We Are What We Watch: Movie Plots Predict the Personalities of Their Fans

How do movie contents relate to the psychological makeup of the audiences they attract? We explore this question by employing advanced analytical tools to a rich dataset combining detailed characterizations of movies and their plots with personality measures of their social-media fans. We identify novel associations between movie features such as quality and genre, and the personalities of their fans. We then show that movie plots—captured via text—predict the aggregate personalities of their fans beyond all other variables studied. We further 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 (e.g., social films attract extraverted fans). Our findings provide fine-grained mappings between personality dimensions and movie preferences, facilitating automated assessment of audience psychographics at scale.