Moral Salience in Film Reviews Associated With Film Success

An Analysis of 1.6 Million Reviews

Huang, Jialing
Yang, Janet
Zhu, Junjie

School of Media and Communications, Shenzhen University, Guangdong, PR China
University at Buffalo, SUNY, Buffalo, NY, USA
New York University, NY, USA

Open Data: The authors are willing to share their data, analytics methods, and study materials with other researchers. The code and the data are available at https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/TUEAM ().

Jialing Huang School of Media and Communications Shenzhen University 802L 3688 Nanhai Boulevard Nanshan, Shenzhen Guangdong, 518060 PR China [email protected]

Received March 23, 2023

revised November 2, 2023

Accepted November 17, 2023

Journal of Media Psychology: Theories, Methods, and Applications 37(1):p 12-25, 2025. | DOI: 10.1027/1864-1105/a000416

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.