The evolving perception of controversial movies

Luca Amendola,Valerio Marra,Miguel Quartin

doi:10.1057/palcomms.2015.38

Abstract

AbstractPolarization of opinion is an important feature of public debate on political, social and cultural topics. The availability of large internet databases of users’ ratings has permitted quantitative analysis of polarization trends—for instance, previous studies have included analyses of controversial topics on Wikipedia, as well as the relationship between online reviews and a product’s perceived quality. Here, we study the dynamics of polarization in the movie ratings collected by the Internet Movie database (IMDb) website in relation to films produced over the period 1915–2015. We define two statistical indexes, dubbed hard and soft controversiality, which quantify polarized and uniform rating distributions, respectively. We find that controversy decreases with popularity and that hard controversy is relatively rare. Our findings also suggest that more recent movies are more controversial than older ones and we detect a trend of “convergence to the mainstream” with a time scale of roughly 40–50 years. This phenomenon appears qualitatively different from trends observed in both online reviews of commercial products and in political debate, and we speculate that it may be connected with the absence of long-lived “echo chambers” in the cultural domain. This hypothesis can and should be tested by extending our analysis to other forms of cultural expression and/or to databases with different demographic user bases.

Highlights

Polarization in public opinion has been the subject of many analyses in the past, due to its important implications in politics, social sciences, economy and marketing
We evaluate H and S for each of the feature movies listed in Internet Movie database (IMDb), from 1915 to 2014, with a breakdown in a few demographic categories
We find that controversy decreases with popularity and that hard controversy is relatively rare: only 3.6%

Summary

Introduction

Polarization in public opinion has been the subject of many analyses in the past, due to its important implications in politics, social sciences, economy and marketing. The availability of large digital datasets has allowed in the last decade a quantitative real-world analysis that produced many new insights into how polarization begins and evolves, as well as on how cultural or demographic differences affect its phenomenology This new area of research has been accompanied by sophisticated mathematical models that simulate the exchange of opinions and reveal the statistical mechanisms that underlie opinion dynamics, as for instance in Castellano et al (2009). Most analyses have so far been devoted to polarization in regard to political themes, as a way of better understanding the origin and trends of possible conflicts among the citizens Another area of research, of particular interest to the field of marketing, has developed around polarization of consumers’ opinions about commercial items, from restaurants to home goods.

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Conclusion