Avengers, Disassemble!

Abstract

Popular culture both reflects and shapes the audiences’ beliefs. Content Analysis of blockbusting movies can teach us about public attitudes. This study examined underlying themes pertaining to personality types, as they are reflected in movies produced by the largest franchise in history, Marvel Cinematic Universe. Twenty-seven Marvel characters were assessed for their personality traits and received a rating for each of the big five personality aspects. To test which personality type was endorsed by the Marvel narratives, each character’s success was measured by examining the outcomes for that character. Successful outcomes were defined by levels of goal achievement in two categories, somatic goals and reproductive goals. The hypothesis was that being a commercial art-product of Western culture, Marvel storylines will follow neoliberal ideas, and award success to characters that align with the entrepreneurial personality type. That is, characters that exhibit high levels of openness, stability, extraversion, and conscientiousness, but not high levels of agreeableness. Results showed that the strongest predictor for success was openness to experience. It was followed by a second predictor, emotional stability. No correlation was found between extraversion or conscientiousness and success. Agreeableness was found to be moderately correlated to somatic success. The hypothesis was partially supported, indicating there might be some influence of neoliberal values on the Marvel character depiction.