Worth Considering
What Favorite Movies Can Tell You About Other People
When the lights came on I noticed that my partner and his wife were seated just two rows behind us. They were both laughing.
“So, you liked it?” I asked.
“No!” he shouted, still laughing. “We hated it!"
The laughing didn’t make sense to me, but the fact that we had polar opposite reactions to the movie did.
I’ve often said that one of the primary but unrecognized purposes of the arts is to allow people to sort themselves into affinity groups that are not apparent from, say, a casual conversation. So I was greatly interested in a fascinating essay in Taki’s Magazine by its residential movie critic, Steve Sailer.
In “Are We What We Watch?” Sailer discusses a study that surveyed Facebook users and cross-referenced their responses with the movie preferences listed on their Facebook profiles. The researchers then categorized the information to assemble a personality profile for each participant based on the OCEAN model – an acronym for Openness to experience, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism.
The study is surprisingly deep. Sailer looks at how a preference for certain movies can denote chauvinism or even the average age/gender of a movie’s fanbase. He goes on to explain how these attributes are calculated (there’s a lot more calculation involved than you’d think) and how an overall personality profile is constructed. You might even find yourself thinking “that makes sense” while learning, for example, that sports movies rank high in extraversion while Winona Ryder movies rank high in neuroticism.
The research is fascinating, and Sailer’s analysis is very insightful (given his movie knowledge). I encourage anyone with even a passing interest in movies and/or psychology to check out his article HERE.