patterns of motion picture consumption and acclaim over three decades. Mass Communication and Society, 17(6), 853–873.
(2010). Exploring the role of meaningful experiences in users’ appreciation of “good movies”. Projections, 4(2), 128–150.
(2003). Using tf-idf to determine word relevance in document queries. Proceedings of the First Instructional Conference on Machine Learning, 242(1), 29–48.
(2020).
Eudaimonia as media effects . In M. B. OliverA. A. RaneyJ. BryantEds., Media effects: Advances in theory and research (4th ed., pp. 258–274). Routledge.(1996). A parsimonious model for forecasting gross box-office revenues of motion pictures. Marketing Science, 15(2), 113–131.
(2021). The intersection of racial and gender attitudes, 1977 through 2018. American Sociological Review, 86(5), 823–855.
(2010, June).
Statsmodels: Econometric and statistical modeling with python . In S. van der WaltJ. MillmanEds., Proceedings of the 9th Python in Science Conference (pp. 57–61). https://doi.org/10.25080/Majora-92bf1922-011(2009). Cinematic success criteria and their predictors: The art and business of the film industry. Psychology & Marketing, 26(5), 400–420.
(1994). Predicting the performance of motion pictures. Journal of Media Economics, 7(4), 1–20.
(2011). Lexicon-based methods for sentiment analysis. Computational Linguistics, 37(2), 267–307.
(2011). Moral intuition and media entertainment. Journal of Media Psychology: Theories, Methods, and Applications, 23(1), 39–45.
(2010). Defining media enjoyment as the satisfaction of intrinsic needs. Journal of Communication, 60(4), 758–777.
(2016). Media’s influence on the accessibility of altruistic and egoistic motivations. Communication Research Reports, 33(3), 177–187.
(2009). Is a “Star” worth a thousand words? The interplay between product-review texts and rating valences. European Journal of Marketing, 43(11/12), 1269–1280.
(2019). Twentieth century morality: The rise and fall of moral concepts from 1900 to 2007. PLoS One, 14(2), Article
e0212267 (2000).
Basal morality in drama appreciation . In I. BondebjergEd., Moving images, culture and the mind (pp. 53–63). University of Luton Press.(2002).
Exemplification theory of media influence . In J. BryantD. ZillmannEds., Media effects: Advances in theory and research (2nd ed., pp. 19–41). Erlbaum.
