How the BLM movement impacts attitude toward an increase in racial minority actors in movies
2024年7月12日 - 1:46AM
Going to the movies is a widespread pastime with cultural
significance. Policymakers, social critics, and researchers have
been calling for more racially inclusive casting in movies for
decades. But how do viewers actually react to increased racial
minority presence in movies?
MIT Sloan School of Management associate professor Jackson Lu
found that while higher casting of minority actors results in more
negative movie ratings from viewers, the Black Lives Matter (BLM)
movement mitigated this bias against minority actors. In a new
research paper, “The Black Lives Matter Movement Mitigates Bias
Against Racial Minority Actors," published in the Proceedings of
the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), Lu, along with Yu-Wei Lin
at Santa Clara University, Shiyu Yang at San Francisco State
University, and Wencui Han at Stony Brook University asked: how
might audience reactions to increased racial minority presence in
movies be shaped by social movements such as BLM advocating for
racial equality? Lu and his colleagues tested two competing
possibilities regarding how viewers react when the main cast of a
movie sequel increases racial minority actors (termed “minority
increase” by the authors). The researchers theorized that on the
one hand, minority increase may lead to more favorable movie
evaluations by viewers if they appreciate racially inclusive
casting for its novel composition and moral appeal. On the other
hand, minority increase may lead to more negative movie evaluations
if viewers harbor biases and discriminate against racial
minorities. To examine these two competing possibilities, the
researchers collected data from two popular movie platforms, Rotten
Tomatoes and Internet Movie Database (IMDb). They constructed and
analyzed a dataset of movie series released from 1998 to 2021 and
conducted text analysis of 312,457 reviews of these movies.
Consistent with their discrimination hypothesis, they found that
sequels with minority increase received lower movie ratings and
more toxic reviews.
After the number of minority main cast members increased, movie
ratings on average decreased by 6.5 out of 100 points in Rotten
Tomatoes expert ratings (reviews by professional critics), 4.4 out
of 100 points in Rotten Tomatoes audience ratings, and 0.29 out of
10 points in IMDb audience ratings. This finding was reliable
across numerous robustness analyses performed by the
researchers.
Could this result be driven by viewers’ aversion to cast change
in general? To rule out this alternative explanation, the
researchers showed that sequels that replaced white actors with
minority actors received significantly lower ratings than sequels
that replaced white actors with other white actors. “These results
suggest that the negative effect of minority increase cannot be
simply explained by an overall aversion to cast change,” explained
Lu.
Another explanation was that the audience dislikes minority
increase in sequels not because of racial prejudice against
minority actors, but merely because the minority actors have lower
acting credentials. To rule out this alternative explanation, the
researchers showed that the negative relationship between minority
increase and movie ratings exists for both high- and
low-credentialed minority actors. This suggests that the bias
against minority actors cannot be explained by credential
differences, but rather by taste-based bias, or racial prejudice
against minority actors.Importantly, the researchers found that the
negative relationship between minority increase and movie ratings
weakened following the start of the BLM movement in 2013,
especially when the movement’s intensity is high — as quantified by
BLM’s public engagement in both the online (e.g., volume of BLM
social media posts) and the offline (e.g., number of BLM protests)
settings. Additionally, the bias mitigation effect of BLM applied
to both Black and non-Black minority actors. Lu and colleagues
conceptually replicated the bias mitigation effect of BLM in an
experiment of 469 white American participants. They found that
participants who read an article about the significance of BLM
(versus participants who did not) gave higher ratings to a sequel
movie that added a racial minority actor in its main cast.
“Overall, our research reveals an unfortunate bias against racial
minority actors, but also demonstrates the power of social
movements in fostering diversity, equality, and inclusion,”
concluded Lu.
- Importantly, the researchers found that the negative
relationship between minority increase and movie ratings weakened
following the start of the BLM movement in 2013.
Matthew Aliberti
MIT Sloan School of Management
7815583436
malib@mit.edu