【Seminar】We are what we watch: movies’ content is predictive of its audience personality
Date: 24th June, 2019
Time: 14:00-16:00 p.m.
Venue: Room 1004, The Administration Building, Zhejiang University
【Speaker Introduction】：Gideon Nave is an assistant professor at the Wharton School and the Wharton Neuroscience Initiative. Nave holds a PhD in Computation & Neural Systems from Caltech. He completed his B.Sc and M.Sc in Electrical Engineering at the Technion –Israel institute of technology, specializing in Signal Processing. Nave’s research was published in top academic journals such as Science, Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, Nature Communications, Nature Human Behavior, Management Science, and Journal of Marketing Research.
【Lecture Abstract】：With the growing prevalence of on-demand video streaming services, humans are consuming personalized media in an unprecedented pace. But despite the ubiquity of personalized media consumption, little is known about how psychological traits are expressed by individual preferences for media content. Are personality traits systematically associated with preferences for media content? We address this question by combining data of two sources: (1) myPersonality - a Facebook app that ran from 2007 to 2012, (2) IMDb - an online database that contains information about over 5 million titles of movies and TV episodes. We trained a machine learning algorithm to predict the personality profiles of the movies, and found that user-generated keywords are predictive of movies’personality profiles, with predictive accuracies that range between r=.5 and r=.6, for all of the Big Five traits. Moreover, user-generated keywords enabled predicting the personality profiles of the movies above and beyond their audience demographics and more general movie characteristics. These findings establish robust links between personality traits and preferences for media content, with implications for media marketing and the development of content-recommendation systems.
