Moral Salience in Film Reviews Associated With Film Success

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.